Incest in Pardon and Marriage - People Fas Harvard

Incest in Pardon and Marriage
are informed.49
(In this sense Christianity casts off the distinction be-
tween nature and culture.)
Moreover, the Fathers' position makes clear how promiscuity gives
rise to incest. One becomes kin to the kin of anyone with whom one
sleeps, whether within marriage (in which case these new kin are "in-
laws") or without. Thus Jacob's Well states that "whan a man hath
medlyd wyth a womman, or a womman wyth a man, neyther may be
wedded to otheres kyn, into the fyfte degre, ne medle wyth hem; for
if thei don, it is incest."50 As J. H. Fowler summarizes the medieval
theologian Rabanus Maurus: "There is something like a communi-
cable disease metaphor involved in early medieval notions of sexu-
ality. If one sleeps with a woman who sleeps with another man who
sleeps with another woman who sleeps with me, then whether I will it
or not my flesh is inextricably bound up with the flesh of that first
man's. A term which continually shows up in these canons and letters
to describe fornication is contugzo carnalis-carnal contagion." 51 Thus
fornication not only leads to venereal disease and to incest through
illegitimacy, it also leads to incest through the secret spread of kinship
by contagion of the flesh. Accordingly, Isabella is the "cousin" of Juliet
(who is Claudio's lover) in ways other than the one she tells Lucio.
In the trial that allowed Henry VIIl to marry Anne Boleyn, the
doctrine of carnal contagion was used against that of the Jewish levi-
rate, according to which a man must marry the childless widow of a
deceased brother (Deut. 25 : 5-6), in order to claim that Henry's mar-
riage to his sister-in-law Catherine was incestuous. If the king's brother
had slept with a woman, it was argued, then she was the king's kin and
his marriage to her was null and void. Had this argument not been
judged successful, the Princess Elizabeth, later the Queen, would have
had to be judged a bastard.
Something like the idea of carnal contagion underlies most notions
of kinship and incest in the West, allowing marital sexual relations to
create kinship, or "in-laws." But by conflating extramarital with mari-
tal sexual intercourse, the Christian doctrine of carnal contagion un-
dermines and transcends the ordinary notion of kinship, which can-
not hypothesize a principle of incest without an absolutely opposite
principle of chaste marriage. Catholic celibates hold the transcendent
position that there can be an incest (literally "non-chastity") beyond
the distinction between chastity and its opposite. In the last analysis,
Measure for Measure, if it can be said to be "about" anything at all, is
about a similarly transcendent position: the perfect reciprocal ex-
change, or end of exchange, where marriage is at once both wholly