Since several scientists can't just take the word of however many medievalists (not just historians either) have said this is bad scholarship, and why, here are some sources. Because I'm feeling generous.https://twitter.com/prof_gabriele/status/1192655774029406209 …
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I also want to say that consanguinity was not the same, over all periods, or enforced. Yes, marriage eventually became considered a sacrament. But that didn't stop a regular couple living in rural wherever from basically just exchanging gifts and saying, okay we're married.
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Medieval marriage is a difficult and complex topic that intersects with the Church, dogma, control, political unions, economics, etc.
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Also, when we talk about it we usually discuss it within the perspective of the visible people in the sources aka nobles.
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So, onto sources. Constance B. Bouchard, "Consanguinity and Noble Marriages in Tenth and Eleventh Century France," Speculum 56:2 (1981): 268 - 287. Discusses that consanguinity was maintained, however, it was not always adhered to and there were ways to skirt around it.
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Mayke de Jong, "An Unsolved Riddle: Early Medieval Incest Legislation," in Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective, which surveys the problems of the topic and the debates.
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Also, the erosion of family ties is something that is widely discussed under the entirety of the scholarship on feudalism (however applicable/inapplicable that word and model may be now). I mean...Marc Bloch. Scholarship has moved past him but...foundational.
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Medieval marriage is widely discussed. WIDELY discussed. Georges Duby is a classic, albeit outdated perhaps now.
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Any of you scientists who claim to want to know more about it? Go to google scholar and input "medieval consanguinity" or "medieval marriage" or "medieval families" or something of the like.
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I went through the sources on this: I saw
@rmkarras cited for a brief comment about early medieval Europe before the Church started to mandate marriage as a sacrament.Show this thread -
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Yes, the Church advocated consent. Didn't always happen, and arranged marriages occurred a lot. However, adoption: not banned, fosterage was common in early medieval Ireland. Households were not nuclear, and may have contained many relatives and different families
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Concubinage also continued, for a long time. Not necessarily "legally" but shall I point to the Merovingians? Also, remarriage happened SO OFTEN. The idea of "weak" kinship ties is...very inaccurate.
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Kinship was an ever changing thing. For nobles it defined your right to inherit titles, and primogeniture was not the norm for a long time. Also, people invented kinships and genealogies.
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But the fact that their data cannot account for peasantry of which we have very spotty demographic marriage data, then this whole study is ridiculous.
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And also, it totally ignores the fact that cousin marriages were in fact very common in the post-medieval period. Like please explain to me how this works when 18th and 19th c England and Ireland have many examples of cousin marriage.
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You know what’s worse than not citing historians? Is citing historians and not actually considering what they wrote, and having a lack of engagement with the wider discourse. It means that you looked, stopped when you found what you thought you needed, and didn’t go further.
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So their map: premise is regarding the early Church contact with the world and the impact on kin structures. Okay so not only is the premise here that the early medieval Church was a Western European thing, it ignores the origins and impact of Christianity in the following places
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Ethiopia being the biggest one, but in general it oversimplifies the Church in N Africa and the Middle East quite significantly.
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Also re: data sets. They are comparing modern evidence (presumably of regular people but I have no idea) with the aforementioned spotty kinship data of the medieval period and just mashing it all up together and presenting that as a model.
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Did no one see the problems inherent in that?
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Also if someone could point out their primary sources/data sets to me in this, I would love that. Because I cannot for the love of me find them in the paper. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/eaau5141 …
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Since some person decided to be rather rude about the medievalists who are more than justified in calling this paper out, I want to just highlight something regarding medieval history that I mentioned yesterday.
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We do not (generally) look at how the past precipated things in the distant future, whether that be nations, ideologies, impacts.
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Simply because it is impossible to boil it down to one cause, one thing.
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The Church’s rules against cousin marriage cannot explain modern Western society.
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Because not only was it not enforced in a way we can accurately understand, but for the Early Modern period when we do have much more demographic data, we know cousin marriages were very common in places like England and I suspect Ireland also.
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So you can’t say, well the systemic contact with the church led to ideas of individuality and such because...that is so Eurocentric and ignores modern data also.
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Again, I want to point out that they seem to think the medieval church had no impact on N Africa (Ethiopia!!!!) and the Middle East.
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Okay so, some final thoughts as I had a look through the supplemental data, located here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/11/06/366.6466.eaau5141.DC1/aau5141_Schulz_SM.pdf …
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