"Do you know any 12 year olds that got married? I do. Guess what, they're still married." :epstein:
Back on :reddit-logo: I remember getting the H I S T O R I C A L A C C U R A C Y defense for that. One of them even said "you're saying my own ancestors were pedophiles."
:yes:
The funniest part is that's not even historically accurate, at least for the most part. There weren't always formal laws, and obviously abuse and predation happened, but for the most part puberty happened later and for both commoners and nobility marriage (or at least the actual consummation of marriage) happened later, in the late teens or early 20s. Even where you have some aristocratic arranged marriage that's happening at 12, usually the married couple would be prevented from cohabitating or having unsupervised contact by their families. Obviously that wasn't always the case, but it was the standard because peasants needed their adult children to stick around the farm and do work into their 20s, and even aristocrats as depraved as they were had access to institutional knowledge that early pregnancies were very, very bad and not worth the risks.
The mainstreaming of noncery came with the industrial and agricultural revolutions as puberty began happening earlier and the social structures that previously prevented (or at least cut down on) men preying on young girls were dissolved by the needs of industrial Capital. It's pretty much just a phenomenon of the 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, with some exceptions.
Any sources on the puberty hitting earlier thing? It's just the first I've heard of it and wanna see what the deal is. I'm guessing dietary stuff but yeah.
This is just summarizing a bunch of disparate things I've read or heard, but yeah it's malnutrition related.
Was there like...archeological evidence? Known if this was a specific to medieval europe or if royalty hit puberty earlier due to better nutrition etc? I gotta go to bed but it feels a bit off...
It probably involved that, but also just historical documentation, spotty as that may be. I think it was specific to Europe too, yeah.
Had a brief look into it and it'd soooorta true. Women started menstruating a couple years later on average but all other aspects of puberty were the same timeline as modern age.
Edit: this seems to have a large class component cause girls worked harder and contracted diseases and the less nutrition angle, since this is also based mostly on skeletal data, probably the fact that it was mostly the poor people that feel into bogs and got preserved and are generally the data set for skeletal studies from this time cause ones put in tombs and shit tended not to last as long and those guys wrote down their lives anyway. It would be even hard to guarantee that this was even the average among the poorer people or just the average amongst the ones that died in places that skeletal evidence could be found. So I'd say, not UN true but I'd wouldn't call it universal in any way. Based on how the data was gathered a very specific set of evidence was generalized and blown up into a pop science generalization.