John Boswell papers

The papers primarily consist of correspondence, lectures, research notes, writings (academic and fiction), biographical records, subject files, and memorabilia (including awards and popular press writings about Boswell). The papers document Boswell's personal life, from childhood to adulthood, as well as his professional life as an openly gay professor of history at Yale and pioneering author of two revisionist histories documenting the relationship between gay people and Christianity in the Middle Ages: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994). Of particular note are the large number of electronic files Boswell created in the 1980s and 1990s. Stored on 162 floppy disks, these files provide, among other things, much of Boswell's outgoing correspondence during the last thirteen years of his life, as well as research notes and drafts of some of his professional writings. The paper and electronic correspondence, some of it of an extremely personal and intimate nature, documents Boswell's relationship with his mother, his younger sister, Patricia, his brothers, Wray and Henry III, his partner, Jerone R. Hart, his close friend Ralph J. Hexter, New Haven neighbors, academic publishers, various Yale students and colleagues, and other academics in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Japan.

The biographical records feature birth and other vital records, passports, and résumés. Boswell’s memorabilia consists primarily of awards and popular press writings about him. The writings in the professinal files include commonplace books, travel diaries, student work, creative writing, and petitions in legal cases involving gay and lesbian military officers, as well as scholarship. Both paper and electronic writings feature drafts of some but not all of his scholarly work. Notably absent are drafts of The Royal Treasure (a small portion of which is included in the Personal Papers Series as part of his dissertation) and of The Kindness of Strangers, for example, whereas a complete paper draft of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is included. Parts of Same-Sex Unions can be found in the electronic files, though not in the paper files. Along with his syllabi, course packs, lectures, conference papers, research notes, photocopies of source material (much of it in foreign languages), and published reviews of his books by others, these materials offer a particularly rich trove of material because they document Boswell's development both as a gay man and as a leading medieval historian from an early age. Some handwritten notes and original folder labels are cryptically abbreviated or written in foreign languages, typically Greek, Latin, or Arabic.