Magistra et Mater

In a recent comment on my post on evangelical attitudes to homosexuality, Tony Carr claimed that: "Throughout history, the "appeasement" churches have declined, and the "fundamental" churches have grown." Putting that in a slightly less prejudicial way, it's frequently stated that in the modern West theologically conservative churches grow and theologically liberal ones decline and that statistics on changing congregation sizes backs this up. These statistics are often used either to attack theological liberalism in Anglicanism or to gloat/worry over the disappearance of liberal denominations. However, the definitional and statistical issues involved in this argument are particularly tricky, so I want to try and unpick some of them (and also draw on a very interesting website I found by a Christian mathematician).

One immediate problem is in defining theologically conservative and theologically liberal churches, especially because churches and denominations are often not internally homogeneous. This is particularly the case in the Church of England, which has a large theological spectrum with several different dimensions (e.g. Protestant versus Catholic practices as well as conservative versus liberal theology). For this reason, it's entirely possible for what looks like growth and decline in individual congregations to be largely a result of internal sorting.

For example, suppose in town X there are 5 Anglican churches, each initially with a congregation of 100. Suppose also that in each congregation there are 40 conservative members and 60 liberals, making an overall total of 500 Anglicans, 200 of whom are conservatives and 300 liberals. Suppose further that one of the churches (St Stephen's) now gets a new more conservative/fundamental minister who preaches exactly the old-time religion that all the conservative Anglicans like, but that repels the liberals within the town, and that members of the congregations then change churches to reflect this.

The end result would then be that St Stephen's, as a "pure" conservative church, now has a congregation of 200: its 40 original conservatives, plus 40 from each of the other 4 churches. Meanwhile, the remaining 4 liberal churches now have 75 members each: their 60 original liberals, plus 15 refugees from St Stephen's (assuming that those liberals leaving there move evenly to the four other churches). Therefore, St Stephen's has grown by 100% and the other churches have declined by 25% without a single person changing either their denomination or their theology. In fact, St Stephen's might show considerable growth even if they actually drive some people away from Christianity altogether. Suppose only 40 of the original liberals in the congregation move to other churches and 20 leave the church altogether. St Stephen's still grows to 200 and the other churches congregations fall even further (to 70 members each), even though it is St Stephen's that is the reason for these Anglicans leaving.

Of course, it would be equally possible for the statistics to go the other way round. If just one of the church in the town had a minister or policies that particularly appealed to liberals in other congregations (they are gay-friendly or have a particular enthusiasm for interfaith dialogue etc) then they may similarly grow at the expense of other churches. But I've put it this way round because it tends particularly to be theological conservatives who encourage the leaving of one congregation for a "purer" one. The example I've given also shows another important point: growth figures for relatively small churches can look very impressive without actually referring to many people.

If you're looking at figures for growth or decline of denominations, therefore, it makes sense to focus on ones which are large, relatively homogenous within themselves and which are quite dissimilar from other denominations (so that you're not just seeing people move between very similar churches). And once you do that the claim that conservative denominations are growing looks a lot shakier. For example, the Catholic Church has serious problems in the US and in Europe (its numbers are holding up or growing in the US only because of Catholic immigrants and are in slow decline in Britain). The largest Protestant denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention is declining and so are some other evangelical denominations. This isn't to deny that liberal denominations are also in trouble (and in some cases their numbers are declining much more steeply), but they do show that theological conservatism alone is not the answer.

