Medieval twitter ( @erik_kaars, @GoingMedieval) is eviscerating this article saying 6th c Church regulation produced modern individuality, wealth, industrialism. I'm weighing in as a scholar of kinship and marriage in Britain in the 19th century. 1/8 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans

Yes, it is broadly true that kinship structures declined in importance and gave way to the more individualized ethos that characterizes the modern West. But to claim it is because of an early medieval church decision is simply bafflingly ludicrous. 2/8

Let’s look at the wealthy and highly industrialized Victorian England. What do we see here? Oh, look, cousin marriage was rampant. 1/10 of middle-class marriages were between cousins. 3/8

Victorian cousin marriages reinforced and perpetuated companies and thus may have fostered the ‘wealth’ that this study is seeking. Ie, cousin marriage may have produced wealth, not inhibited it. 4/8

The study naively assumes that everyone had only legal marriages; it does not consider that people might have had quasi-marital cohabiting relationships, and in fact that was widely practiced until Lord Hardwicke's Act of 1753 regularized marriage. 5/8