Monday, September 19, 2022
Tendentious Misreadings of Antiquity
Brent Shaw, "A Groom of One's Own?" The New Republic (July 24, 1994), a review of John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994):
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The data of the past may not be all that happy for the liberationist movements of our time. Why else would those movements come into being? But what the sources record is, for better or for worse, what the sources record. A good part of what they record, certainly, is made up of systematic and successful repressions; but tinkering with the moral balance of the past is a disservice to the study of history and to the reform of society. The past is dead. We cannot change it. What we can change is the future; but the way to a better future requires an unsentimental and accurate understanding of what happened in the past, and why. A more civil and humane modernity will not be achieved by tendentious misreadings of antiquity.
