Medieval Monogamy

Yes, I continue to be inspired by the same book.  It give brief answers to so many questions about daily life and makes so much sense that it's a little disturbing.  Written by a scholar, it's lain out in a less than scholarly manner (which he states from the beginning as his intent).  There are no attributions, so I almost feel as if I'm cheating as I write these posts.  However, as I've stated before, since I always call my work Fantasy, the idea is to use ideas that seem plausible to make my world feel more real to the reader (and myself).  Truth and reality, as hard as they may be to unearth in the best of times, are not necessarily the goal.

Charles II of Naples and Mary of Hungary, Queen of Naples

"The age difference between man and wife in the most usual style of marriage meant that the home sheltered a young woman of sixteen or eighteen years and an adult male ten or fifteen years older." (Fossier pg 88).  Take a second to let that sink in.  This simple statistic is the confluence of a significant number of social factors which lead to large scale societal responses.
    The first thought that struck me, upon reading that statement, was that most men apparently got married between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-three.  While that doesn't seem like such a stretch in the modern world, most of us think of families getting started much earlier back then (in 1960, the average American man was getting married at 22 and his partner was 20).  It's important to remember, though, that men needed to be able to provide a home for their families.  Remember that post about the implications of there being more men than women?  Ladies were a valuable resource.  Guys needed to establish themselves in the world before parents would consent to the match.
    One structure limiting this economic establishment was the apprenticeship contract.  Learning a craft under a master was a time consuming and laborious proposition.  While the details of the contracts may have varied, based on master or profession, the majority prohibited marriage until the end of the term agreed.  Furthermore, apprentices tended to live in the master's home and make little to nothing in terms of wages.  It was only upon reaching the status of journeyman that a craftsman could afford to think of the fairer sex, and even then he couldn't open his own establishment (in guild controlled areas) until achieving the rank of master.
    While the Church held major sway regarding sexual practice, it's difficult to imagine the average woman holding off until sixteen, but impossible to imagine the average man waiting until after his twenty-sixth birthday.  Surprisingly, the Church's answer to men's quandary (at least in France) was hookers.  "... the medieval Church saw it as the only concession that could be admitted to the tyranny of sex." (pg 90).  Apparently, the church actually ran the bawdy houses, in accord with the local authorities, allowing men to make donations to the church in penance for the sins they committed within.  This is not to say that all prostitutes were Church sponsored, there were streetwalkers and ladies who worked the bathhouses as well.  The point is, to maintain this cultural norm, folks kinda fudged another one.
    Even today, people have difficulty understanding May-September romances.  Either they think that the woman is taking advantage of the rich older man in his dotage or that the man is trying to prove his virility (it's still very rare for the woman to be much older).  Imagine then, how things were long ago, when medicine was not as advanced and the years wore harder on the human frame (think dentistry).  Additionally, as we have seen, these marriages were less likely to be love stories than they were best available options.  Small wonder that adultery was winked at by society.  Who doesn't feel for Lancelot and Guinevere?  Arthur may have been a fine king, but we all get it.
    Using this information in a fictional setting can be a bit dicey.  As I've stated before, it's important to have an idea about the social influences which lead to certain practices so you can figure out how to include what you want in your own.  If you are fascinated by the age differential, then by all means, go ahead.  The concept of young men needing to prove themselves before being wed makes sense in all kinds of worlds, but maybe not if the genders are equal.  How do people view adultery?  Do they joke about it, like Chaucer does in The Miller's Tale?  Will your army provide their own prostitutes for the march, or do they discourage such camp followers, like Joan of Arc did?  Have fun with your world, but be alert to how small changes may have a ripple effect across the entire social dynamic.


Modern Marriage - http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/getting-married-later-is-great-for-college-educated-women/274040/

Pregnancy in Medieval Life

Still reading Fossier's Axe and the Oath, so all quotations, data, or wellsprings in the following posts are from such unless otherwise attributed.  Oh, and the author's source material and statistics are based on Medieval France.