Which brings me to a very interesting website: Church Growth Modelling run by John Hayward of the University of Glamorgan. Hayward has developed several models of church growth, essentially adapted from epidemiology. Christianity here is something that non-believers "catch" from enthusiastic church members, but such enthusiasts do not keep on making new recruits. Their evangelical "infectiousness" declines and they became inactive as recruiters, even while continuing in the church. Hayward builds up several possible layers of the model, as shown in this diagram:

Hayward's model of church renewal

He then runs simulations using different parameters to explore both the short-term and long-term effects of two key factors: the reproduction rate of individual enthusiasts (bringing others into the church who then go on to bring more new members) and also the success of the church at retaining the children of believers to become committed adult members of the church (whether active or inactive). Hayward's models are particularly interesting because they suggest that short-term expansion can sometimes be at the expense of longer-term growth and that sustained long-term growth is very difficult to maintain (although a stable higher size can be maintained for longer). Hayward's models of long-term decline are also revealing: for example he calculates that on present trends the Church of England will be down to around 80,000 members by around 2100.

Hayward's models aren't the only possible way of looking at church growth (and he admits himself that there are some unquantifiable factors that he can't model), but they are very useful for thinking about how churches behave. They're also potentially useful for looking at other religious organisations; I immediately wondered whether a similar model would also explain the rapid growth and then decline/stabilization of new monastic orders in the Middle Ages.

Another paper by Hayward also provides an interesting definition of a strict church (p. 3): "A strict church is one that has a strict entry policy, a policy that prevents a number of people from joining the church who would have otherwise wished to join. Conformity is expressed through the recruitment policy. Thus a strict church will be pure in the sense that people are filtered out by some set criteria."

Hayward's criterion is interesting precisely because it reminds us that a strict church isn't necessarily a conservative one: a church that didn't care what you believed about Biblical inerrancy or evolution as long as you were willing to sell all your goods and give the money to the poor is an extremely strict one. But it does also apply reasonably well to many theologically conservative denominations and churches: if you have to sign up (literally or figuratively) to a detailed doctrinal statement or commit to attending several services a week or to avoid drinking alcohol, that is a deterrent to the less zealous. He goes on to show that under some certain assumptions about how strictness affects the enthusiasm of new members who are accepted, a strict policy may in the long-run be more effective than a more lenient one of letting everyone who wants to join a church do so. (Although a too-strict church may also die out, like the Shakers).

So why don't all churches do more evangelism and hence bring more people in? Is it just lack of belief or liberal wishy-washiness that prevents this? Here, I think there's one arrow missing from Hayward's renewal model (depicted above). Hayward pictures enthusiasts as having either a positive or neutral effect on unbelievers. I think he needs an extra arrow to explore the possibility of negative evangelism. Hayward allows for adults already in the church to leave it and become actively disillusioned with it (his "active reversion"). Such "hardened unbelievers" are temporarily resistant to all conversion attempts. But it's also possible to become hostile to a church/religion that you're not part of as a result of unpleasant contacts with its enthusiasts. Unbelievers can be turned to hardened unbelievers without going "through" the church first.

Such negative evangelism can take many forms. At its extreme, major events like the Catholic church's handling of child abuse scandals or the militancy of some Islamic sects can turn potential converts off entire denominations or the thought of any kind of religion. At the other end, door to door missionaries or just an unpleasant encounter in a church playgroup may make people reluctant to engage with Christians again. I'm not sure how you could quantify the effects of such negative evangelism, but they certainly do exist. I suspect that many people in more liberal churches have experienced such negative evangelism themselves and are therefore wary about too explicitly missionary an outreach.

The other point to make is that Hayward's model, because it's adapted from epidemiology, is a supply-side model; if there's enough of a supply of Christianity, some people will "catch" it. He doesn't model the demand for religion and particular types of religion. There's an interesting assumption shared by both the more conservative Christians and the more 'missionary' atheists, that there is only one real form of Christianity and that is fundamentalism. Any other kind is lukewarm, wishy-washy stuff that appeals to no-one. So if you don't believe literally in the Bible you can't really be a Christian and you're inevitably going to end up as an atheist.

That black and white assumption, however, goes against the whole grain of modern life. People don't just want to have two choices on anything; and as the metaphor of the religious marketplace suggests, religions and denominations are increasingly competing against one another. The evidence that there is no demand for liberal Christianity seems to me very weak. It may only be a niche product, but some people are still going to want it.

