I agree, Peter, that in many ways the western nations have been more individualistic than others. I have explored this in my recent book The Awakening, A History of the Western Mind AD500-1700, published in the UK with a US edition coming from Knopf under the title The Reopening of the Western Mind. This is precisely why i bought Henrich’s book when it came out in the UK! As my title suggests I am concerned with the rise of the individual mind. I would argue that it lies in the relationship between an intellectual elite and the classical sources- so from 1400 onwards. This is why I like Mokyr’s approach (see another of my comments) which links a cultural elite to influencing the Industrial Revolution.
I was immensely disappointed by The Weirdest People. The first time i read it I was mildly interested and kept on going, the second time I got very irritated by the poor editing, the imprecise terminology and above all, his complete ignorance of European history (which was obvious from the first reading). Because it is so poorly organised (did he not have an editor?) it is hard to see the weaknesses, but I now realise that he did not know that the Roman empire existed and that many of the changes he attributes to the Church (the break-up of cousin marriages and communal landholdings) had already been in effect during the long centuries of Roman rule. There is very little evidence that anyone took much notice of the consanguinity rules anyway. ( I have searched for this but can only find one article on the nobles of the tenth to eleventh century where there was some acquiescence but unlike the mass of the population they were mobile and so could marry out.) While one can see a transmission of culture across the European elite (using Latin as a common language) over time, there is no evidence that it extended beyond this elite. It is true that the Protestant areas of Europe ( I wonder whether Henrich knew of the persistence of Catholicism over much of Europe- France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria,etc. as he seems to attribute much of WEIRDness to Protestantism but this would only have affected part of Europe) encouraged the reading of the Bible but this hardly compares with those who had access to the rich resources of the classical world.
We shall see whether the whole argument on which this book depends unravels as better historians than I come in contact with it. It certainly does not deserve to be seen as a major academic work.
He is aware of some relevant Roman norms. From page 176:
Early Roman law, for example, prohibited close cousin marriage, though the law of the Roman Empire—where Christianity was born—permitted it without social stigma.
Brent Shaw, the classical historian, has done an in-depth survey of this and analysed 33 Roman marriages none of which were between cousins, He makes the good point that rising aristocratic families who needed to secure their position deliberately married into established aristocratic families so that there was a good reason for avoiding cousin marriages. Of course, as with medieval Europe, we don’t know what went on with the mass of sexual relationships. Henrich seems to have assumed that there was some sort of formal marriage under the auspices of the Church. This was not the case as marriages by mutual consent without even a priest in attendance were valid.
The fact that around me in rural East Anglia, there were marriages within the villages, most of whose inhabitants were born and died in the same village, up to the Second World War shows that Henrich’s argument that rural life was split up in the Middle Ages is erroneous. My late father-in-law ,a GP in Norfolk in the 50s had to sort out the medical consequences of inbreeding! Luckily we have extensive evidence of marriage patters from the rich Florentine archives and an analysis of 700 dowry documents from the fifteenth century showed that rural men married rural wives and urban men urban wives and seldom was there a crossover.
As I have already said that as a historian who has been researching these things over the years,I am exasperated by Henrich’s imaginary narrative !
I agree, Peter, that in many ways the western nations have been more individualistic than others. I have explored this in my recent book The Awakening, A History of the Western Mind AD500-1700, published in the UK with a US edition coming from Knopf under the title The Reopening of the Western Mind. This is precisely why i bought Henrich’s book when it came out in the UK! As my title suggests I am concerned with the rise of the individual mind. I would argue that it lies in the relationship between an intellectual elite and the classical sources- so from 1400 onwards. This is why I like Mokyr’s approach (see another of my comments) which links a cultural elite to influencing the Industrial Revolution.
I was immensely disappointed by The Weirdest People. The first time i read it I was mildly interested and kept on going, the second time I got very irritated by the poor editing, the imprecise terminology and above all, his complete ignorance of European history (which was obvious from the first reading). Because it is so poorly organised (did he not have an editor?) it is hard to see the weaknesses, but I now realise that he did not know that the Roman empire existed and that many of the changes he attributes to the Church (the break-up of cousin marriages and communal landholdings) had already been in effect during the long centuries of Roman rule. There is very little evidence that anyone took much notice of the consanguinity rules anyway. ( I have searched for this but can only find one article on the nobles of the tenth to eleventh century where there was some acquiescence but unlike the mass of the population they were mobile and so could marry out.) While one can see a transmission of culture across the European elite (using Latin as a common language) over time, there is no evidence that it extended beyond this elite. It is true that the Protestant areas of Europe ( I wonder whether Henrich knew of the persistence of Catholicism over much of Europe- France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria,etc. as he seems to attribute much of WEIRDness to Protestantism but this would only have affected part of Europe) encouraged the reading of the Bible but this hardly compares with those who had access to the rich resources of the classical world.
We shall see whether the whole argument on which this book depends unravels as better historians than I come in contact with it. It certainly does not deserve to be seen as a major academic work.
He is aware of some relevant Roman norms. From page 176:
Brent Shaw, the classical historian, has done an in-depth survey of this and analysed 33 Roman marriages none of which were between cousins, He makes the good point that rising aristocratic families who needed to secure their position deliberately married into established aristocratic families so that there was a good reason for avoiding cousin marriages. Of course, as with medieval Europe, we don’t know what went on with the mass of sexual relationships. Henrich seems to have assumed that there was some sort of formal marriage under the auspices of the Church. This was not the case as marriages by mutual consent without even a priest in attendance were valid.
The fact that around me in rural East Anglia, there were marriages within the villages, most of whose inhabitants were born and died in the same village, up to the Second World War shows that Henrich’s argument that rural life was split up in the Middle Ages is erroneous. My late father-in-law ,a GP in Norfolk in the 50s had to sort out the medical consequences of inbreeding! Luckily we have extensive evidence of marriage patters from the rich Florentine archives and an analysis of 700 dowry documents from the fifteenth century showed that rural men married rural wives and urban men urban wives and seldom was there a crossover.
As I have already said that as a historian who has been researching these things over the years,I am exasperated by Henrich’s imaginary narrative !