Pregnancy is not traditionally a focal point of a Fantasy story.  Birth may be a popular starting point, with some kind of portend or prophecy foretelling of the little one's destiny, but the mother is rarely the hero (all credit to Mrs. Potter, who may have been the true hero of that particular story).  To be honest, I must admit that I've rarely encountered pregnant characters in any sort of writing, regardless of genre.  Granted, pregnancy does limit one in terms of adventuring, and many women who are the heroes of their stories are rather young (therefor un-wed and perhaps virgins as well) at the beginnings of their stories, but the general lack is surprising since, "...every woman was pregnant every eighteen months, on average, during the course of her marriage, hence a dozen times according to the demographic norms of the age."
    Obviously a woman in her third trimester is not in the best shape to go out slaying dragons, but then again, life hardy ever waits for us to be ready for any form of adventure.  If we do encounter a pregnant woman, they are most often portrayed as hiding those early stages from the world at large (or a clueless Fitzchivalry) before disappearing for the remainder of their term.  Obviously, women have been bearing children under the most difficult of situations since time began.  Women are able to handle much more pain and stress than we give them credit for.  There is no reason why a pregnant woman could not be actively involved in some perilous adventure (plus it'd give an easy method of keeping track of time in the story).  Many modern women still work right up until their due date.  After all, you don't have to be swinging an axe to have an adventure (though I can think of a few pregnant women I've know that I wouldn't hand an axe to for fear of my life).
    Those women in stories who are spoiling for adventure, or just aren't interested in conceiving, seem to regularly imbibe contraceptive draughts in Fantasy stories these days.  While there is plenty of historical evidence for concoctions intended to prevent (or abort) pregnancy, most Fantasy writing doesn't seem to provide a reason for the secrecy that they continue to impose on this practice in their Fantasy wolds.  Christian tradition has a couple passages that the Church has used to construct its dogma against contraception, but why impose it upon your world?  Granted, there are plenty of reasons that a religion might want to discourage its adherents from limiting their reproduction.  Another reason for contraception is the stigma of a child being born out of wedlock.  Again, not necessarily a thing in your world.  Once you remove Christian influences in your setting, many social "norms" become superfluous (unless you reintroduce them intentionally).  Maybe a female military would be supplied with contraceptive potions as part of their standard kit.  You could put wise-women on the main street next to that stuffy old apothecary.  Feel free to remove any stigma if it serves no purpose in your world.
    Ladies in courtly stories seem to always be either youthful and unmarried or well past their child-bearing years.  Where are the ladies in their prime?  While they may be "indisposed" during difficult pregnancies, or during the final few days, most women can, and do take full part in life/work right up until the end of their pregnancies.  There is no reason to exclude them just because of their swelling midriffs.  Furthermore, a female protagonist who is, or becomes, pregnant during the course of a novel could create a "ticking clock" situation in which whatever task she needs to accomplish would become more and more difficult as time goes on and her condition becomes increasingly more (eh?) cumbersome...
    Final thoughts, for the day, connects to the idea that with a married woman being pregnant every eighteen months (take into account that you can't conceive while you breast-feed), there was really very little time that she wasn't expecting or had a little one at the breast.  The rich might employ wet nurses for infants and nannies for the older children, but most women would have a full range of children that needed to be cared for (depending upon the depredations of illness), much like the Stark family or the Brady Bunch (though both of these examples had servants to help them).  Women in poorer families would be working all the while, perhaps with children underfoot, to make ends meet.  Pregnancy was a matter of course for these women.  It was no extraordinary circumstance.  Children were an increase of the family fortune, by way of a little pair of hands, ready to be put to work as soon as possible.  Make sure that moms are an important part of your world.

Some intriguing numbers from the time:
average 12 pregnancies per married woman
25-35% children were stillborn
20% of the dead in cemeteries are children, aged 7 and younger
4.5-6.5 children per household survive into adulthood

Balance and Disruption

I picked up a copy of The Axe and the Oath, by Robert Fossier, a week or so ago and am really enjoying the style.  It is so dense in material that I found myself going at it with a pen and marking it up (yes kids, this is another joy of owning a paper copy, marginalia).  Reading this book properly is going to take some time.