And it's possible to see where that niche might fit roughly into Hayward's renewal model. He assumes that the active and inactive believers (in terms of recruitment) are both within the same church or denomination. But the same model would also work if we presume that enthusiasts whose enthusiasm fades or inactive believers who are renewed move between two different type of churches: strict evangelical ones (call them alpha churches) and more lenient and less mission-focused churches (call them beta churches). If moving denominations or churches becomes standard practice (and it's already very common in the US), you are likely to see more of this happen.

I've discussed this idea before, in terms of hard and soft churches, and as commentators then pointed out, there is earlier work on the topic. What's new in Hayward's work is the attempts at quantification, and if I had more time and energy it would be interesting to combine Hayward's model with data on switches between denominations. I suspect this might show that some denominations (such as the US Episcopal Church might survive for longer than expected via influxes of disillusioned Catholics.

I'm less certain about what the future holds for liberal denominations within the UK: it would be perfectly possible for liberal Christianity as whole to survive while some individual denominations effectively disappeared. To an outsider like me, it's not clear whether there's enough distinctiveness between say, URC churches and Methodist ones to keep them both going. The niche for a lenient congregational-based church with a low-church style of worship looks overcrowded at the moment, and there are also new contenders for such markets, such as the Emerging church movement. But if strict churches are going to stay strict, they need the lenient beta churches to absorb the non-zealous or no-longer zealous. Despite the hostility of traditionalists towards liberals (and vice versa) there is real symbiosis between them and we ought to think realistically about that.

Both the last IHR Earlier Middle Ages seminar of 2012 and the first of 2013 were on the Merovingians: first up we had Edward James on "Visualising the Merovingians in nineteenth-century France" and then Étienne Renard from Namur on "From Merovech to Clovis: what can we really know?"

Edward James' talk, as he explained, was really a companion piece to an article he's just published: "The Merovingians from the French Revolution to the Third Republic", Early Medieval Europe 2012 20 (4) 450–471. He started by talking about the changes during the nineteenth century in school history textbooks. There was a noticeable contrast between two of the most popular textbooks during the century. Laure de Saint-Ouen’s Histoire de France depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusquà nos jours (1827) recounts the history of France as series of 71 chapters on kings from Pharamond to Louis XVI. Just over fifty years later, Ernest Lavisse, La première année d’histoire en France: leçons, récits, reflections (1884) (later entitled Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire and reissued up to 1950), after a chapter on Clovis and his baptism, states: ‘The descendants of Clovis were almost all bad kings’ and promptly goes onto the Carolingians.

Such changes were a reaction to the end of the French monarchy (after its restoration between 1814-1848) and also to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and drew on French revolutionary ideas putting the emphasis on histories of peoples rather than kings, and of the Gallo-Roman rather than Germanic roots of France. The latter is still intermittently a live issue: when Pope John Paul I went to Reims to celebrate the supposed anniversary of Clovis' baptism, protestors took to the streets in Paris shouting "Vercingetorix not Clovis."

In this talk, Edward was concentrating on visual evidence, looking at a tradition of French historical painting that he argued was inspired by possibly the "greatest historian of the early nineteenth century", Walter Scott. One of the key figures was Paul Delaroche, described by one contemporary as a "court painter of decapitated monarchs", such as in his famous picture of Lady Jane Grey awaiting execution.

Delaroche's more intimate style, influenced by Dutch genre painting, moved away from an academic style of historical painting that tended to be despised by critics as "arte pompier" (fireman art), because there was normally a man in what looked like a fireman's helmet lurking somewhere in the scene. After 1830, however, there were more serious attempts to use archaeological evidence to get costumes etc correct, while technological advances in printing, such a lithography and steel engraving made illustrated histories more widely available.

