Just a reminder on Valentine's Day!
"... But the truth is that people in the preindustrial past faced few possibilities when it came to marriage. The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low, and the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children. Peasants “married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away,” according to the historian William Manchester. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person could easily imagine. By the 18th century, little had changed: “Most villagers married people from within 10 miles of home,” as the historian Kirstin Olsen noted.
The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as consanguineous pairings (including plenty of first cousins) and couples with huge age gaps. Even in the 18th century, in England, grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although that was rare in practice, thankfully ...
Men [and women] were also often unhappy in marriage. An illustration from the mid-1600s depicts an alleged Dutch invention to help unhappy husbands: a windmill to transform ugly wives into beautiful ones. ..."
Husbands bringing their ugly wives to a windmill, to be transformed into beautiful ones. Engraving, ca 1650.
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