Now, I don't study kinship ties specifically, but I can say that some scholars claim that the shift away from extended family to a nuclear family centered around the father came with INCREASED social expectation of emotional connection to family members. 2/13
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The study leaps backwards and forwards in time: number of centuries "under the influence of the medieval church" being correlated with amount of charitable blood donations in the present, for instance. 3/13pic.twitter.com/vBoXOviHVb
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It claims to control for the integration into the Roman Empire (based on Roman roads???), education (based on presence of medieval universities, AS IF THE UNIVERSITY WAS THE ONLY FORM OF EDUCATION), and incorporation into the Carolingian Empire OR Soviet Bloc (?!) 4/13pic.twitter.com/AJrG1St7mo
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It makes *baffling* statements about the difference between the medieval and modern "Church," as if there is only one dominant form of Christianity. 5/13pic.twitter.com/WXcWhYLoZj
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And, as others have pointed out, it makes huge leaps in terms of the connections between the church and kinship groups, family structure and individuality, etc etc. 6/13https://twitter.com/mccormick_ted/status/1193028975951519745 …
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I am focusing on my specialty, and this claim about Church "policies" starting in 500 CE is...broad. What policies? How were these enforced? We don't know that people even went to confession regularly before the millennium. There's little in secular laws on kinship. 7/13pic.twitter.com/g3tYOLUnjB
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The Church also didn't assert exclusive control over marriage until the 10th and 11th centuries. Yes, they made lots of claims about what you *should* do but we don't have strong evidence they were enforced (and not strong evidence for the late Middle Ages either). 8/13
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So if their big metric is # of centuries "under the influence of the church," are they arguing for a stronger influence of the early church on kinship? And are they claiming that kinship was the Church's primary sexual concern (rather, than, sodomy/adultery/remarriage)? 9/13
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And the citations are wildly terrible. You're going to claim that kinship changes caused sweeping changes in medieval society and then cite JARED DIAMOND and FRANCIS FUKUYAMA?? 10/13pic.twitter.com/fBSEDjplCx
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You're going to claim that kinship ties are the most important structuring institutions in society and then point to Levi-Strauss? 11/13pic.twitter.com/QUk996IkOr
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There's remarkably little citation of medieval scholarship and what is cited is piecemeal. I have no criticism of individual works cited, which are often very good, but they don't add up to a complete picture of medieval attitudes towards sexuality or kinship across Europe. 12/13pic.twitter.com/0SmpY9uXow
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As
@ISASaxonists and@prof_gabriele have said recently in relation to other "studies" like this, these data studies are built on wildly ahistorical assumptions. This claim that the Church "built the West" rests on a racist foundation. 13/13 https://twitter.com/Lollardfish/status/1197704778505166851 …This Tweet is unavailable.Show this thread -
I really want to know what
@GoingMedieval thinks of this new studyShow this thread
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