Mobilizing Canon Law’s Concepts of Kinship: From Incest Prohibitions to Discrimination and Exclusion

In the course of the Middle Ages, canon lawyers developed

sophisticated techniques to implement Catholic prohibitions against

marrying close kin: By the thirteenth century they had developed

measurements (in degrees) for quantifying the closeness of kin

relations, methods for calculating this closeness (computus), and

diagrams (arbores) to visualize their operations. This paper will

examine a period, beginning in the fifteenth century, when these

techniques began to be appropriated by agents of secular powers who

re-used them to define descent groups in terms of inequality,

inclusion and exclusion. They drew on the diagrams to establish

systematic dynastic pedigrees and integrated the computus into proofs

of nobility. Perhaps most momentously, they applied the methods of

quantification to test the Limpieza de Sangre (the purity of Christian

descent, “unstained” by Jewish or Muslim ancestry) as well as a

plethora of related procedures used in the early colonies to determine

individual status within proto-racial groups.

Short Abstract (does not seem to upload in its section)

During the central Middle Ages, canon lawyers developed sophisticated techniques of describing and measuring relationships in order to implement incest prohibitions. The paper discusses how these techniques at the end of the Middle Ages were appropriated by secular powers and re-used to define descent groups in terms of inequality, inclusion and exclusion.