http://www.turismo.intoscana.it/allthingstuscany/tuscanyarts/cassone/

Some of my earliest posts are related to natural resources, where they occur, and the implications regarding their presence or absence in a Fantasy world.  Works of Fantasy and Science Fiction have done this fairly frequently: desert worlds, ocean worlds, realms of endless night, and so on.  Taking a commonly used resource and figuring out a workaround, as well as its societal implications, is an engaging exercise.  However, we need not be so extreme in our applications.  A simple unbalancing of the norm is all that you need to have a significant impact.
    In my recent reading, I encountered the statement, "Among adults... the female sex seems to have been in the minority, particularly in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, at a ratio of eighty to ninety females for every one hundred males." (Fossier).  He goes on to say that it is this imbalance which created a market (in a manner of speaking) for ladies that had men hunting the hedgerow country for them, or doing battle in tourneys for their hands.  Older widowers would have to wait in line behind the younger men (unless they were rich, of course), which makes me think of Fiddler on the Roof (damn, now that song is going through my head).  Anyway, we see how a slight market imbalance can lead to all sorts of societal implications.
    I can hear many of you thinking, "What about the  dowry?"  Well, that practice doesn't really mean what you think it means (or at least what I thought it meant).  First of all, in some cultures there is the complementary institution of the bride-price (where the prospective husbands put up the cash instead of, or in addition to, the dowry).  Secondly, the dowry was intended to act as support for the wife and children, and was actively managed by the women of early India.  In some cultures the dowry was expected to be held in trust, in case of divorce.  In others, it was intended as an emergency fund.  While the dowry may have been employed at times to buy a rich trader's way into the aristocracy, or to make one's daughter more attractive to suitors, it was not always thus.
    Anyway, while we shouldn't think of women as a commodity, their relative lack in a society creates a significant effect throughout the community.  The modern man will happily make a complete ass of himself for the woman he desires, now imagine if there were that much more competition!  The "distinguished old bachelor" starts to become a more reasonable choice when you think of the consequences of this shift.  Ladies would have much more control over this system as their "value" rose.  Mistreatment and abuse would decrease.  They would gain an increased political and economic voice.  This did, in fact, happen in certain areas during the Hundred Years War.  Unfortunately, as the ratios balanced back out things went back to normal.
    One clever approach to the a reversal of this idea is covered in the Chanur Saga, by  C. J. Cherryh.  The Hani are a feline people, with a culture extrapolated from the social workings of lions.  In a clan, there are females, children, and one adult male (the "Lord").  The male is big and powerful, having to fight off rivals for clan leadership, but the ladies do almost all of the work (both physical and mental).  Over time, the males have essentially bred for size and aggressiveness, while the ladies are smaller and tend to be more intelligent (though we find that this may be more a function of nurture and nature).
    Humans might not fall into such leonine patterns, but what would the fallout be?  Would human men just become bigger assholes (from a historically repressive perspective) if there were truly "two girls for every boy"?  If the ratio really started to skew to making women more dear, where there was one women for every ten men, would we become more like bees with their queen?  Hmmm I seem to have gone over some of this in the Creature Culture posts, but thinking about how nature has already put us through some of these societal stresses really fires my imagination.  
    As Fossier tells us (see the intro), the lack of women had a variety of social implications.  Some men had to quite literally go searching for a mate, not some specific woman, but to find any available woman.  Women were promised in marriage much younger than they had been, even before child-bearing age.  Even spinsters (yup, I did a post on that too) had significant economic value for their families.  This unbalancing of the genders set men on the move and improved the lot of the ladies in both social and economic realms.
    While gender balance has been the focus of this post (and I still don't view women as possessions, promise), this line of thinking can be widely applied in your world building.  If steel is rare, smiths are revered and snake-men will pillage for it (see: "Conan the Barbarian").  When wood is scarce, you find another fuel for the fire (peat, dung, what have you).  Things do not need to be completely lacking in order to have a societal impact.  Conversely, some things are valuable to us because they are so rare.  After living in Brazil for a little while, where avocados were free and available on the tree outside, their price in PA is really galling.  In Brazil, it seemed like the old ladies always knew which ones were perfectly ripe and ready to be plucked.  Old ladies in Czech know where to find the best mushrooms in the forest.  Have you seen the prices for morels, much less truffles?  Yeah, sorry, it's lunch time.
    Anywho, add some imbalances to your peoples to make things interesting.  Maybe your female-poor folks become raiders who carry off their female victims.  Slavery is not an original American idea, perhaps there is a trade if balances in only one of your planet's cultures are significantly skewed.  Maybe your abundance of women rise to dominate the economic and political scene, while the men become pampered dandies.  Perhaps your slight abundance of women simply encourages more to take up arms and defend the homeland.  It's your world, I'm just sharing my take on the available tools.  Enjoy.