The Merovingian scenes that these painters were portraying, meanwhile, were often inspired by Augustin Thierry who wrote a series of articles (‘Nouvelles Lettres sur l’histoire de France: Scènes du sixième siècle’) taking the goriest bits of Gregory of Tours and increasing their luridness. (He also increased the barbarity of the Merovingians by using "Frankish" versions of their names e.g. "Hlodewig" for Clovis and "Hilperik" for Chilperic. (Charlemagne, incidentally, is "Karl-le-Grand").

The result of this mix of archaeology and enthusiastic narrative include paintings such as Laurence Alam-Tadema's The Education of the Children of Clovis where small children practice indoor axe-throwing:

Other artists also painted the Merovingians, such as the illustrations that Jean-Paul Laurens did for Thierry's book, described by Edward as including lots of images of conspirators in dark cellars. There were even pictures of non-existent Merovingian atrocities painted, such as Évariste Luminais' picture of ‘Les énervés de Jumièges’ (also known as "The Sons of Clovis II"), recording a legend that Queen Balthild had two of her rebellious sons hamstrung and left to die on a raft on the Seine.

Edward did point out that there weren't that many nineteenth-century paintings of the Merovingians; topics from the fifteenth to seventeenth century were far more popular. And the urge to do distinctly Merovingian paintings seems to have died out fairly soon: from the late nineteenth century, pictures showing Gallic and Frankish warriors become very hard to distinguish, merging into the general barbarian prototype of Asterix. This perhaps reflected the view, articulated by the historian Fustel de Coulanges, that seeing French history as a battle between the races of Gauls and Franks was unproductive. Instead, French history was seen as developing from a single barbarian phase before being civilised by the Romans and Christianity.

This study of the nineteenth century is part of a larger project by Edward on reactions to the Merovingians from the Carolingian period onwards. But the re-imagining of Merovingian history was already taking place under the Merovingians themselves. Étienne Renard's paper was an attempt to make sense of the information for Frankish kings before Childeric I, without assuming that we can just follow Gregory of Tours' account, given that Gregory was writing more than 100 years later and had no first person information on Childeric's predecessors.

We were given a fairly detailed handout, but Étienne was speaking in French and my knowledge of fifth-century history isn't brilliant, so apologies if what follows is scrambled. Most of the talk was about Chlodio and Merovech. Gregory says that Chlodio was king of the Franks and of very noble family (HF 2-9); we know both from Gregory and Sidonius Appolinaris that Chlodio conquered the Artois region, but according to Sidonius, he was defeated by the Roman emperor Majorian around 445-450. Chlodio was said to come from Dispargum and Étienne argued for this being Duisburg in Brabant, rather than in Thuringia.

One of Étienne's main arguments was an attempt to deduce information on the possible relationship between Merovech and Chlodio from two Merovingian genealogies. These were probably composed under Clothar II in the early seventh century, but survive only in three tenth-century manuscripts. Both include some early names in common: someone who might be Chlodio, his son (called Glodobaud or Chlodobaud), and then Childeric and Chlodoveus (= Clovis). One of the genealogies included three extra names between Chlodobaud and Childeric: Mereveus (= Merovech), Hildebric and Genniodus. Étienne argued these were maternal ancestors: Genniodus was possibly called something like Gennhildis and was Childeric's mother, Hildebric and Merovius are then her father and grandfather. One version of the genealogy had simply omitted these names, while another had attempted to fold them into a father to son list.

It's fair to say that this idea didn't convince the audience overall, but then that included a fair proportion of people (myself included) who tend to see authors of genealogies as quite happy to make things up as they go along rather than trying, however clumsily, to preserve earlier traditions.

Étienne also went on to talk about Childeric, but since by that point both my concentration and his time were running out, all I can add is that he was trying to put together Gregory's account of Childeric being exiled (HF 2-12) with Priscus' account of Attila having a Frankish prince as an ally and Childeric's pagan funeral to argue that Childeric may have stayed at Attila's court for some years. The significance of the burial, including the sacrificed horses, got some discussions going afterwards, especially when Jon Jarrett pointed out that Childeric couldn't have organised his burial himself, so what did this say about Clovis and his attitude to his father? Étienne wondered if there were Thuringian parallels, given that Childeric's wife Basina may have been Thuringian, and added that the nearest parallels for the burial in the period were from Moravia.

