Blood and Kinship

Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present

Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781782381778, 9780857457493
• eBook ISBN: 9780857457509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

Chapter 1

Agnatio, Cognatio, Consanguinitas

Kinship and Blood in Ancient Rome

Ann-Cathrin Harders

Family Matters

In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, first published in 1934, Edith Wharton takes the reader to the New York of her birth in the 1870s:

My mother, who had a hearty contempt for the tardy discovery of aristocratic genealogies, always said that old New York was composed of Dutch and British middle-class families, and that only four or five could show a pedigree leading back to the aristocracy of their ancestral country. These if I remember rightly, were the Duers, the Livingstons, the Rutherfurds, the de Grasses and the Van Rensselaers (descendants, these latter, of the original Dutch “Patroon”). … My own ancestry, as far as I know, was purely middle class; though my family belonged to the same group as this little aristocratic nucleus I do not think there was any blood-relationship with it. The Schermerhorns, Joneses, Pendletons, on my father’s side, the Stevenses, Ledyards, Rhinelanders on my mother’s, the Gallatins on both, seem all to have belonged to the same prosperous class of merchants, bankers and lawyers.¹

After placing her family in the group of families that came from British colonies other than New York and arrived in Manhattan later than the original Dutch and British settlers, Wharton turns to her great-grandfathers, paternal and maternal. To describe the heart of New York’s society, she looks to family and family matters.² As the protagonists of her novels bitterly must learn, the ramifications of kinship networks placed individuals in a web of social expectations and obligations that they could not escape without facing grave consequences; their own doings and wishes were outweighed by the claims of genealogy and affinity.

Social arbiter Samuel Ward McAllister famously coined the expression “the Four Hundred” to describe the set of fashionable people and families that ruled New York society. Within this illustrious group, rank and distinction were determined by kinship ties. Ab origine families, such as the Duers, Livingstons, and Rutherfurds, set themselves apart as a special group within this elite by rejecting the attempts of newer families, the Whartons among them, to integrate by intermarrying with them and establishing blood relations. The oldest Manhattan aristocracy thus constituted an exclusive nucleus that founded its identity on consanguinity and antiquity.

Very much like the aristocracy of New York’s Gilded Age, the nobility of republican Rome can be described as a “Four Hundred”—not only in numbers, but also in terms of self-regard. Also, like its modern counterpart, the republican Roman nobility used kinship to structure hierarchies within its ranks and marriage to integrate newcomers into the group, or the refusal of marriage to draw firm boundaries. Therefore, when Edith Wharton started her autobiography by referring to her paternal and maternal ancestors, thus distinguishing her agnate from her cognate descent, she was using strategies and speaking in terms that the great biographers of Roman antiquity, Suetonius and Plutarch, would have recognized. The same observation holds true of her references to families whose links through affinity would lead in the next generation to cognate relations. Wharton, in short, unfolded a social map that any Roman could easily have read.³

In republican Rome, kinship not only created family groups, but also helped to constitute the aristocracy and to distinguish that group as one of privilege and rank in the social structure. Affiliation to a specific kinship group allowed a Roman aristocrat to position himself within Roman aristocracy. He could refer to the honor of his ancestors, the prestige of his name, and, of course, he could count on his kinsmen, his clients, and his amici for help during his run for office—the Latin term honor, quite aptly, meant both “honor” and “political office.”⁴ On a macro-level, through belonging to the larger aristocratic “family,” he could assure himself that he was different from the ordinary people, possessed of high-ranking social status, enjoying a spot at, or very near the top, of his society.⁵

Given the social importance of family and kinship, it is surprising that Roman society never settled on definitive concepts of kinship and family, but rather developed several concepts of each. The resulting variety makes it difficult for modern historians to define the Roman family or the larger Roman kinship group. Scholarly debates about the social importance of agnate and cognate relations, or about the outlines of the Roman household, the domus, ramify from these failures of definition. The aim of this chapter is first to discuss the various configurations of kinship in republican and imperial Rome and their social functions, and second, to analyze the significations and functions assigned in these concepts to the idiom of blood.

Agnatio and Cognatio

The Latin language lacks a specific term to distinguish the nuclear family from larger kinship or household groups: usually terms like necessarii and propinqui, literally “those near in relationship,” are used to describe relatives, but there is no differentiation of degrees, of maternal from paternal kin, or of relatives acquired by marriage (adfines) from those related by birth. Equally important, neither the modern concept of the nuclear family nor the modern terms family, famille, famiglia, and Familie directly translate the Latin term familia. Moreover, the precise meaning of the Latin has actually been debated since antiquity. At the beginning of the third century CE, for example, the Roman jurist Ulpian gave no fewer than five definitions of the term, while highlighting the important structures of Roman kinship groups: agnatio and cognatio.

