The Byzantine practice of adelphopoiesis, or “brother-making,” has been both much discussed and much misunderstood since the publication of John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (Villard, 1994), which led many in the popular press to believe (incorrectly) that the Orthodox Church during the Byzantine period performed same-sex marriages. While this is clearly not the case, it is true that Byzantine society had a very rich practice of “brother-making” that involved a liturgical yoking of two men to one another by a priest. The purpose and practice of Byzantine adelphopoiesis varied considerably—in a monastic setting it often bound together two monks who sought to pursue their ascetic struggle together; in elite secular society it was employed by aristocrats and members of the imperial family to pursue a variety of alliances both within and beyond the borders of the empire. Claudia Rapp's masterful study of this phenomenon brings together a staggering number of liturgical, literary, textual, and material sources so as to provide a thoughtful analysis of the religious and sociological practice of Byzantine “brother-making.”

The book consists of an Introduction, six chapters, and three helpful appendices (the last of which includes an English translation of the liturgical prayers). The introduction nicely frames what is to follow around the central question of the book—how are we to understand the significance of ritual brother-making in Byzantium if neither the rite nor the practice is to be understood as an explicit sanctioning of homosexual marriage? Chapter 1 surveys the wide variety of non-biological relationships in Byzantine society (e.g. marriage, godparenthood, and adoption) and the number of social settings in which one man might refer to another as “brother.” Chapter 2 provides a detailed analysis of the prayers for the liturgical rite, which is contained in a wide variety of manuscripts from the eighth century onward from Sicily, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean. Using this evidence, Rapp argues, compellingly, that the rite is more similar to a Christian rite of baptism than marriage.

The third chapter is the longest and, to my mind, the most intriguing. It is here that Rapp's masterful command of early Christian and Byzantine monasticism is on full display. The argument of the chapter—and the book—is that the ritual of adelphopoiesis emerged in a monastic setting where monks routinely lived in groups of two or three as a way to cement a pledge liturgically between monks in order to aid and assist one another in the ascetic life. The variety of sources that she marshals here is striking, as is her careful analysis of them. Indeed, what we find in this material is a treasure trove of emotional, affective, and spiritual attachments between monks that reveal all of the beauty, love, and angst that we might find in other closely-paired human relationships.

Chapter 4 identifies and analyzes the practice of ritual brother-making among the aristocracy, suggesting that as Christianity took hold more firmly in Byzantine society, the practice of ritual brotherhood as it was developed by ascetics spread (in modified forms) to a variety of secular settings. The fifth chapter offers a useful summary of the efforts by the church and legal authorities to control the practice after the fact. Most notable here are the repeated condemnations by church authorities of monks who enter into brother-relationships with laymen for fear that such engagements outside of the monastery will court worldliness. Notably, the practice itself is rarely condemned outright, even if experts in later centuries routinely asserted that it had no legal standing. The final chapter carries the story beyond Byzantium through the Ottoman period and even into the twentieth century.

While Rapp is clear that the Byzantine rite of adelphopoiesis was neither a marriage rite nor a license for male-male sexual relationships, she also marshals an enormous amount of evidence to demonstrate the extremely close affective bonds that existed between men in a variety of settings in Byzantine society. One can easily imagine that the wide acceptance of the male-male pairing that was celebrated and cemented by the rite of adelphopoiesis, could give occasion to illicit activity (particularly in the close confines of a monastic cell). On this score Rapp offers several examples of monastic ritual brothers who were required to separate because their friendship had caused “scandal.” One of the great attributes of Rapp's study is that it raises these kinds of questions but never departs from a careful reading of the sources. In other words, while Rapp returns to the possibility of homosexual activity at various points, she never advances a conclusion further than her evidence takes her.

In sum, this is an exceptional book that will surely spur further research, not only for historians of early Christianity and Byzantium but also for scholars of theology and religious studies who continue to look for ways to engage contemporary questions with the resources of the Christian past.