Thanks to a series of unlikely circumstances the very small village of Montaillou in southern France is one of our best guides to how ordinary people lived in Medieval Europe.
I do a lot of fiction critiquing and one of my pet peeves is blatant historical inaccuracy. I don't expect every author to become an expert on the subject--most are just trying to write a fun story and that's fine--but really big blunders make me cringe. This book sounds like a great source for aspiring authors and really fascinating overall. Thank you.
Yes very much true, and slightly disappointing even for authors who like to write for a hobby - by coincidence I'm writing a short story about medieval France in which a primonent character is a virtuous lady tempted by a foreign lover. Maybe the French nobles had better scruples, but reading this it does seem that, if she'd been living around Montaillou, she'd just have slept with the guy (and the stableboy) by page 3.
I would not put too much weight on data coming from an isolated village. Plus mores vary not only by place but even more by class. What was acceptable or even expected of a maid was not of a noblewoman.
Well, granted. But I don't want to ignore the clearest data I have. My general sense is that people overweight their existing beliefs, which creates a pattern of bias. Also don't forget that Béatrice, the noblewoman of the village, also had an affair with the priest.
Probably what I should do is check this against other sources; wasn't Eleanor of Aquitaine supposed to be more restrained?
Hm. You both write that people in the middle ages were much like us and that it was considered normal that all unrelated people who lived in the same house had sex with each other. Does that mean that it is still considered normal that all people who get the idea to form a household together have sex with each other? Or has that aspect of life actually changed?
Secondly, maybe when illiterate medieval peasants get together, this is just what they do. More limited travel and isolated village life meant that venereal diseases were less likely to circulate, and without being able to read your blog, they were probably pretty bored.
Ha ha, well, I often wonder how much more fun sex was before modern entertainment. People certainly seem to have been more obsessed by it before television was invented. I sometimes speculate that this could play a part in the decline of family values starting when modern entertainment arrived. Since sex is one very important asset women control, women lost bargaining power when that asset became less valuable. And as Marcia Guttentag and Jon Birger and such people have shown, when women have bargaining power, they use it to promote family values. Maybe television decreased the power of all those real-life sexy ladies and caused family break-down!
Wait a minute Tove, do women *really* use bargaining power to promote family values? At least in the US, feminism has grown from a fringe movement to a political standard, and only recently has the wave been cresting. During this time feminists have been championing libertine values like no-fault divorce and abortion. I do realize this may be at least somewhat different from what you mean when you write about bargaining power. (I'm not familiar with Guttentag and Birger, but I think you mean "bargaining power" in terms of low numbers of women with respect to men, right?) But women have at least gained power in America over the last 100 years, and they haven't used it to promote family values.
Yes, feminism really promotes much of the opposite of what evolutionary biologists would call "female reproductive interests". And that is intriguing. Why would women want what the opposite of what was evolutionarily beneficial for their ancestresses?
Marcia Guttentag's hypothesis is the only one I have heard about that could solve that contradiction. Guttentag meant that feminism is a kind of emergency reaction to a weak bargaining position due to a greater number of women than men on the market. I think it lies a lot in that. In evolutionary terms, feminism makes much more sense if one puts the sentence (Since men are untrustworthy,...) in front of every feminist demand.
Women's power have indeed increased in certain areas. But I'm not sure that power in the labor market or even in the household is very important for women in an evolutionary sense. Women might have demanded equal power in the labor market because they needed to be in the labor market because men didn't invest enough in their children. Obviously, women have been able to demand many new rights during the last 100 years. But we can't demand that men love us and give us everything they have because they love us so much. Even if that is what we want most of all, we can't demand it. We can just read seedy romance novels about it in secret while we demand the right to compete in the labor market on equal conditions with those men who do not love us enough.
> feminism really promotes much of the opposite of what evolutionary biologists would call "female reproductive interests". And that is intriguing. Why would women want what the opposite of what was evolutionarily beneficial for their ancestresses?
Hate to be "that guy", but one of the basic things to understand about evolution is that we have no direct access to our "evolutionary interests". The slow grind of natural selection shapes instincs and all sorts of mechanisms which, in individuals, drive behaviors. So if we look at the basic evolutionary interest of reproduction, evolution has given us plenty of instincts that push towards that, from sexual desire and lust, to baby fever, to extremely pleasurable sensitivity in our genitals. The basic equation is that individuals with stronger versions of these instincts tended to have more babies throughout the species's past, so all else being equal, the instincts were favored by evolution, and stayed with us. That doesn't mean that we're programmed to want to spread our genes as such! It just means that we happen to like sex a lot, especially with attractive individuals of the appropriate sex. But the same mechanism also gives us the urge to masturbate, and creates the conditions for porn consumption once it becomes available, even if those bring no evolutionary benefit, and waste our energy. And once we understand how sex leads to procreation, the fact that we have a direct urge for sex itself gives us an interest in seeking nonreproductive sex, which has been a thing since antiquity, and probably for as long as humanity has been able to undrestand the link between sex and pregnancy.