We thus ended with an event that we could be reasonably sure happened and can be fairly closely dated, but whose background and significance we're not at all sure of. It's also one marked by seemingly gratuitous violence (at least for the horse-lovers among us), but that had obvious symbolic importance to someone. Somehow that seems to sum up the fate of the entire Merovingian dynasty, doomed to spend the next 1500 years providing grisly material for fantasies.

Sometimes I find the most intriguing seminars in the IHR Earlier Medieval History series aren't the ones on immediately relevant topics, but ones that highlight a concept potentially applicable to many cultures. The next two seminars from the autumn term that I want to blog about both reflect this: Annette Kehnel talking about "Rituals of power through the ages: a history of civilization?" and Sinead O'Sullivan on "The sacred and the obscure: Greek and the Carolingian reception of Martianus Capella".

Annette's very wide-ranging talk was interested in the ritual humiliation of kings and other rulers during inauguration rituals. She started from a C14 source that discusses how the future Duke of Carinthia was dressed in peasant clothing and slapped in the face by a peasant before he could ascend the throne. She also commented on some of the elements of "weakness" displayed in ordines for making Christian emperors, especially the Mainz ordo found in the Romano-German Pontifical. In this, the king is fetched from his bed to the church, which he enters supported by the bishops. He must take off his weapon and lie on the ground before the altar. He is tested with interrogations as to whether he will fulfil his duties as a king. His anointing, while it sanctifies him, also makes him like a child, someone being baptized or someone who is sick. During it he kneels, with ritually bare shoulders; he is then dressed by the bishop. He has to bow to the person crowning him when he is crowned and the crown is literally too heavy for him to support: Annette reckoned the German crown weighed 3.5 kilograms and was so heavy it had to be replaced by a lighter one before the end of the service.

Annette went on to talk other rituals that seemed to includes elements of the same humiliation, such as Gerald of Wales' claim in Topographia Hibernica c 25 that one inauguration rite in Ulster involved the king having sexual intercourse with a white mare and then bathing in a broth made from its body. She also cited some non-European parallels and ended up with an image of the humility/humiliation of Barack Obama:

Barack Obama sitting on the steps of the US Embassy in Paris.

Annette briefly touched on the motivations for such displays: a warning to the ruler himself, an imitation of Christian humility, perhaps psychologically using the charisma of weakness, displaying a power that does not require external symbols of support. Simon Corcoran, afterwards, mentioned the apotropaic effect of averting evil in this way. There was no suggestion that this was an inevitable part of inauguration rituals, but it does sound plausible that such acts were part of the available language of ritual. We probably ought to look to see if there are other examples, even within rituals which overall exalt the powerful.

While Annette's paper roamed widely in time and space, Sinead's was extremely tightly focused, on around 20 manuscripts of Martianus Capella's allegorical work De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Martianus' book is an obscure work, filled with rare words and Greek terms. The eighth and ninth century glossers added more Greek and Sinead was asking the question of the function of Greek in these glosses.

What she showed in a very clear manner for the non-experts among us is that the glossators weren't simply trying to explain the book to a less educated audience. Instead they were sometimes demonstrably trying to make the work more complicated, for example by using additional Greek terms to explain ones already in the text, or by providing "Greek" etymologies for Latin words. Even stranger were examples of hyper-Graecizing, where Greek letters which resembled their Latin counterparts were replaced by more "foreign" looking ones, so that (majuscule) eta was used for epsilon, theta for tau and omega for omicron.

