Talk:Flowering

This page is so long because I took a semester on "Medieval Women", and one of the lectures was on the "European Mariage Pattern". Anthropology stuff, comparing standards about what age females marry at in different societies, and at different social strata within societies. Interesting stuff. This varies by region, even within Europe, though there are various explanations for why this occurred. A basic principle is that women often married quite late in medieval Europe: or at least, instead of being married at 13-16, many noblewomen actually married anywhere from 20 to 28 years of age. Given that many people died in their 50's at the time, that's fairly late. In contrast, in the Islamic world, girls generally married as soon as they started menstruating.

The explanation for this difference is that Christian Europe had celibate clergy, while the Islamic world did not. In the Islamic world there was no motivation to postpone marrying off your daughter. The older she got she was less likely to be able to bear children, and if she hit 30 and became outright barren....what then? She couldn't marry and you were stuck with another mouth to feed. In contrast, because Christian Europe had celibate clergy, you always had a fallback option: if your daughter hit 35, still hadn't married, and was barren...you could have her join a convent ("get thee to a nunnery!")  Convents were places for unmarried women of any age who would not have sexual contact with men, or marriage.

So the pattern that developed was "yeah, we could marry off our 15 year old daughter to the first suitor who comes...or, we could wait a few years to see what other potential suitors come along"...then when she's 20, a better match comes along, and they marry. Or, worst case scenario, you waited too long, the potential suitor you hoped for suddenly died in war, and you're stuck with a 35 year old barren daughter....well, there's always sending her to a convent (not the worst thing for noblewomen; a noble family would send money donations to convents, fast-tracking their daughter to a command position, quickly rising to be an abbess herself).

...but conversely, poor aristocrats would jump at the chance to marry off a 13 year old to a prince of France or something.

There was considerable variation, and there's this entire field of research figuring out the patterns in different regions, and more importantly why these patterns existed.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 02:49, June 30, 2014 (UTC)