Dowry Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
Dowry in India - http://www.hitxp.com/articles/history/origin-dowry-system-bride-woman-india-british/

Information and Communication

http://users.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/florilegium/popfabr04.html

The selection your news outlet is an important process in this modern era.  Websites and television channels offering their version of the truth seem endless.  The time in which we live has been referred to at times as "The Information Age."  Sources are differentiated by having different topical focuses or political slants.  Some consumers focus on one primary outlet for their information, while others go to specialized outlets for individual topics of interest.  In devising a Fantasy world, the topic of information dissemination leads us to a number of questions with significant implications.  

    With all of the information available to us today, most people consider themselves relatively savvy consumers.  However, most of us don't regularly research the politics of both sides on an issue or visit multiple sources to fact-check.  We go with sources we trust.  For many people, they still trust what their preacher tells them from the pulpit every Sunday, which has a long tradition.  Others will listen to the statements made directly by the government (town crier or media rep) for political movements and changes in the world.  Some prefer to listen to those who have seen situations firsthand (tv personalities and editorial writers, or travelling merchants and tinkers) who share their experiences in anecdotal form.  Then there are those who enjoy rumor and gossip, which is available from pretty much all of the sources at some time or another, if you catch them in the right mood.   

    Information sources are naturally less reliable in a Fantasy setting (even Tolkein's palantir could mislead the user) than we are use to.  Eyewitness accounts are notoriously untrustworthy, even when the viewer has the best intentions at heart.  Written messages can be easily lost, damaged, delayed, or faked (though this can necessitate the fun of seal making).  Authoritative texts did not (well, some today still don't) have the peer review process that modern scholarship requires, plus mistakes could have been made in the scribing porcess, or in subsequent copying.  All of these problems may arise when seeking after knowledge, assuming that the information is even there to be found.  In an interesting twist, those absorbing the information might recognize the information as false, or misleading, and use that knowledge to their advantage.

    We are all concerned about the validity of the information we receive and establish a kind of relationship with the mouthpiece who delivers it (the somewhat recent flap over Brian Williams is a fine example of the perceived betrayal of that trust).  While it may be more difficult in a Fantasy setting to prove that information is false or misleading (intentionally or not), the breaking of trust is that much more significant.  Giving your word seems like a cute relic of the past, but it was extremely significant to our forebears for the simple reason that important decisions often had to be made on very limited information.  Consequently, being caught in a lie or breaking your word in a world that relies so heavily on hearsay could have a serious impact on both social and business relationships.  

    In a Fantasy world, knowing who to trust is one of the most important factors in survival (see: GoT).  In many adventuring stories, your characters will be outsiders.  Without someone to vouch for them, they will quite naturally be viewed with mistrust and apprehension (doubly so if they are carrying weapons).  It may serve you best to send them off in disguise to gain the trust of the populace, but they should beware of being found out and destroying that fragile bond.  Knowing who to go to for good information and who to ignore as untrustworthy are complementary skills.  Sifting widely circulated rumors for truth may be the most valuable skill of all.  

    Misleading your characters though lies and half-truths is a time-tested plot device.  Is it the aged councilor (who secretly needs money to keep his ailing wife in healing draughts), or the back alley foot-pad out to save his own skin who is telling you the truth?  There is the old 'misunderstood prophecy' route, which Star Wars beat us over the head with.  The turn-coat in your midst out for personal gain also has a strong presence in the genre (as well as Shakespeare).  When information is so scanty, it is hard to know who to trust.  The gullible and the openhearted may be ripe for the picking.  Perhaps only the keen-eyed and the cynical would survive in a time like that.  However, they may also miss out on opportunities that the believers would jump at.  Playing with that dynamic within a party of travelers can be a fun opportunity for character development.

