‘May a Man Marry a Man?’: Medieval Canon Lawyers and Theologians Analyze Same-Sex Unions

The Medieval Debate: Pre-History

The possibility of same-sex marriage was raised for the first time in the ancient world. The Emperor Nero, the ancient historians agreed, entered into a same-sex union with a galley slave during an elaborate public festival.¹ The ancient writers, who were stern moralists, were highly critical of this action.² The historian Tacitus went so far as to connect, by implication, Nero’s marriage with the great fire in Rome and with his eventual overthrow.³

It is possible that Nero’s action briefly occasioned imitators. If the satirists Juvenal and Martial are to be believed, some men at least chose to follow Nero’s example and enter into unions with other men.⁴ Again, however, Juvenal and Martial do not record this conduct approvingly. Rather, they make these actions a target for their biting acidic humor.⁵

Other examples from the ancient world are more problematic. John Boswell discusses the paired saints Serge and Bacchus. Two soldiers in service of the Roman Army, they were close companions during one of the last persecutions of the Church.⁶ Revealed to be Christian, they suffered a joint martyrdom and still share the same feast day.⁷ Boswell looks to the evidence of art history to suggest that they were depicted in early Christian iconography as a married couple,⁸ but even he concedes that the evidence is not free of ambiguity.⁹ It is safe to say that the explicit question of same-sex marriage did not arise again until the thirteenth century, when it was brought up by one of the most virtuosic lawyers of his or any age, the remarkable Hostiensis.

Hostiensis: Biography

Born in the year 1200 in a small town in the Piedmont region of present-day northern Italy, Henry of Segusio (who later became known as Hostiensis) entered the service of the Church as a young man and proved to be precocious.¹⁰ He trained as a lawyer, earning doctorates in both canon law and Roman law.¹¹ He must have been hugely impressive to his contemporaries. He was well-versed in classical literature and Salimbene ‘praised [him] for his learning, his singing, and his playing of the viol’.¹² By his middle thirties, he had already advanced far in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Around the year 1235, he was named Prior of Antibes, in the south of France.

For Hostiensis, however, Antibes was merely the first step on an ascent into the upper reaches of church governance. In the late 1230s and early 1240s, Hostiensis journeyed more than once across the English Channel on diplomatic missions involving King Henry III.¹³ He mediated a disputed episcopal election that featured as one of the contestants one of the greatest English legal minds of the age — William Raleigh.¹⁴

Nor was Henry III the only crowned head of Europe with whom Hostiensis was on familiar terms. He knew and consulted with Louis IX of France, the famous St. Louis.¹⁵ And he had a close, ongoing relationship with the royal family of Savoy, at the time a powerful principality nestled between northern Italy and modern-day France.¹⁶

He found time in all of this statecraft to lecture briefly on law at the University of Paris. He also climbed steadily the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment. In 1244, he was elected Bishop of Sisteron, located in Provence, where he would have presided in the Église de Notre-Dame des Pommiers.¹⁷ In 1250, it was off to the bishopric of Embrun, in the border area between modern France and Switzerland, and finally, in 1262, he was named Cardinal-Archbishop of Ostia, one of the most powerful positions in Christendom next to the papacy itself. He was a serious candidate for the Throne of St. Peter in the conclave of 1271 and might have been elected Pope had he not taken ill at Rome and died.

Hostiensis was among the most virtuosic of jurists — of his time and ours. Although he spent little time...