Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by Boswell John

Author:Boswell, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

8 The Urban Revival

“Invigorated, transformed and launched upon the route of progress, the new Europe resembled, in short, more the ancient Europe than the Europe of Carolingian times. For it was out of antiquity that she regained that essential characteristic of being a region of cities.”1

Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the economy of western Europe, fragmented, rural, and generally depressed since the breakup of the Roman Empire, underwent a dramatic expansion and transformation. The causes of this expansion—increased domestic security; stabilization of economic, social and political institutions; trade; technological advances; changes in climate and agricultural techniques; population growth—are neither fundamental to the present study nor fully understood by historians. But the effects of the change are well documented and were profoundly important to gay people in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chief among these was a dramatic acceleration in the rate of urban growth.2 During the period between 1100 and 1250, many European cities increased in population five- or sixfold,3 and some increased in area by almost 800 percent.4 Many villages grew into towns, and new villages and towns grew up where there had been no urban settlement before.

The influence of urban centers on Europe increased even more rapidly than their physical growth would suggest. Not only did thriving trade in many great cities draw merchants and tradespeople to urban centers, but many social services previously provided locally or not at all became concentrated in city centers—law courts, hospitals, welfare systems, markets, universities, etc.—and these often drew even the peasant landowner into the city's orbit.

Although cities had always been associated with democracy and self-government, an equation in the popular mind between urban life and personal freedom became dramatically prominent during this period.5 Many cities were communes and, although scarcely democratic, afforded opportunities for self-government unavailable anywhere else in the medieval world. Even in cities under royal or ecclesiastical control, municipal government often included social classes not admitted to power anywhere else, and the lower and middle classes were able in many ways to make their wishes felt in urban environments. Escaping to the city was escaping to freedom for peasants in most of Europe, and residence of a year and a day in a city was often claimed to constitute emancipation from any feudal obligation. “Die Stadtluft macht frei” (“City air makes one free”) ran the proverb, and urban dwellers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries consciously developed an atmosphere of liberty and tolerance in which individual rights and personal freedom were of paramount importance. The reemergence of a distinct gay subculture in southern Europe is almost exactly coetaneous with the revival of major urban centers, and the relation between the two was obvious even to contemporaries. It was also during this period that erotic passion—which had been almost totally absent from Western literature since the fall of Rome—suddenly became the subject of a large proportion of literature and seemingly the major preoccupation of feudal society. There could hardly be a more dramatic contrast than that afforded by tenth- and twelfth-century literatures in regard to love.

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