seven, "The History of Same-Sex Unions in Medieval Europe", looks at further evidence for such ceremonies in the Byzantine Empire, including stories such as those of Nicholas and Basil, and then examines the Christian prohibitions that were later introduced to put a stop to them. Reception Academic reception Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published a review by the historian Joan Cadden of Kenyon College, in which she described the book as a monument to Boswell's "prodigious accomplishments", providing an opportunity to celebrate his life and mourn his death. Although largely positive of it, she thought that Boswell's choice of the term "same-sex union" was unsuccessful, because in its usage it became a "transparent euphemism" for "homosexual marriage", the very term that Boswell sought to avoid. She also thought he was unwilling to deal with the views of theorists of social construction, as evidenced by his description of the North American berdache as "homosexuals". Ultimately she thought that the book greatly added to the continuing debate on the issue. The sociologist Lutz Kaelber of Indiana University, Bloomington, reviewed Boswell's text for the Contemporary Sociology journal. He considered it a "dazzling study" and thought that Boswell had overcome "some very formidable obstacles" in assembling his information. He noted that Boswell's main argument relies on his controversial translation of Greek terms which have already been criticised in the scholarly community. Speculating that Boswell's arguments will spark debate for decades to come, Kaelber suggested that even if his ideas were rejected by future scholarship, the book would still be very important for showing how "social arrangements and processes can shape and sometimes bend normative perceptions of the boundaries between friendship, affection, and love." Concluding his review, he praised the book as "an admirable, challenging, seminal work", although he lamented that it did not make use of sociology. The classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, himself openly gay, published a scathing and detailed review of Boswell's book in the scholarly journal Arion. According to Mendelsohn, judged as a work of philology Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe is a "bad book", and "its arguments are weak, its methods unsound, its conclusions highly questionable". Mendelsohn argued that Boswell failed to establish his two basic contentions: that adelphopoiesis (literally "creation of brothers") was a ceremony akin to marriage rather than a celebration of a ritualized friendship, probably intended for the reconciliation of heads of households,