5 degeneration is clear, and persisted within the Church of Rome throughout the Middle Ages.7 It was confirmed in the Decree Concerning Original Sin of the Council of Trent in 1546 when anathema was declared against those who deny that the transgression of Adam transfused not only death and pain of the body but sin also (Waterworth, 22).
In the sixteenth century, as a result of the contact of explorers with ―primitive‖ peoples, an explanation had to be drawn from familiar sources to account for the strangeness of this newly-discovered Other. In Margaret Hodgen‘s words,
the theory of degeneration of savagery was a corollary of that even gloomier and more inclusive doctrine by which the condition of all men everywhere, uncivil or civil, was regarded as the outcome of corruption [...] inferences from the ancient and medieval belief, still viable in the Renaissance, that the world and man were subject to inevitable and progressive decay. The savage was only a little more corrupt that anybody else. (Hodgen 378)
A theory of degeneration was thus here used to articulate interracial relations long before it was used to assert the superiority of Western Europeans as a pretext for slavery. The idea of degeneration was pervasive. In England in the early seventeenth century Lord Bacon argued for his inductive accumulation of scientific knowledge on the grounds that it would help to restore Man to the perfect knowledge he had degeneration [...] throughout the Middle Ages: for fear of decay, decline and degeneration before the Enlightenment see Swart chapter 1. 7