William & Mary Crim Dell Association
[PAST EVENT] "Not A Tame Lion" Screening plus Q&A with Director Craig Bettendorf, Boswell Lecture Series
Access & Features
- Open to the public
As part of the Boswell Lecture Series, we are proud to screen the 2022 documentary Not a Tame Lion and engage in discussion with director Craig Bettendorf and Senior Lecturer Jay Watkins, who led the charge to name Boswell Hall. John Boswell graduated from William & Mary in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975. Boswell read and translated seventeen ancient and modern languages, became a Yale Professor by age thirty, and was granted full access to the highly classified and restricted Vatican archives from which he researched four award-winning books, making him a world-renowned expert in Medieval History and Linguistics. John Boswell was also openly Gay without apology in neither a tolerant nor accepting era. This film offers the first-hand accounts of Boswell's closest friends, students, colleagues, and family members as they recount his life, his works, and his final days during which he feverishly worked to complete SAME-SEX UNIONS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE, a book that changed the trajectory of the Marriage Equality debate, all while privately battling the debilitating effects of AIDS which led to his death on December 24th, 1994 at the age of forty-seven.
Contact
[[jwatkins, Jay Watkins]], H.R. Tyler Department of History