So any group of people following agendas that are not exactly aligned with their evolutionary reproductive interests is nothing unusual - in the indirect causal chain that goes from evolution to behavior, there are plenty of chances for other factors to intervene.
In the case of humans, the causal chain gets even more complex, because one of our biggest evolved drives is to learn culture from our peers and mostly follow their lead. So here evolution drives instincts, instincs drive cultural evolution, cultural evolution drives actual culture, and actual culture drives behavior.
Since you give no-fault divorce and abortion as examples... is it really that hard to understand why women would push for these? It's pretty well known that the majority of divorces are initiated by women. Would all these ladies prefer to stay married to a man they no longer like, or might they like to push for a law that lets them walk away from a failed marriage while protecting their economic interests? Same goes for legalizing abortion, which straightforwardly increases the woman's options. Would women prefer to be forced to carry their pregnancies to completion no matter what, or would they rather have a choice not to do so in some relatively rare circumstances?
Of course there will be second order effects, and plenty more to consider. I'm not trying to make a point about whether any of these things are globally good or bad - just responding to your evolutionary puzzlement by saying that 1) evolutionary interests are far from being the only or the most relevant force and work, and 2) women have a straightforward case for wanting these so-called "libertine" rights which directly increase their individual agency.
Yes, you're right, evolution is blind. Men who play computer games with other men in the day and watch pornography in the evening are not doing their genes any service. Still, impulses that made children in history is what spurs them: seeking excitemen together with other men and seeking sexual pleasure used to multiply men's genes. Until it suddenly didn't.
I can easily see why women would want no-fault divorce and abortion rights: It is women who suffer the most from both pregnancy and marriage. On a personal level, I have always found it much stranger why so many women are against abortion and divorce, considering the toll such laws take on unfortunate women.
Reproduction is women's weak spot. It makes us utterly dependent on and vulnerable to men. Somehow, it seems like the strongest always have the upper hand. Without abortion and divorce rights, women get trapped in unwanted childbearing and violent marriages. But with rights to abortion, women get left alone with unintended pregnancies. Men no longer feel as responsible for pregnancies they cause because women have abortion rights. With rights to no-fault divorce, we get a slightly polygynous system where two or more women share the same man (although they usually take turns).
So the puzzle for me, if there is any puzzle, is that Western women have been so successful in obtaining individual agency and so unsuccessful in obtaining male investment. I do believe most women would prefer to have both, but feminism only gave us the first mentioned.
I wrote more about male investment and feminism here:
Btw thanks for the article, I was not at all aware of the history of Montaillou and its discovery. The story of how Occitania's culture was suppressed, starting with Catharism and ending with its own language, needs to be told more.
> Women might have demanded equal power in the labor market because they needed to be in the labor market because men didn't invest enough in their children.
> We can just read seedy romance novels about it in secret while we demand the right to compete in the labor market on equal conditions with those men who do not love us enough.
I feel as though this attitude is somehow the *essence* of Tove. This is something I don't really understand, but I have a very different life experience from you. My personal experience is that passionate love is a male trait - that men usually (though not always) love women more than women love men:
> Marcia Guttentag's hypothesis is the only one I have heard about that could solve that contradiction.
Contradictions are often a sign of a problem in analysis. I think feminism is an expression of instincts that at one time to promoted reproductive success - instincts which are now expressing strangely in the context of a strange culture. For a more thorough explanation, please read "Out Grandmother's Legacy" at https://tinyurl.com/3nm4c6s9 . If you still prefer Guttentag, I will absolutely discuss her ideas, but I love Reynolds. (I'd give more studies by other researchers, but the other studies are more study-like.)
I also think that passionate love is a male trait. For men, love is based on feelings. For women, love is...work. It is the contents of life, more or less. The daily toil. So naturally, women are more prone to initiate divorce because marriage is a lot more work for them than for their husbands.
I read like half of that paper of Tania Reynolds a few months ago. I gave it up because I thought it was just a list of every study that has been done that says that women are indeed competitive. I missed the idea behind it completely. If you tell me what is the point of Reynold's paper, except being a great encyclopedia of studies on the female side evolutionary psychology, I might find the strength to read the other half of it too.
This was really fascinating.
