re: #241 avanti

Some Biblical scholars contend that Mary would have been wed to Joesph in her very early teens as was the custom at the time. As usual, I’ll defer to Walter on the tradition.

I don’t know a lot about the first century, but there’s a sweet Yiddish lullaby from the late nineteenth. The mother sings to her baby daughter that when she’s twelve years old, a prince will come to marry her, and mama will sew beautiful clothes for her—the baby’s father, she adds, has become modern, and says his daughter is not to marry until she’s eighteen, but Mama will outwit him, so go to sleep…

In medieval communities worldwide, girls were married off at puberty or earlier. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples of cultures with later ages of marriage, but plenty of European princesses were betrothed in the cradle and married off at puberty.

Is this a goddamn abomination before the Lord in the present day? Hell, yeah. But can I get real worked up about in the case of a seventh century warlord/religious leader? Not really.