Glossing of this kind, therefore, wasn't strictly necessary. But Sinead argued that it also wasn't being done solely for exotic effect or by scribes trying to show off. Instead, obscurity was being deliberately cultivated to sharpen the readers' wits, to make them think harder about a particular text. She quoted Augustine saying that obscurity was divinely pre-ordained, to stop intellects getting bored. There was a desire to clothe as well as uncover meaning; in the discussion afterwards Alan Thacker pointed out parallels to the pre-Carolingian Anglo-Saxon tradition of the opus geminatum twinned prose and poetical versions of the same text.

Sinead's paper was on a very specialist subject, and yet by making us think about why a particular text was written in the way it was it potentially opens our minds up more widely. It's easy to presume that glosses are always there to simplify, just as inauguration rituals are always there to exalt. Sometimes one of the most useful purposes of a seminar or paper is to remind us of the basic truth that makes history worth studying in all its complexity: "It ain't necessarily so."

I am very slowly working my way through last term's IHR Earlier Medieval Europe seminars, and the next one I want to blog is Marek Jankowiak talking about "Dirhams for slaves: investigating the Slavic slave trade in the tenth century". Jon Jarrett has already written a report on an earlier version of this paper, so I can summarise the argument fairly quickly.

Marek's basic thesis is that in the ninth and tenth centuries, a massive trade in slaves underpinned Europe's economic revival. As he points out, this was a view popular among nineteenth-century historians and more recently eastern European historians, who saw the slave trade as the motor of the economy. More recently Michael McCormick has argued for a large-scale Mediterranean slave trade.

Marek's looking at evidence from the eastern European network, or rather two networks: one going to Umayyad Spain, with Prague as the key centre, plus another network from shifting areas in Gotland, Poland and Estonia to the Caliphate, on which Marek was focusing. One of his key points was trying to show the scale of this trade, deducing this from hoards of silver in the north. As far as I could note it down, his calculations were as follows:

1) He estimated there was around 1 tonne of silver dirhams in the known hoards.

2) Of this silver, around 2.5-5% were imitations: coins produced by the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, who acted as middlemen. Marek argued that these coins were produced solely for this trade, as a way of evening out trade flows: that is, when slaves were brought and there wasn't an immediate buyer, the Khazars/Bulgars minted silver to pay off the northern traders and then waited for the Muslim buyers to come.

3) Marek then used what I think was an argument from die chains in the imitations to argue for the total size of that coinage. He then used this to scale up the total inflow of silver into the north in the tenth-century via this route to 25-50 tons. (This is where my hazy notes meet my limited knowledge of numismatics, so if I misunderstood him, apologies).

4) He assumed that 75% of this inflow was for slaves, arguing essentially, that there wasn't much else worthwhile that the parts of the north he was interested in had to sell. Large fur production sites are visible in the far north, but there's nothing much in Poland, for example.

5) He therefore argued that in the tenth century around 5-10 million dirhams were paid for slaves, and given that around 100 dirhams was the price of a slave in the Bulgar markets, that would mean around 50,000-100,000 slaves sold in the tenth century.

As Marek said, that was probably a figure that erred on the cautious side: even if you added in slaves in the western trade, you're looking at around 1000 slaves a year. He then went onto argue for some of the large number of big hill-forts that appear in tenth-century Poland as being slave camps, places where caravans of slaves being transported could be kept for a night. He also suggested that signs of depopulation between the ninth and tenth centuries in e.g. the western part of Greater Poland might be entire tribes disappearing because they'd been captured and sold.

Jon's discussed some of the archaeological and numismatic problems with this hypothesis. I want to think about a more general question: is a slave trade on this scale likely and could it act as a motor for economic growth? One of the things that the Making of Charlemagne's Europe project is doing is providing a prosopography of everyone in charters from 768-814 and I can already say that there were a hell of a lot of unfree. I'm inputting a charter currently that lists 60 mancipia by name given to Wissembourg and though that's a big list, it's not the biggest there is and the donor is at most from the regional elite. Elipandus of Toledo claimed that Alcuin, as abbot of Tours, controlled 20,000 servi and that doesn't sound implausible.

