Glenn Olsen positions this book as a correction to John Boswell's 1980 Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) (1), which argued that early Christianity was not inherently hostile to same-sex desire or practices. To do so, Olsen presents a limited examination of one eleventh-century reformer's attempt to link as “sodomy,” and to rank as sins, four erotic acts that, he believed, defiled the clergy. Olsen's general thesis is that historical overviews such as Boswell's are incautious and untenable, that to understand the medieval history of sexuality one must proceed on a case-by-case basis using techniques of the “old philology” (421).

Part 1 is a lengthy review of recent scholarship on the history of sexuality in the Middle Ages that aims to provide historical context for “medieval sexual experience” (2), discussing how various scholars have proposed categories of and labels for that experience. The first chapter, “Naming Sodomy,” explicitly challenges Mark Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The phrase “scelus sodomiae,” Olsen tells us, appears much earlier than Jordan proposed, occurring in Hincmar of Reims's account of the divorce proceedings of Lothair II, where it identified the sodomite sin ambiguously to include all “acts against nature.” Olsen concludes that, prior to Damian, “sodomitic” had a range of meanings. It is unclear how Olsen's portrayal of the ninth-century definition of sodomy as ambiguous actually challenges Jordan's thesis that sodomy emerged as a clearly defined category in the writings of Peter Damian.

Olsen constructs several additional minor arguments from his exposition of recent scholarship. First, that gender and power relations had little fixity and should not be subject to the generalization of historians. That the terms “sodomite,” “effeminate,” “hermaphrodite,” and “androgyne” held a range of meanings and can be viewed as standing in historical antecedence to “homosexual” (65), two points that are hardly supported by any sustained analysis of the latter three terms. Chapter 3's review of Pierre Payer's 1984, Sex and the Penitentials (Toronto: University of Toronto) concludes that Christianity was “a great motor force in spreading antipathy to all the “sins against nature,” and that later writers like Aquinas merely “worked out the logic of longstanding positions” (131). Here, Olsen seeks to correct Boswell's thesis that intolerance of gay people only emerged with thirteenth-century persecutory mentalities. The final chapter in this section examines, minimally, the literary production of Baudri of Bourgueil and Marbod of Rennes, as well as French and Spanish sculpture in order to project a sense of the medieval “sexual imagination,” which fostered an active sexual subjecthood and sexual identities. From these sources Olsen concludes that there is no “fixed vocabulary” to articulate the feelings they wished to convey (195), and thus he does not seek to do so.

Part 2 turns, finally, to Peter Damian. Olsen judges Damian a fit candidate to reveal the “sexual imagination” because he forged a link between the penitential tradition (wherein sodomy was equated with anal sex) and Hincmar's identification of sodomy with any non-procreative sexual act. Damian identified four related sodomous acts of ascending moral gravity: solitary masturbation, mutual masturbation, femoral intercourse, and anal intercourse. He placed these individual acts into the category of “sodomy” on the grounds that each one spilled semen in an exclusively male scenario. Chapter 7 examines sodomy as male sin, wherein Damian deemed each act “unnatural” because it wasted semen on an act that God ordained by nature to be inspired by and fulfilled with a woman (325). Sodomy, in particular, occurred, he believed, not as a temptation of the flesh, but as goad of diabolical impulse (412), which Olsen demonstrates through a lengthy analysis of Romanesque sculpture in chapter 8. The final chapter then examines the gender of the sodomite, who Damian constructed in typically rich phrasing as an “unmanned man” seeking sexual fulfillment in a body precisely like his own, something he could offer himself.

Olsen is wary of making generalities in historical interpretation and for this reason is wedded to a precise philology, seeking at all times to examine the variant meanings of a concept or category as it occurs in context. In this endeavor, he is successful, though his conclusions, with minor modifications, fundamentally follow those of Mark Jordan. Olsen's contribution is to clarify precisely how Damian both built upon received Christian tradition by narrowing the definition of sodomy from Hincmar's use, as well as innovating to some degree, enlarging it from the penitential tradition.

While Olsen is right to caution readers that, contrary to the Boswell thesis, the early medieval western Christian tradition indeed bore distinct hostilities to same-sex desires and acts, Olsen's framing of his study as a corrective to Boswell is misleading. For all of its essentializing and anachronistic errors, Boswell sought to demonstrate that gay people had a thriving history in the premodern western past. Olsen's interests do not lie with people and their intimate lives and loves. The thrust of his study is far more limited. If Olsen truly wished to fathom the range and affections of the “sexual imagination” and “sexual experience” of medieval persons, he would not have limited himself to the construction of a single category of sin in a vitriolic letter of condemnation of clerical sex acts written for the explicit purpose of creating an all male celibate clergy.

Further, Olsen's understanding of the history of sexuality and gender in the Middle Ages is stifled by his unwillingness to critically engage the work of contemporary scholars like Bruce Holsinger and Dyan Elliott, whose interpretations of same-sex desire he dismisses almost without regard as, respectively, a “gay reading” (59) and “science fiction” (123). Indeed, Olsen conjectures that the sexual orientation of certain scholars (at least one of which he has assumed incorrectly) has led to their misrepresentation of the medieval sources. At one point, discussing differences in historiographical interpretation, he proposes the troubling analogy that, “it is possible that a heterosexual parent is culturally trained to view the naked bodies of his own children one way, while they are viewed in another way by a pederast viewer” (59). This analogy is meant to explain why he does not “see” what certain “gay readings” of medieval texts have offered, but it clearly aligns gay persons with pederasts. In another misplaced comment, Olsen aggrieves the stereotypes used in the “anti-Catholic” twenty first-century U.S. news media, which, he believes, consistently play upon stereotypes in order to affiliate the celibacy of the Catholic clergy with pederasty (307).

Olsen reiterates throughout this book his hesitation to make generalities, while also recognizing that “the mind craves some new overview” (1). But it is not just an impatient mind that pines for generalization. To a certain extent, proper history requires it, at least insofar as meaning emerges only when the historian connects ideas, demonstrating relationships between isolated facts or “on-the-ground knowledge” (422). Olsen's study of Peter Damian's characterization of sodomy, in its dogged insistence on limiting discussion to a single letter and in its refusal to accommodate more expansive interpretations, fails to draw historical significance for Damian's work, to make meaning of the eleventh-century construction of sodomy.