Whatever his initial hopes for it, the one certain achievement of Boswell's Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality was to provoke a catfight. Its potent assertion – that Christianity and its current nemesis, gay sex, were once on nodding terms – assured the book more than a noisy reception. Its was an argument that demanded a response; The Boswell thesis is itself evidence that, even twenty-five years after its publication, Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality is still there, is still provoking.

Kuefler has gathered his respondents judiciously: there is a satisfying breadth to his collection. Whilst the contributors are, as the jacket tells us, ‘leading scholars’, their contributions are neither so esoteric nor so narrow as to require of the reader a specialist knowledge of what can be a terribly theorised subject. And though a few of them flirt with hagiography, there is generally a willingness to grapple with – even to floor – some of Boswell's most cherished premises. Less a companion to Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality, The Boswell thesis is perhaps better considered as a sparring partner to a now aging but still respected mentor. It will appeal especially to students gingerly feeling their way into the (mine)fields of sexual politics and sexual history.

That these areas are more than semantically connected is immediately apparent. In his preface to Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality, Boswell wrote that ‘the province of the historian [is] not to praise or blame but merely to record and explain. This book is not intended as support or criticism of any particular contemporary points of view – scientific or moral – regarding homosexuality’. Several contributions to The Boswell thesis cast doubt on this claim to objectivity: in his analysis of Boswell's addresses to gay Catholic conventions, Bernard Schlager reconstructs the milieu in which politics and research intersected, and in which the fêted author reflected upon how ‘a history of gay people’ might be used to ‘reform current Christian attitudes’ (p. 76). In a penetrating essay, Carolyn Dinshaw notes that ‘[g]ay history and gay community are tightly linked in Boswell's work’ (p. 64); he believed that without ‘gay people’ back then, there may not be any possibility of a ‘“gay community” now’ (p. 64). For those of us coming to the main event more than two decades after it started, such contextualisation is vital to any understanding of the work then and of its valency now. Indeed, Ralph Hexter's paper, its occasional obsequiousness aside, so successfully contextualises some of Boswell's (still) troubling terminology that the author's insistence upon it becomes comprehensible.

But the anachronistic terminology, and what it connotes, is still troubling. That there is no sustained treatment of what is after all a central premise of Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality – other than an incidental handling of it in two or three contributions – is, to me, a glaring omission. Perhaps the issue of pre-modern people being self-consciously ‘gay’ seems passé; Dale Martin's interrogation of Romans 1 – ‘the ancients had no notion of “homosexual orientation” or “homosexuals”; it was not a question of “disoriented desires” but of legitimate desires that were allowed illegitimate freedoms”’ (p. 137) – suggests otherwise.

Many of the essayists collected here demonstrate a subtly nuanced grasp of homosociality that surely takes forward our understanding of intra-male relationships in the pre-modern, and therefore very differently configured, world. Matthew Kuefler and, particularly, Bruce O'Brian reconstruct those vanished worlds and the now atrophied concepts that animated them, to position acts of affection in a continuum of homoeroticism that may well, but need not, have had a sexual dimension to them. In so doing they greatly finesse Boswell's work; this is one of the strengths of this book, and makes it a fitting tribute to its predecessor.