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Not letting this go. This is riddled with factual errors, peddles dangerous stereotypes about the medieval Church and, most importantly, exonerates an elusive beast called „Western modernity“ as based on some arbitrary self-imposed discipline. 1/ https://www.ft.com/content/dfadcaf5-b644-4abc-ae8f-65ae912e321f
The pope didn’t send Augustine to Kent in 597 „to win King Aethelberht round to the church’s strict matrimonial edicts.“ It was a complicated ecclesiastical and political mission to an island with already existing Church. Wrote a book about it. 2/ https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463727532/roman-infrastructure-in-early-medieval-britain
The Church didn’t have a master plan with an „extreme package of prohibitions“ that it planned to impose from 600 onwards through „millennia” (can someone count here?) in order to move away from Roman “permissive family rules” (sic!) 3/
Ecclesiastical rules on marriage developed through a long process and for a long time actually were connected to... Roman imperial legislation. They were also a product of numerous theological disputes and not imposed by some medieval Church marriage committee. 4/
Even a passing, cursory look at the genealogies of medieval royal families will show you that marrying inside the extended kin was the norm not the exception. The past doesn’t follow neat precepts end neither did the people. 5/
“From the ruins of traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations” Ruins? How exactly kinship affiliations stopped being important? They still remained paramount. 6/
“Roman religious leftovers that held sway at the time in much of Europe”. Hate to break it to you but Christianity *is* a Roman religious leftover. Stop trying to make hidden paganism a moving force of medieval Europe happen. 7/
All this misunderstanding of medieval European history leads to a particularly dangerous form of Western exceptionalism which looks for a single rule or “virtue” that is supposed to explain how “the West” was predestined to succeed. That pivot point is to exonerate modernity. 8/
Stop infantilising the past in order to exonerate the present. 9/
The Church didn’t force “the West” into modernity by forbidding certain forms of marriage. (This screams anti-Catholic propaganda btw.) The differences you see between Europe and other regions are results of extremely complex processes and that, you know, colonialism thing? 10/
As someone who actually works on analysis of historical and historiographical data I am extremely tired of the old, long debunked stereotypes coming back to life because someone didn’t do due diligence with their data and the historical context. Zombie Bigdataism. 11/
If you think this is of no consequence, reading this short report @FT should give you pause. History has always been used to argue the present and here the “cousin thesis” is put to issues as diverse as China’s economic growth and COVID. Yes, Augustine and 597 matter today. 12/
