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Are you certain mutual consent had to be respected for marriages to be binding?

Back in Sansa III, ASOS you pointed out that the Lannisters couldn’t outright force Sansa into marrying Tyrion, because if the Faith is anything like the Catholic Church then “mutual consent is very much necessary for a marriage to be considered binding.” Well I’ve been reading about the life of Anne of Cleves and I found something interesting which appears to contradict this statement.

You see Anne of Cleves’s brother Duke William of Cleves was initially married to Jeanne d’Albret (Queen of Navarre and mother to the first French Bourbon king, Henry IV). It turns out Jeanne was very much against this match and her parents had her whipped when she refused to comply. But even then she remained obstinate and on her wedding day had to be physically dragged to the alter by the Constable of France.

Her marriage with the Duke of Cleves was eventually annulled partly on the grounds that she was forced into it against her will. But even taking this into consideration, wasn’t this type of conjugal coercion common place in Europe around that time? Since royal parents usually didn’t care if their daughters didn’t want to marry their chosen bridegroom and were more interested in the benefits their unions will bring, wasn’t coercion sometimes necessary to force an uncooperative daughter into accepting who they’ve been arranged to marry?

Also if Sansa had refused to marry Tyrion and the Lannisters resorted to their usual show of brutality by having her flogged or worse until she capitulates, do you think that could then be used to invalidate her marriage to Tyrion once she was free from their clutches?

I think your example sort of speaks for itself: a marriage was undertaken without consent and got annulled because the Catholic Church really cared about consent when it came to marriage. 

So I wouldn’t say that this kind of harsh coercion was common. Instead, I think there was a more passive process, whereby people were raised with the expectation that they would marry the people their family approved of, and understood that they could be disinherited if they didn’t go along with it. 

On the other hand, for people who were willing to stick to their guns, the option of running away to a sanctuary church/monastery/nunnery gave them a powerful backstop. It’s hard to threaten someone with disinheritance if they’ve taken a vow of poverty. 

Hello, I really like your blog! Someone here once compared the vital need for Northern independence from the rest of the kingdoms akin to America’s independence. I know enough about Colonies, Monarchies, and Democracy to know how wrong they are to a large extend, but not informed enough to explain it. Could you please help me out :) ?

Hi, and thanks!

I think that there’s a lot of potential independence parallels that one could make, from many different time periods. Some of those are more apt than others, and some have very different implications than others. (For example, I think we would consider an appeal to the American Revolution as an example very differently from an appeal to the Confederacy.) 

As a historian, I wouldn’t necessarily start with an 18th century independence movement which had a very different economic, political, and cultural context, if I was looking for parallels for a very medieval polity like Westeros. I might look instead to the Scottish independence wars of the 13th and 14th centuries, especially since that’s probably what GRRM was working off of when he was writing ASOIAF.

As a native Mainer who’s been following your remarks about the recent election, I’m curious to know if you have any particular thoughts about ranked choice voting.

Ah, ranked choice voting. I know it’s something that a lot election wonks like; it’s got certain advantages over first-past-the-post, but also certain drawbacks. (Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a harsh mistress.)

It’s used in a bunch of places, so it’s not intrinsically unworkable. When it comes to alternatives to first-past-the-post, I tend to prefer Mixed-Member Proportional Representation, but RCV seems fine. 

I was wondering – I’m a bit confused by the sheer amount of Objectivism in early superhero comics, largely because of how anti-altruism objectivism is. Logically, going out and fighting supervillains to no personal advantage and often at great personal cost would seem to go against these precepts, right? But the Objectivist roots of early comics go so deep and are such a big part of comics history, whatever my opinions on it as a philosophy may be,that I’m assuming there must be something there?

I mean, I don’t think it was quite as prevalent as you’re making it out to be, yes there’s Ditko but I wouldn’t describe Kirby or Lee or Marston or even Finger and Kane as Objectivists even slightly. And even with Ditko, there’s strong arguments to be made that while he was at Marvel, he hadn’t yet become a full-on Objectivist. 

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Spider-Man’s credo of “with great power comes great responsibility” and his origin story of selfish self-promoter shown the error of his ways by the death of his uncle Ben; the original Doctor Strange is so uncompromisingly committed to the Hippocratic Oath that he won’t even allow harm to befall even Baron Mordo. (Even in his full-on Objectivist phase, Ditko tended to be more about moral absolutism – absolute good vs. absolute evil – than the pro-selfishness stuff.)

Where I think confusion tends to set in is that people associate the heroic individualism that is in superhero comics DNA from Superman onwards – the idea of a costumed do-gooder who steps outside the law or at least the institutions of society to set right what is wrong – with Objectivism. As you suggest, anti-altruism is at the heart of what sets objectivism apart from bog-standard individualist liberalism, and the heroic part of super-heroism is all about helping others full stop.

To what extent would you say that the Supreme Court was simply being honest about the nature of slavery in the Dred Scott decision, in effect saying ” you want a slave society? This is what a slave society looks like” ?

To no extent whatsoever.

Dred Scott was a pretty naked attempt to settle the “slavery question” in favor of the pro-slavery party by making as broad a decision as possible (i.e, not just ruling against Scott but going further to invalidate the Missouri Compromise and indeed any restrictions on slavery), even though that decision went plainly against evidence from the time of the ratification of the Constitution and before (namely, that there were black voters and thus citizens at the time of the Constitutional Conventions, and the Northwest Ordinance, which had barred slavery in the territories north of the Ohio, which predated the Constitution) as we can see from the two dissenting opinions. 

Indeed, the lack of honesty in Taney’s findings played a significant role in opening up the Supreme Court to backlash, and indeed resulted in the “slavery question” being more un-settled than before. 

Is there a Watsonian reason for Westeros being stuck in medieval stasis for several milennia now? Or is it just George being beholden to some very traditional fantasy tropes?

Oh no, you said the s-word…

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This is one of my major pet peeves in ASOIAF fandom. I’ve talked about it here and here and here and here, but I’ll repeat myself here: Westeros is not in medieval stasis. 

Rather, what we have is a story of technological change from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic through the Bronze Age through the Iron Age through the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages, with the Free Cities sitting firmly in the Renaissance. 

The reason why we think there’s medieval stasis is that Westerosi historians, much like medieval chroniclers, have re-interpreted pre-medieval history in medieval terms, so that warriors become knights, chieftains become kings, and gods become heroes. 

Different Anon, but following the question about Rhaegar’s body. Do you think that his ashes or those of his father, would have been interred in the Great Sept with the other Targaryens as a show of political legitimacy for the Baratheon regime? Been reading a book called the King’s body and the author talks about how new rulers would use the funerals of the overthrown king to show continuity and I’m curious as to your thoughts.

No, I think his ashes were probably scattered over the Trident. 

So I was going through Reddit and someone wrote that some things in ASOIAF were too modern for that era. Me knowing jack shit about medieval living wanted to ask if you could give me some examples about it? Thanks in advance!

The best example is medicine: unlike their medieval counterparts, maesters in Westeros have a working theory of antiseptics (vinegar, myrish fire, firemilk, boiling wine (although that wouldn’t really work), use bread mould as an antibiotic, etc.