The problem with the argument for slave-trading as the motor of the Carolingian economy, however, is there isn't much evidence for a large-scale slave trade in the Carolingian world. Even Joachim Henning, talking about a rise in Carolingian period slave shackles, admits that they're not found within the Carolingian empire. In addition, if slave-trading (i.e. selling on of captives to Muslim markets) was the best way to get rich in eighth and ninth-century Francia, you'd expect more discussion of it in the Carolingian sources. (Probably to justify it morally, given the way that Carolingian authors could justify practically anything rich noblemen did).

There is some evidence both for the resettling of "foreign" captives within the bounds of the Carolingian empire and of the normal taking captive of women and children in warfare that John Gillingham has discussed. But as Henning points out, the selling abroad of the western European rural peasant population by the Frankish nobility was exceptional. If we believe Marek, however, it wasn't in Eastern Europe at the same time. Why the difference?

Henning, in "Slavery or freedom? The causes of early medieval Europe’s economic advancement", Early Medieval Europe 12 (2003), 269-277 comments on McCormick's thesis (p. 273):

it is difficult to imagine that landlords of the west would have systematically destroyed their most effective rural production network – the manorial system – by selling their own peasantry into slavery only to buy silk and drugs in southern markets.

In a settled society, the agricultural use of captured slaves and the unfree who might have been "bred" on estates normally makes more economic sense than selling them for luxuries. But there are a few situations where such economic logic may not hold. One is if there is a shortage of agricultural land, so that having extra mouths to feed isn't compensated for by extra productivity. That's possibly the case for at least some parts of Scandinavia.

Secondly is when a short-term influx of money allows you to gain a major competitive edge. North-Eastern Europe at this point is having proto-states form (one of Marek's incidental points was that the Piast state in Poland appears later than previously thought). Is it possible that you've got a situation something like Steve Bassett's FA cup model of small kingdoms violently clashing and being absorbed? In that case it might be worth hoovering up a small tribe or two and selling them off for cash, because one of the things we know that is being bought by people in the eastern borderlands from the Carolingian empire is arms and armour. If you can get money to pay and equip warriors now, that may be a better bet waiting for better harvests six months or even longer down the line from an increased labour supply. Marek's argument that slavery provided the capital for creating northern states may be correct, but that wouldn't necessarily make slave-trading the motor for expansion in the whole of ninth-century Europe.

In some ways the title of this post is misleading: I'm not discussing the reaction of late antique Christian writers to same-sex marriage (there are rare examples of such marriages in Roman times: see Mathew Kuefler, "The marriage revolution in late antiquity: the Theodosian Code and later Roman marriage law", Journal of Family History 32 (2007), p. 363). Instead, what I'm interested in is how the arguments of (some) Christians in Britain today on same-sex marriage are drawing on ideas of marriage developed in the few five centuries of Christianity, rather than directly from the Bible itself, and yet ignoring elements of this "traditional" view that do not suit them.

One of the key arguments repeated in opposition to same-sex marriage is that marriage is intended for the procreation of children and that therefore any relationship in which procreation between the couple is impossible cannot be regarded as marriage. This is often extended in Catholic teaching to the claim that any sexual activity between a couple that is non-procreative is sinful.

However, the Bible says nothing explicitly about contraception (although there have been attempts to claim that the punishment of Onan in Genesis 38: 8-10 shows that all contraceptive acts are wrong). While the Creation account in Genesis 1 has God telling humans to increase and multiply, Genesis 2 has Eve created as Adam's companion and there is no mention of marriage as involving intercourse or bearing children before the Fall.

Overall, however, the Old Testament sees marriage and procreation as good and blessings from God; the New Testament is far more ambivalent towards both. In particular, St Paul's discussions of marriage (the most extensive in the New Testament) have almost nothing to say about procreation: when he says that it is "better to marry than to burn", there's no suggestion that this is only for those willing and able to have children.

