Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Did you notice the bit in my post where I said lots of those children died?
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I have a teaching credential in history and passed my 3 hr. final exam in the 97th percentile and I say your post was historically ignorant because it was.
Yes, I noticed it but that was not the point of your post at all which was "From an economic standpoint, it's interesting how a modern, middle class person can look at having children as an economic catastrophe,
where as a medieval peasant could afford to keep pushing out children (all be it with only half of them surviving to adulthood)."
The highlighted is merely an acknowledgment that many children died but it does not change what your main point was: it wasn't an economic hardship on women to keep having children. That is patently false.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Also, do you have a non-****** article backing up your claim? That is a blog post, by somebody saying they did some research as an undergraduate 46 years ago that indicated nutrition in some parts of the middle ages wasn't great. Was there not an old geocities site you could link to?
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Despite your attempt to discredit my source as a 'blog',
the writer was referring to his senior thesis. You know, that thing a graduating senior has to write and present to professors as evidence of their mastery of their major.
Do you think malnutrition in the MIddle Ages has changed in the last 46 years? As the author included in his 'blog', he "was particularly interested in a recent study of bones from medieval London (National Geographic, Feb 2016, p. 97):
Quote:
Isotope and bone analysis from a collection of 14th- and 15-th century skeletons unearthed during an excavation at Charterhouse Square paint a harrowing picture of life in medieval London. Many showed signs of malnutrition, and one in six suffered from rickets. Severe dental problems and tooth abscesses were also common, as was a high rate of back injuries and muscle strains from heavy labor. People from the later period in the 1400s, had disturbingly high rates of upper body injuries, possibly consistent with violent altercations that resulted from a breakdown in law and order in the wake of the plague.
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This backs up exactly what I said.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Typical numbers for infant mortality would have been something like 20% back then. Children not making it past their first birthday was not a significant barrier to larger families than we have today.
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The size of families was not determined by infant deaths alone but by all child deaths which was about 50%:
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"Many researchers have independently studied mortality rates for children in the past: in different societies, locations, and historical periods. The average across a large number of historical studies suggests that in the past around one-quarter of infants died in their first year of life and around half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty."
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https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
AND
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Estimates of infant and child mortality are often elusive in the Middle Ages. When they are available, they range from 30% to 50% of births, depending on the context and the socio-economic circumstances of families. Fertility patterns are even more difficult to ascertain. What is clear, however, is that both rates varied depending on a number of factors. Of these, wealth was the most important since it directly impacted the ability of individuals to properly feed their children and to have access to health practitioners. This, in turn, largely determined their fertility and life expectancy.
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https://www.medievalists.net/2021/06...sant-families/
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
The whole thing varies around hugely depending on what period you are talking about. During the black death? During a famine? During the mini-ice age? Very clearly they must have had significantly larger families than we have today, because civilisation survived the middle ages. Your average medieval family had above replacement rates of children surviving into adulthood. Given that, they were clearly having at least 4 or 5 children per family. So, we go back to the issue that today middle class people are not having children because they can not afford it, but in medieval Europe peasants were having lots of children.
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False:
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...although it is true that death did take a dramatic toll on medieval children, families were, from the beginning of the medieval era, smaller than we had once thought.
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Quote:
In rural England, between the twelfth century and the Black Death, the average number of children who survived infancy in poor families was slightly below two. This average improved to over two surviving children in landowning peasant families, and climbed to as high as five among the wealthiest noble households. The situation was similar in the southern French diocese of Maguelone in the late Middle Ages, where peasant families had on average two living children at the time they made their wills, while wealthy families counted an average of three.
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Quote:
In the rural areas of the diocese of Maguelone, Languedoc, between c. 1325 and the outbreak of the first plague epidemic, testators had on average 2.8 live children. Between 1350 and 1375, the average dropped to 1.9 and continued to decrease, reaching a low of 1.4 children per testator between 1400 and 1424. Fortunately, families soon began to expand, as Western European sources suggest that there was a “baby boom” in the fifteenth century. The threshold for population renewal (two children per couple) was thus reached by the mid-fifteenth century.
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So, not the large families you claim.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Look, we don't all have access to the rememberings of undergraduates from 46 years ago. Somehow I had missed that guys wordpress blog. Through the midwit haze that your post fogs up the facts with, there is certainly truth that the social environment was different in the middle ages.
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Again, your attempt to dismiss my source fails. As does your ad hominem. I'd say my facts are backed up with....facts. Yours are not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Your version of it is simplistic, but attitudes to sex, and children, and the "good life" were different.
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LOL! Speaking of a 'midwit haze' what the hell does that have to do with your claim that people 'pushed out children' like crazy and didn't find it an economic burden?
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
The root difference between then and now in terms of how many children people are having is the society, and it's beliefs and incentives. You list some of the steps that society took that clearly encouraged children in the middle ages, today we incentivise very different behaviours that encourage people to delay having children, or not have them at all. Today we live in a society that prioritises the individual, so even though people aren't going to starve they feel they don't have enough money to have children. In the middle ages peoples lives were much more marginal, but they had lots of children.
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OMG. The list I provided weren't 'encouragements' to have children!
They are what prevented women from having control over their own bodies!
Women
never wanted to be breeding machines but that was the major role society...controlled by MEN...gave them because it wasn't MEN who were dying from pregnancy, in childbirth or from post partum infections. Childbirth was the leading cause of death in women in the middle ages.
Today we give women
choices...or at least we did until this latest SC debacle. Historically, women had very little control over anything in their lives because they were legally the property of men in their lives. Hell,
rape was seen as a property crime against a woman's husband or father.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Can we knock off the throwing sass at one another, and just talk about the issues in the thread?
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I said your post was
historically ignorant...as in uninformed. I didn't say stupid. It was you who chose to use the term "midwit" toward me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shuttlt
(Post 13846938)
Now we've thrown sass at one another, can we just argue about the topic please? I've read plenty of history. Maybe I interpret it differently to you? Any errors I make are not for lack of a general knowledge of the past.
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AS the saying goes: you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Your post was, and is, historically incorrect.