Collecting

http://www.museumofthecity.org/city-market-places/

    I was just getting my hair cut this morning, and had a conversation with my hairdresser about, not exactly comics, but the superhero industry.  It's odd to live in a time where comics can not only be adult, but cool as well.  To be candid, I haven't collected comics for some time.  When I was a kid I subscribed to The Avengers (the Black Knight, Wasp, Hercules, and others line-up.  Yeah, not really a classic period).  Luckily, one of my brothers had one to The Uncanny X-Men, so I got to read those too, if I asked nicely.
    As I got older, my tastes changed a bit, and I moved away from superheroes.  Comics seemed to grow up with me as the subject matter got "grittier" and more sexual, though for a while they were really going over the top, especially the independent ones (not one I collected, but did you ever read "Faust"? Jeez).        
    The other day I was regaling my girlfriend with tales of comic collecting in the late '80s-'90s.  I gave her some light history of the major players and the independent comic scene.  "The Comics Code," was something she'd never heard of (if you're in the same boat, go read The Ten-Cent Plague).  Part of the fun at the time was 'the hunt' for back-issues to fill in the gaps (graphic novel collections are a relatively new phenomenon).
    The more you got into it, the more you wanted to learn about you favorite characters' history, their origin (not the re-boots or flash-backs they did from time to time, but the original stuff).  Marvel stuff went back something like 20 years or more, at the time, depending on the title and they hadn't really done much in the way of reprints.  To seek out those back-issues, you got to know all of the shops in the region.  When I was a kid, there were at least 8-10 within easy driving distance of my folks' place.  After a little while though, you knew most of their stock and had to move on to other resources.
    Regional cons came through a couple times a year, bringing in new retailers and the talent behind the books.  This was the place to fill in those gaps and to build the value of your collection, getting the signatures of those men (to my recollection, not really any ladies doing it when I was a kid) who created those prized works.  Here was where you met the most devoted collectors, who could find what you wanted, but here was also where you would likely pay top dollar.  They knew the value of what they had, and while they were willing to deal, I'm sure they could read the hunger in my young eyes.
    As I got older and began to travel more, I'd make stops in the local comic shops.  You dip your toes into new pools and new worlds open up.  Those impossible to find couple of issues I'd lacked for years might be sitting right there, waiting for me.  Titles I'd never heard of blew me away.  Around this time, the internet had made its presence felt, and you could find pretty much anything you wanted for a price.  The trouble was that you were never sure about the quality.  Collectors know the difference in value between Fine and Mint, even if you mostly care about the story, you don't want to overpay.
    Today there are many more assurances when purchasing online, but this post is not about e-commerce, it is about collecting.  My experience as a comic-book collector mirrors that of collectors of all sorts throughout history.  Someone discovers something wonderful and new in a local shop and becomes an enthusiast.  They might move on to a seasonal market, seeking the best that region has to offer.  There, they make contacts to further their passion.  Perhaps they seek out older and rarer expressions of their passion.  Maybe they delve into the means of production or of distribution.  Perhaps they convince the travelling merchants to acquire something for them in a distant land.  They may travel themselves to acquire this thing, or see where it is made.  Who knows where this ends?
    Our passions can lead us on many adventures.  That, after all, is the point of this blog.  At one time, passionate comic collectors were much like rare book collectors, wine enthusiasts, stamp collectors, and so on.  Scouring dusty cardboard boxes filled with the mylar bagged ephemera of some other geek's hocked adolescence is a treasure hunt to a comic fan.  We live for that moment of discovery.
    The unbridled passion of the collector is central to the plot of The Maltese Falcon and numerous other works.  Why we collect what we do can have many sources.  Some love the connection to the past (their childhood, or further), or to distant lands.  For others, the goal is merely to acquire an object of beauty to appreciate.  Old books may provide insight into the how things have changed, both in the way people think and how the text itself may have developed over time.  Whatever the reason, collecting creates an odd community of passionate individuals with great stories.  Tell one. 


