A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe Book

This is a short but dense and often dry book that looks at how the Church influenced family, marriage, and kin structures in Europe. It does a good job of tracing some important threads through the centuries and is quite convincing of its point.

In general the thesis is that before the 3rd and 4th centuries, there wasnt the "Oriental" and "European" dichotomy of family structures that have been talked about. The Mediterranean was essentially one cultural space with North Africa and southern Europe very similar to one another. In fact most of the Roman empire had family structures similar to elsewhere on the planet. Namely, large kin groups that were held together by inheritance that kept property inside the kin group. Then, around Pope Gregory and Augustine, the Church made several drastic changes and decrees that changed this forever.

Specifically, they eliminated all the strategies that kin groups typically use to pass property down inside the kin group and in cases of a lack of male heirs. These strategies are close marriages (marriages between cousins), and to produce an heir: divorce and remarriage, concubinage (taking on more than one wife), remarriage of widows (sometimes automatically to the brother of the husband, called the levirate), and adoption. ALL of these strategies were outlawed with dubious moral and scriptural support. All of them were very common practice in Christian lands before the decrees and significant pushback was the norm for centuries. Yet the Church held firm and was adamant in enforcement.

Why? When there was no male heir and less pressure to keep property in the hands of the kin group the property would go to the Church. Within a few centuries the Church became the biggest landholder in nearly every country where these laws were in place and rivalled kings for power. There was a pushback by the kings and nobles eventually because it seemed like the Church would own all the land at some point at the rate it was going, but the inheritance and marriage rules which caused this didn't change. Instead there developed a steady state where as much property was going into the church as was being taken back or taken over by the state, but the Church remained a huge wealthy landowner. In no other place in the world were these specific legal and moral injunctions enforced, so Europe developed a very distinct individualized culture that shed off the kin group and atomized individuals and the nuclear family. The European late marriage model was also allowed to develop without the kin group authorities to block it.

The degrees of separation allowed for two people to get married were so large that it was almost impossible to be "legally" married under Church doctrine unless you left your village or paid for an exemption (another way to extort money, especially nobles). Over time the number of allowable degrees was reduced slightly but it was still heavily enforced by the Church. The Church also insisted on being a part of the marriage and officiating it, which was new and allowed them to police these requirements.

Overall it shows how Europe uniquely brushed off kin networks and became an individualist society.

Quotes:

P84: The thrust of the fourth century decrees and legislation lay in another direction, one that changed the patterns of marriage in the whole area under Christian domination, but which had little or no relation to the doctrines of the faith, much less to its scriptures. In the main these patterns can hardly be regarded as an *ethical* advance on the rules and customs of earlier societies; some might wish to argue against concubinage on universal ethical principals but the same can hardly be done for the marriage of cousins or the adoption of children. Their one common feature was the control they gave over the strategies of heirship, and in particular the control over close marriages, those between consanguinal, a final and spiritual kin.

P94: In earlier Mediterranean societies the state of heirlessness could be remedied by the use of one of the widespread strategies of heirship current in the region, namely adoption, concubinage, plural marriage, widow remarriage (including the levirate). It does not seem accidental that the Church appears to have condemned the very practices that would have deprived it of property. For the accumulation of property was essential so that it could assume responsibility for the maintenance of those widows and orphans who, under the pre-existing arrangements, would have been cared for by their kin. If a widow was to remarry rather than enter a nunnery, then the property would come under the control of the new partnership. If an individual or couple adopted a child, they provided themselves an heir for their goods. So too, in a less direct fashion, does a man who takes a second wife or a concubine if his first wife is barren. Is it by chance that the Church forbade such strategies of continuity, that it set limits to the efficacy of kinship ties outside the elementary family in matters of property? Even within the immediate conjugal family, while the church often protected relationships, it could also threaten them. The widowed daughter was encouraged by St. Jerome to leave money to the church against her father's wishes. Such a policy was not only destructive of the idea of "family property", it also encouraged filial disobedience. Or to phrase the trend in another way, it promoted "freedom" and "individualism" at the same time as strengthening the independence of women.

P142: While moral and ethical considerations are relevant to this change, perhaps a yet more important fact lay in the growth of both Church and State, in their bureaucratic and property holding forms, which led to a weakening, often deliberate, of groups and ranges of kin. In the process the molecule of kinship became reduced to its constituent atoms, the individual whose consent- to marriage, to alienation, and to many other activities - could not be challenged by recalcitrant or powerful relatives.