According to Ulpian, familia refers to persons and property both. Freed men (liberti) belonged to the familia of their patron and former master, as did slaves, who were considered property.⁶ Familia, therefore, exceeded the modern understanding of a group of related persons, although Ulpian is very careful also to define familia as a specific kinship group, a body in its own right, defined by an agnatic principle.⁷ The agnatio (group of agnates) was a kin structure defined exclusively by patrilineal descent, which was seen as the core of the larger kinship group, cognatio. In legal terms, the agnatio was described as cognatio legitima or civilis, a subdivision of the cognatio. The cognatio (group of cognates), in contrast, was defined bilaterally and ascribed to natural law.⁸ Though basically defined by patrilineage, agnatic kinship was not, in fact, transmitted via the biological act of procreation. Rather, the status resulted from the application of the legal concepts paterfamilias and patria potestas. Agnates were those who would have been subject to the power of the paterfamilias while he was alive.

There were actually many different ways of entering or leaving a pater’s power, the boundaries of which were determined by the distinction in Roman law between a genitor and a paterfamilias or legal father. The genitor was simply a biological father whose claim to patria potestas was restricted to his children born within the bounds of legal marriage; he had no claim to children born to a concubine or in any other way outside of wedlock. The paterfamilias, in contrast, was a legal status not directly tied to biological fatherhood. It could be granted to a genitor but also to underage boys, or to eunuchs or other men unable to sire children.⁹ The patria potestas of the paterfamilias derived from his position as head of the household or familia; a pater thus exercised power over a broader group of people than a genitor did. Both emancipation and adoption were legal means of transferring potestas from one male to another: in the first case, an emancipated son left the patria potestas of his father and became a pater in his own right and head of his own familia; in the second case, an adoptee entered the familia of the adoptive father and became agnatus to him and to the other persons under his power as paterfamilias.¹⁰ The legal character of kinship by adoption was emphasized by the fact that an adoptee was not considered a cognatus naturalis and therefore could not claim any relation to the wife of the adoptive pater.¹¹ Furthermore, with his “birth” familia an adoptee retained nothing but cognate relations. The situation for wives was different altogether. Motherhood brought a woman only a cognate relationship to her children, unless she had celebrated a special kind of marriage, the so-called conventio in manum. This form of marriage—exceedingly rare in the late republican and imperial eras—brought a wife under the legal control of her husband, the so-called manus, who replaced her biological father as her paterfamilias. Upon legally and ritually leaving the agnatic family unit of her birth, with which she afterward had but a cognate relationship, she became an agnata to her husband and children.¹²

Clearly the constitution of a familia was not based on procreative relations, and the biologically based idea of bilateral filiation was rejected in favor of a complex logic rooted in a legal concept. Why did the Romans make matters so complicated? In part, as I shall indicate below, it is because differentiation between agnatic and cognatic kinship served to constitute the familia as a distinct group and to construct its identity in many ways.

First, the family name was handed down from pater to son. The Roman name system was unique among the societies of antiquity in that it identified the kinship group by a nomen gentile rather than by a patronymicon derive...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One Agnatio, Cognatio, Consanguinitas: Kinship and Blood in Ancient Rome
• Chapter Two The Bilineal Transmission of Blood in Ancient Rome
• Chapter Three Flesh and Blood in Medieval Language about Kinship
• Chapter Four Flesh and Blood in the Treatises on the Arbor Consanguinitatis (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
• Chapter Five Discourses of Blood and Kinship in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile
• Chapter Six The Shed Blood of Christ: From Blood as Metaphor to Blood as Bearer of Identity
• Chapter Seven Descent and Alliance: Cultural Meanings of Blood in the Baroque
• Chapter Eight Kinship, Blood, and the Emergence of the Racial Nation in the French Atlantic World, 1600–1789
• Chapter Nine Class Dimensions of Blood, Kinship, and Race in Brittany, 1780–1880
• Chapter Ten Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Question of “Jewish Blood”
• Chapter Eleven Biosecuritization: The Quest for Synthetic Blood and the Taming of Kinship
• Chapter Twelve Articulating Blood and Kinship in Biomedical Contexts in Contemporary Britain and Malaysia
• Chapter Thirteen From Blood to Genes? Rethinking Consanguinity in the Context of Geneticization
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index