Do you have any great collecting stories?  How far have you gone to acquire that thing which would "complete" your collection?

Reference I Love (VI): Booze

http://www.theworldwidewine.com/Wine_articles/Wine_parties.php

One of the most intense pleasures I get while writing is doing the detail work.  Story and character are, naturally, of prime importance, but (as you can see from this blog) I love creating the world around them.  History has long been a passion, and while Fantasy is not strictly history its application can add a sense of grounding even when you throw in some really batty shit.  In an effort to keep enhancing my abilities to tell a compelling story, I keep my reading broad.  Most recently, I've been reading George Saintsbury's Notes On A Cellar-Book (1920).  I couldn't care less about which vintages he preferred, it's the detail that surrounds which catches my imagination.
  The role of the wine merchant and the importer were the first elements which caught my eye.  Not only dealing in individual bottles or cases for private consumption, these guys were handling casks and tuns.  The author recounts the names of a few reputable men who would never lead him wrong and the importers they preferred (though he suggests that extreme brand loyalty may have been somewhat unnecessary).  The quality and availability of the product these men were selling were a significant issues.  Wars and other more mundane logistical concerns hindered or shifted the trade in, or preference for, all kinds of goods.  In a time when hosting a fine dinner was a significant social requirement, having the right procurer was vital.
    How the author tastes is much more interesting than what he tastes.  Because the author tends to buy in larger volumes (talking of purchasing bottles of wine by the dozens), he approaches alcohol rather differently than most.  He preaches patience with certain wines and speaks of others as though they are sprinters, who flag over the long run.  He can make these assessments because he laid down a couple dozens and tasted them over the years.  With Scotch he recommends keeping a 10-14 gallon solera, blending in the new with the quality old stuff to create a more unified experience while simultaneously barrel-ageing it (a practice he replicated with various spirits in different quantities over the years).  He would also experiment with blending (bottled) single malt scotches from different distilleries at home, on a glass by glass basis.  Thinking of glasses, there is an entire chapter devoted to glassware.  Apparently, he quite literally put his money where his mouth was (referring more to the booze than the glassware).
    In many chapters, the author discusses overarching changes in tastes regarding alcohols.  Sweet champagne was the rule at one time, as opposed to the preponderance of modern bruts.  Scotches used to be darker and sweeter from being aged in sherry or madeira casks, the new ones were lighter and drier. Changing tastes also move from drinking Scotch in toddy form to whisky and soda.  Rums were traditionally darker and more tar-like.  Naturally, tastes continue to evolve, but it is fascinating to imagine the historic palate.  Did they crave sweeter alcohols because sugar was harder to come by?
    One of the real pleasures in reading old books is in divining the full implication of a statement.  Following a series of comments on American whiskeys, the author notes, "That they are or were generally drunk 'neat' is, I believe, the fact; and if any rational comparison of the state of America and England in regard to alcoholic liquor were made, this fact would have to be taken into 'high consideration.'"  Obviously the author does not hold American whiskey in high esteem (he had stated previously that it was only good for drinking straight, and not at all in other combinations).  Using this method of consumption as a basis for comparison may be implying that he felt Americans did not have a refined palate.  Potentially it related back to the Prohibitionist movement (which he makes frequent comment on), especially in America, suggesting that Americans abuse alcohol more often (encouraging the Prohibitionists).  Finally, his disdain for Americans taking their whiskey 'neat' suggests rather strongly that he rarely did likewise, which is rather interesting when considering that he spent many years living in Scotland.
    I could go on and on about all of this (I have done a fair amount of trimming to this post, believe it or not). His musings include a fair number of recipes for toddys, flips, and other concoctions which tantalize the reader (I admit, I tried a Scotch and milk last night).  There is a chapter about how to arrange your cellar wherein he discusses some of his residences through the years.  When you take your time working through a book of this nature, it can lead to research in all kinds of directions.  Granted, to get to all of the 'good stuff,' you must wade through his masses of literary allusion and staunch opinions, but he obviously had fun assembling this work.  If nothing else, skip to the end where he lists some choice menus.  Imagine taking part in some of the grand dinners and their associated libations.  GRRM, eat your heart out.