Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, by Bernadette J. Brooten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 412 + 12 halftones. $34.95 (cloth), $9.00 (paper). In her groundbreaking work Love Between Women; Bernadette Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to the fields of biblical studies and classics, as well as the history of sexuality, ancient Mediterranean women's history, and lesbian historiography. Brooten argues that the early Christian indictment of female homoeroticism was neither a theological nor a cultural innovation, but rather that Paul and other early Christian writers who condemned female homoeroticism wrote in full continuity with their precursors and contemporaries. The book is simultaneously a broadly focused history of ideology and interpretation, a detailed exegesis of Rom 1:18-32 (with a seventy-page commentary on the passage), and a Christian theological intervention into contemporary social debates about sexuality and civil rights. Brooten has meticulously collected Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources for her history of male attitudes toward female homoeroticism in the ancient world, a history that constitutes the first half of the book. Here, magical papyri, medical texts, astrological handbooks, novels, dream-books, polemics, and artistic representations are mined for evidence of the ancient world's knowledge about and attitudes toward tribades. In this rich elaboration of the sources, one encounters binding spells that seek to enslave one woman to another sexually; astrological explanations for sexual object choices among some women; recommendations for gynecological surgery to remove a large clitoris since it is "a symptom of turpitude" causing women to "strive to have their own flesh stimulated just like men"; and interpretive guides for analyzing different sexual desires as they are expressed in dreams. In concert with other historians of sexuality, Brooten argues that sexuality was conceptualized in antiquity in binary, hierarchically arranged terms, "active" and "passive. " These active and passive roles of sexual acts were scrupulously scripted and were tied to carefully structured notions of gender identity. Ancient commentators viewed violations of the hierarchical script as dishonorable transgressions of role and status and judged these violations harshly as challenges to the proper ordering of society. Paul's description of female homoeroticism as the exchange of natural passions for unnatural ones, Brooten argues, should be situated in this broader cultural framework of a concern over gender transgressions and their potential threat to the social order. As Brooten puts it directly, "Paul condemns sexual relations between women as `unnatural' because he shares the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature and therefore should remain passive in sexual relations" (p. 216). In part 2 of the book, Rom 1:18-32 emerges into high relief with a careful and lengthy exegesis. Here, Brooten provides an extremely close, line-by-line textual analysis that is a model for its genre, and she situates the passage in relation to a range of biblical intertexts. This analysis is followed by readings of other early Christian texts (the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul) and writers (Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, John Chrysostom, Shenute of Atripe, Augustine) in whose works the condemnation of female homoeroticism appears. The book concludes with a brief assessment of the contemporary theological, cultural, and political stakes involved when "through Paul's Letter to the Romans and other early church writings, the principal concepts discussed in this book have come to serve as authoritative for Western cultures, as a source for our ethics" (p. 361). Brooten's exegesis of Paul is painstaking, demanding, and persuasive. …