I do a lot of fiction critiquing and one of my pet peeves is blatant historical inaccuracy. I don't expect every author to become an expert on the subject--most are just trying to write a fun story and that's fine--but really big blunders make me cringe. This book sounds like a great source for aspiring authors and really fascinating overall. Thank you.
Yes very much true, and slightly disappointing even for authors who like to write for a hobby - by coincidence I'm writing a short story about medieval France in which a primonent character is a virtuous lady tempted by a foreign lover. Maybe the French nobles had better scruples, but reading this it does seem that, if she'd been living around Montaillou, she'd just have slept with the guy (and the stableboy) by page 3.
I would not put too much weight on data coming from an isolated village. Plus mores vary not only by place but even more by class. What was acceptable or even expected of a maid was not of a noblewoman.
Well, granted. But I don't want to ignore the clearest data I have. My general sense is that people overweight their existing beliefs, which creates a pattern of bias. Also don't forget that Béatrice, the noblewoman of the village, also had an affair with the priest.
Probably what I should do is check this against other sources; wasn't Eleanor of Aquitaine supposed to be more restrained?
I'm sure she was really chaste, during her imprisonment.
Hm. You both write that people in the middle ages were much like us and that it was considered normal that all unrelated people who lived in the same house had sex with each other. Does that mean that it is still considered normal that all people who get the idea to form a household together have sex with each other? Or has that aspect of life actually changed?
Well, I can think of two possible caveats.
The French have long had a reputation for promiscuity. On the other hand, by this map they aren't unusual by European standards: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-promiscuous-countries
Secondly, maybe when illiterate medieval peasants get together, this is just what they do. More limited travel and isolated village life meant that venereal diseases were less likely to circulate, and without being able to read your blog, they were probably pretty bored.
Ha ha, well, I often wonder how much more fun sex was before modern entertainment. People certainly seem to have been more obsessed by it before television was invented. I sometimes speculate that this could play a part in the decline of family values starting when modern entertainment arrived. Since sex is one very important asset women control, women lost bargaining power when that asset became less valuable. And as Marcia Guttentag and Jon Birger and such people have shown, when women have bargaining power, they use it to promote family values. Maybe television decreased the power of all those real-life sexy ladies and caused family break-down!
Wait a minute Tove, do women *really* use bargaining power to promote family values? At least in the US, feminism has grown from a fringe movement to a political standard, and only recently has the wave been cresting. During this time feminists have been championing libertine values like no-fault divorce and abortion. I do realize this may be at least somewhat different from what you mean when you write about bargaining power. (I'm not familiar with Guttentag and Birger, but I think you mean "bargaining power" in terms of low numbers of women with respect to men, right?) But women have at least gained power in America over the last 100 years, and they haven't used it to promote family values.
Yes, feminism really promotes much of the opposite of what evolutionary biologists would call "female reproductive interests". And that is intriguing. Why would women want what the opposite of what was evolutionarily beneficial for their ancestresses?
Marcia Guttentag's hypothesis is the only one I have heard about that could solve that contradiction. Guttentag meant that feminism is a kind of emergency reaction to a weak bargaining position due to a greater number of women than men on the market. I think it lies a lot in that. In evolutionary terms, feminism makes much more sense if one puts the sentence (Since men are untrustworthy,...) in front of every feminist demand.
Women's power have indeed increased in certain areas. But I'm not sure that power in the labor market or even in the household is very important for women in an evolutionary sense. Women might have demanded equal power in the labor market because they needed to be in the labor market because men didn't invest enough in their children. Obviously, women have been able to demand many new rights during the last 100 years. But we can't demand that men love us and give us everything they have because they love us so much. Even if that is what we want most of all, we can't demand it. We can just read seedy romance novels about it in secret while we demand the right to compete in the labor market on equal conditions with those men who do not love us enough.
> feminism really promotes much of the opposite of what evolutionary biologists would call "female reproductive interests". And that is intriguing. Why would women want what the opposite of what was evolutionarily beneficial for their ancestresses?
Hate to be "that guy", but one of the basic things to understand about evolution is that we have no direct access to our "evolutionary interests". The slow grind of natural selection shapes instincs and all sorts of mechanisms which, in individuals, drive behaviors. So if we look at the basic evolutionary interest of reproduction, evolution has given us plenty of instincts that push towards that, from sexual desire and lust, to baby fever, to extremely pleasurable sensitivity in our genitals. The basic equation is that individuals with stronger versions of these instincts tended to have more babies throughout the species's past, so all else being equal, the instincts were favored by evolution, and stayed with us. That doesn't mean that we're programmed to want to spread our genes as such! It just means that we happen to like sex a lot, especially with attractive individuals of the appropriate sex. But the same mechanism also gives us the urge to masturbate, and creates the conditions for porn consumption once it becomes available, even if those bring no evolutionary benefit, and waste our energy. And once we understand how sex leads to procreation, the fact that we have a direct urge for sex itself gives us an interest in seeking nonreproductive sex, which has been a thing since antiquity, and probably for as long as humanity has been able to undrestand the link between sex and pregnancy.
