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Review article: Kinship and religion in the early Middle Ages

The study of medieval incest prohibitions became fashionable after the publication of anthropologist Jack Goody’s The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983). His most prominent thesis, that the function of the prohibitions was to divert wealth to the church, was initially received with great interest, but seems fundamentally flawed. A curious feature of the book was its silence about the work on the kinship of the Nuer by the most famous British anthropologist of the previous generation, Evans-Pritchard, who had found that they had a very extensive incest prohibition. Goody had claimed on his anthropologist’s authority that the western church’s prohibitions were extraordinarily extensive in a comparative perspective (say with the other side of the Mediterranean). This side of the Goody thesis still requires more comparative attention. Nonetheless the stimulus provided by the book did a power of good to medieval scholarship and provoked important research by a wide range of scholars: Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, Michael Mitterauer, Constance Bouchard, Bernhard Jussen, Patrick Corbet and other important historians. There is no need to summarize the historiography because that is done efficiently at the start of Karl Ubl’s new book (section 1.1), and because the book itself makes most previous scholarship out of date. Ubl’s study deserves an extensive review article rather than an ordinary review for several reasons. It argues a dramatically new thesis about the