The view that sexual activity is only morally acceptable for the procreation of children comes not from the Bible, but from Stoic philosophy, but it was taken up both by early Christian Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and slightly later ones, such as Jerome in the fourth century. As John T. Noonan puts it in Contraception: a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists (Harvard UP, 1965), p. 49: "The statement that the rational use of sexual faculties is a procreative one is not the same as the Old Testament statement that fecundity is highly desirable. The ideas do, however, harmonize".

As discussed in detail both by Noonan and by Peter Brown, The body and society: men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (Columbia UP, 1988), a developed theology of marriage and its purposes, embodied in the works of St Augustine, took place in the late fourth and early fifth century against a background of intellectual challenges from ascetics and sects regarded as heretical. Augustine attempted to assert the good of marriage against opponents who mainly saw it as vastly inferior to virginity and sexual abstention. Some, like Jerome, asserted that the only good thing about marriage was that it generated children who could become virgins. The Manichees, meanwhile, saw procreative sex as particularly evil, generating children who were caught in the body and the darkness of the material world. Some of them, at least, argued for efforts to ensure that any sexual activity was non-procreative. On the other side of the debate were Christian writers such as Jovinian, who saw marriage and virginity as equally good.

As Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser have discussed, this whole debate was also implicitly about authority within the church and within society. Renunciation of sex (specifically male renunciation of the sexual use of women) had become a symbol of the wider self-control that a man in authority needed to have, and a symbol that was particularly promoted by ascetics from a lower social position anxious to prove their moral superiority. This was a challenge to the other obvious claimants to Christian leadership in late antique society, the couple of senatorial social status.

Augustine attempted to steer a middle course, opposing the condemnation of marriage as heretical, but wanting to remain within a tradition that saw virginity as superior. The result was that he produced a distinctly ambivalent defence of marriage which described all sexual pleasure as sinful. It's also typical of his own limits of perspective that he argued that Adam and Eve must have been intended by God to have intercourse in Eden: if Adam had just wanted friendship, a man would have been a more stimulating companion (Brown p. 402).

Tangled up with this was another near-simultaneous debate about the virginity of Mary, discussed in most detail by David G. Hunter, Marriage, celibacy, and heresy in ancient Christianity: the Jovinianist controversy (Oxford UP, 2007). Had Mary remained a virgin while giving birth to Jesus (virginitas in partu), i.e. had God allowed some kind of miraculous painless birth, as various apocryphal Gospels claimed? Had she remained a virgin after giving birth (virginitas post partum), i.e. had she and Joseph been in a permanently celibate marriage? Neither were agreed doctrines in the fourth century. Ambrose of Milan, however, anxious to protect the consecrated virgins of his church from pressure to marry, and seeing Mary as a symbol both of such a virginal life and of the inviolable church, became the most influential supporter of Mary's perpetual virginity during birth and after.

This was the view of Mary that triumphed in the western church. However, it was also important to maintain that Mary and Joseph had been truly married, for obvious reasons. As a result of these debates, the doctrine that Augustine developed about the purposes of marriage sees multiple "goods" in it: offspring (proles), fidelity (fides) and symbolic stability (sacramentum, which didn't yet mean "sacrament" in the Catholic sense). The sacramentum, in the sense of an indissoluble bond, meant that a couple who could not have children together could not divorce so that one might remarry and have children. The procreational good of marriage could be dispensed with. This could be either on grounds of incapacity (the old could marry for mutual companionship) or on grounds of choice (continence in marriage was preferable to intercourse).

Reflecting this view, the medieval church almost always adhered to the view that it was consent, not consummation that made a marriage. The churches' current opposition to same-sex marriage on the basis that the nature of Christian marriage requires the procreation of children turns out to be based on extremely shaky historical and theological foundations.