So any group of people following agendas that are not exactly aligned with their evolutionary reproductive interests is nothing unusual - in the indirect causal chain that goes from evolution to behavior, there are plenty of chances for other factors to intervene.
In the case of humans, the causal chain gets even more complex, because one of our biggest evolved drives is to learn culture from our peers and mostly follow their lead. So here evolution drives instincts, instincs drive cultural evolution, cultural evolution drives actual culture, and actual culture drives behavior.
Since you give no-fault divorce and abortion as examples... is it really that hard to understand why women would push for these? It's pretty well known that the majority of divorces are initiated by women. Would all these ladies prefer to stay married to a man they no longer like, or might they like to push for a law that lets them walk away from a failed marriage while protecting their economic interests? Same goes for legalizing abortion, which straightforwardly increases the woman's options. Would women prefer to be forced to carry their pregnancies to completion no matter what, or would they rather have a choice not to do so in some relatively rare circumstances?
Of course there will be second order effects, and plenty more to consider. I'm not trying to make a point about whether any of these things are globally good or bad - just responding to your evolutionary puzzlement by saying that 1) evolutionary interests are far from being the only or the most relevant force and work, and 2) women have a straightforward case for wanting these so-called "libertine" rights which directly increase their individual agency.
Yes, you're right, evolution is blind. Men who play computer games with other men in the day and watch pornography in the evening are not doing their genes any service. Still, impulses that made children in history is what spurs them: seeking excitemen together with other men and seeking sexual pleasure used to multiply men's genes. Until it suddenly didn't.
I can easily see why women would want no-fault divorce and abortion rights: It is women who suffer the most from both pregnancy and marriage. On a personal level, I have always found it much stranger why so many women are against abortion and divorce, considering the toll such laws take on unfortunate women.
Reproduction is women's weak spot. It makes us utterly dependent on and vulnerable to men. Somehow, it seems like the strongest always have the upper hand. Without abortion and divorce rights, women get trapped in unwanted childbearing and violent marriages. But with rights to abortion, women get left alone with unintended pregnancies. Men no longer feel as responsible for pregnancies they cause because women have abortion rights. With rights to no-fault divorce, we get a slightly polygynous system where two or more women share the same man (although they usually take turns).
So the puzzle for me, if there is any puzzle, is that Western women have been so successful in obtaining individual agency and so unsuccessful in obtaining male investment. I do believe most women would prefer to have both, but feminism only gave us the first mentioned.
I wrote more about male investment and feminism here:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/is-feminism-caused-by-a-lack-of-male
Btw thanks for the article, I was not at all aware of the history of Montaillou and its discovery. The story of how Occitania's culture was suppressed, starting with Catharism and ending with its own language, needs to be told more.
> Women might have demanded equal power in the labor market because they needed to be in the labor market because men didn't invest enough in their children.
> We can just read seedy romance novels about it in secret while we demand the right to compete in the labor market on equal conditions with those men who do not love us enough.
I feel as though this attitude is somehow the *essence* of Tove. This is something I don't really understand, but I have a very different life experience from you. My personal experience is that passionate love is a male trait - that men usually (though not always) love women more than women love men:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-resilience/201508/women-initiate-divorce-much-more-men-heres-why
> Marcia Guttentag's hypothesis is the only one I have heard about that could solve that contradiction.
Contradictions are often a sign of a problem in analysis. I think feminism is an expression of instincts that at one time to promoted reproductive success - instincts which are now expressing strangely in the context of a strange culture. For a more thorough explanation, please read "Out Grandmother's Legacy" at https://tinyurl.com/3nm4c6s9 . If you still prefer Guttentag, I will absolutely discuss her ideas, but I love Reynolds. (I'd give more studies by other researchers, but the other studies are more study-like.)
I also think that passionate love is a male trait. For men, love is based on feelings. For women, love is...work. It is the contents of life, more or less. The daily toil. So naturally, women are more prone to initiate divorce because marriage is a lot more work for them than for their husbands.
I read like half of that paper of Tania Reynolds a few months ago. I gave it up because I thought it was just a list of every study that has been done that says that women are indeed competitive. I missed the idea behind it completely. If you tell me what is the point of Reynold's paper, except being a great encyclopedia of studies on the female side evolutionary psychology, I might find the strength to read the other half of it too.