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There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
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Yeah, that was definitely true of the lower classes in my period: they couldn't afford to get married, so the average age of first marriage for domestic servants was late twenties/early thirties. (As you note, the ages and types of marriages for servants did change significantly between 1670 and 1790, and also there was a gradient from north to south.)
For heads of state? War. War, impending war, avoiding war, recently ended war, dictated who married who when. You can see them holding on their daughters until their 20s in order to drag more concessions out of their neighbors during peacetime, and you can see them shipping off their daughter the moment the war is breaking out and they need an alliance too badly to quibble. [Impressionistic, but I read a lot of diplomatic history.]
You also see royal fathers of my period going "Why isn't my teenage daughter pregnant yet! What's wrong with my son-in-law?!" or "What do you mean, my son let a thirteen-year-old girl tell him she didn't want to have sex? Show her who's boss, son! You've got to get this marriage off on the right foot!"
Compleeetely different considerations from the class whose first question had to be "can I afford to have kids?"
Mind you, even among heads of state, there was also the consideration of "Will I be able to find a husband for all my daughters?" and "Will I have to support them forever?" and "If I support them forever, what happens when I die? Will they have an income of their own?" that led even heads of state with large treasuries to want to get their daughters married off asap.
For readers who might not know this--I'm sure you do!--there was even, at least in France, symbolic marriage consummation for children who were too young or if one party was unwilling and the other wasn't going to force it. They would lie side by side in bed, fully dressed, and the sharing of the bed would be witnessed by courtiers and make it more official than if they hadn't done this, but less official than if sex had taken place. (Sometimes the sex was actually witnessed! as with Henri II and Catherine de' Medici in 1533, both 14 years old.)
If the parties were really not on good terms, the bridegroom might just stand beside the bed and touch his leg to hers without fully getting in the bed. Those marriages were even easier to annull than your average marriage.
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So hilariously through most of my period consummation was actually much less important for the "realness" of the marriage. That was something that became more important again after the Reformation, because the Protestants de-sacralized marriage and even though the Catholics didn't, there was a significant knock-on effect that got more intense as time went on, getting into the stuff you're familiar with.
The theological rule for marriage in my period was: you were married if you said you were married in "words of the present tense" (eg "I marry you" or "I do" in response to the "do you"), or if you said you'd GET married in words of the FUTURE tense and then had sex (so yes: boys who got girls to sleep with them on the basis of "I'll totally marry you later" were absolutely dragged in front of canon courts to discover hahaha ACTUALLY, bro, you ARE married now already).
This was a hard line; your only way out of it in terms of "annulled for non-consummation" was in fact if one party (usually the man) had DECEIVED the other party about whether he was CAPABLE of consummating. So eg if a woman found out that her husband was impotent and he'd KNOWN (or should have known) that he was impotent before they married, then the marriage could be annulled.
There were detailed examinations for this by "knowledgeable women of the village". (So a dude couldn't get OUT of a marriage free and clear by lying ABOUT this just because he didn't want to sleep with his wife.) Which yes does in fact mean that there are court cases where as far as we know two or three village matrons took a guy into another room to determine whether or not he could get it up via a handjob in order to determine whether a marriage could be annulled, because the mediaevals are WONDERFUL like that.
On the other hand if he became impotent after the marriage or didn't know or hadn't known, nope!
Otherwise, if you said "I do" and there was no destructive impediment (ie thing that made marriage theologically impossible regardless of anything else), you were married. End of story. The sacrament had been performed, the union was complete in God's eyes, that's it!
The Church had to work for a few centuries to ESTABLISH this, mind, and as I said it fell apart come the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up, or which should have made the marriage impossible AND other FUTURE marriages impossible, but who cares I'm the King (looking at you Eleanor and Henry . . . )whenever they could! But the other flipside was the obsession with the Witnessed Consummation was a later thing that came back in AFTER the Reformation thanks to the effect that Protestant desacralization of marriage had on the entire affair, and attendant theological confusion, especially when countries were switching back and forth on what they were every ten years or so.
Shakespeare's era would have been at the wobbly point in time for this one, but still solidly erring on the side of, even the nobility were mostly reserving their daughters until at least late teenagerhood if not beyond, or if they surrendered them were doing so with retinues and support staff.
And again: outliers definitely happened! But there's a difference as we know bob between the outliers and the norms. (I have some speculation about the changing role of women OVERALL also having an effect on how willing the bride's family were to have younger women in the diplomatic role - there's also a strong indication a lot of the time in my period that they also tended not to be interested in sending the daughter out to the husband until she was old enough to be a USEFUL driver of their dynasty's interests, which a 14 year old is usually not - and vice versa - in a society where politics was less symbolic and much more rooted on individual personalities and talents than it was moving to be later on, but I don't have the transitional knowledge to back that up as my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)
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This is ringing a bell from translating medieval canon law in Latin, thanks for the reminder!
also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up
"After umpteen years of marriage, we just discovered we're too closely related! I need an annulment so I can go marry someone equally closely related who might not be barren!" One historian I was reading recently got snarky about this. Most of them just report it. :P
One party saying they were forced into the marriage was also valid grounds for annulment, at least in the Renaissance and continuing into my period. Usually (impressionistically speaking, I have no stats) this is the woman speaking, but 15th-century Louis XII comes to mind: he wanted a divorce, so he argued that he was married against his will below the age of consent (they were both about 11-14, of course no one knew exactly), and also claimed he'd never consummated the marriage (something his wife contested).
Women obviously had a stronger case, overall, for being made to do things without their consent.
(Which reminds me, in my period, Protestant King Frederick William I asked his local pastors if filial piety meant he could marry his daughter off against her will. They all agreed marriage was a sacrament and required the consent of both parties. His response? "I don't like your answer, so I'm going to do it anyway.")
my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)
See, I agree with this, which is my focus starts when the Wars of Religion are over and everyone is openly fighting over territory and trade! Hence my period begins with the late 17th century. XD
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“and also claimed he'd never consummated the marriage (something his wife contested).”
Right, of course, non-consummation could be used as EVIDENCE of lack of consent, in particular cases! Which often led to lay confusion about what non-consummation meant.