Note 321 — BOOK IX

Isidore gives a table of “the prohibited degrees” within which marriage was forbidden by the rule of the church. Since the introduction of Christianity these had been steadily extended until in Isidore’s lifetime intermarriage within the seventh degree was prohibited by Pope Gregory. The analogy between the wide extension of “the prohibited degrees” in the dark ages and that found among primitive peoples generally is remarkable. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 297, says: “As a rule among primitive peoples unaffected by modern civilization, the prohibited degrees are more numerous than in advanced communities, the prohibitions in many cases referring even to all the members of a tribe or clan.” For an account of this development of marriage, see Westermarck, op. cit., p. 308, and Smith and Cheetham’s Christian Antiquities, art. “Prohibited Degrees.” This social phenomenon of the dark ages is a development parallel to the recrudescence of the primitive in the intellectual sphere which is illustrated in so marked a manner in the Etymologies (cf. pp. 50–54).