Instal the new version for ios Weird West12/22/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote-a very interesting footnote, to be sure-but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed. ![]() (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine’s letters document a moment in a prolonged process-begun in the fourth century-in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom. The taboo against consanguineous family had expanded to include “spiritual kin,” who were, mostly, godparents. By the 11th century, however, you couldn’t get engaged until you’d counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. He was lax about second and third cousins only the children of aunts and uncles were off-limits. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood-another example was brothers’ widows. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother? Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. That meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. ![]() A round 597 a.d., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |