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XPost: ca.politics, alt.war.vietnam

On 1/10/22 5:29 PM, Kurt Nicklas wrote:

super70s wrote

In article <daadnY2hdbQvNEb8nZ2dnUU7-V_NnZ2d@earthlink.com>,
"1.AAC0832" <z24ba7.net> wrote:

On 1/9/22 10:04 PM, Kurt Nicklas wrote:

davej wrote

Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee have reported the highest >>>> death rates so far.

Best news I've heard today.

Gee ... what a murderous attitude. Hate Jews too ?

More like your side has a suicidal attitude...c'est la vie.

And then there's all those rightwing radio hosts who were unvaccinated antimask and now are pushing up daisys!

Must be God's will.

https://newsone.com/playlist/famous-anti-vaxxers-who-have-died-from-covid-19/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trio-conservative-radio-hosts- died-covid-will-their-deaths-change-n1278258

mayiinjectaprayerforallthebastardchildren

The Strange History of the 'Bastard' in Medieval Europe

https://thewire.in/history/history-bastard-europe

Today, ‘bastard’ is used as an insult, or to describe children born to non-marital unions. Being born to unmarried parents is largely free of
the kind of stigma and legal incapacities once attached to it in Western cultures, but it still has echoes of shame and sin. The disparagement of children born outside of marriage is often presumed to be a legacy of
medieval Christian Europe, with its emphasis on compliance with Catholic marriage law.

Yet prior to the 13th century, legitimate marriage or its absence was
not the key factor in determining quality of birth. Instead, what
mattered was the social status of the parents – of the mother as well as
of the father. Being born to the right parents, regardless of whether
they were married according to the strictures of the church, made a
child seem more worthy of inheriting parents’ lands, properties and titles.

Consider, for example, the case of William the Bastard, more commonly
known as William the Conqueror. Born to Robert, Duke of Normandy and
Herleva, a woman clearly not his wife, William was nevertheless
recognised by his father as his heir. Despite his youth and questionable
birth, William managed to conquer and rule first Normandy and then
England, and to pass his kingdom and titles on to his children.

Why then was William called ‘the Bastard’? Writing about William in the 12th century, the chronicler Orderic Vitalis called him ‘/nothus/’, an Ancient Greek term used to indicate birth to anything other than two
Athenian citizens. What might Orderic have meant by this? The only
elaboration he offered suggests a concern not with William’s mother’s marital status but rather with his maternal lineage. During William’s
siege of Alençon in the 1050s, as Orderic wrote, the people gathered on
the battlements taunted William not because his father hadn’t married
his mother, but over his mother Herleva’s paternity, as the daughter of either a tanner or an undertaker. In other words, they objected not to
his birth out of wedlock, but to his mother’s poor lineage. That sense
of what made a birth illegitimate, what made a child a ‘bastard’,
matches the definition of /nothus/ often found in early medieval
sources. As one late-11th-century chronicler declared, the French called William ‘bastard’ because of his mixed parentage: he bore both noble and ignoble blood, ‘/obliquo sanguine/’.

William’s social advancement, despite his dubious birth, is not unique.
Kings before and after him, and even queens, successfully inherited and
reigned despite allegations of illegitimacy. There are many cases in
which the children of illegal marriages, including even the children of
monks and nuns, inherited noble and royal title throughout the 12th
century. Children born to a high-status couple could inherit from those parents, even if their union violated contemporary prohibitions on
marrying close kin, marrying those already married to other living
spouses, or marrying those sworn to celibacy. As such, the ideal of
legitimate kingship as defined by legitimate birth, and legitimate birth
as determined by a legitimate marriage between the parents, took hold
only slowly and inconsistently in medieval Europe. It’s not until the
late 12th century that evidence for the exclusion of children from
succession on the grounds of illegitimate birth first appears.
‘Bastard’, as we now understand it, began to emerge here.

Importantly, this shift in the meaning and implications of illegitimacy
did not arise as an imposition of Church doctrine. Instead, ordinary
litigants began exploiting bits of Church doctrine to suit their own
ends. Perhaps the earliest signs of this can be found in the annals of
English legal history, with the Anstey case of the 1160s. This might
have been the first time an individual was barred from inheriting
because her parents had married illegally. And it happened not because
the Church intervened, but because one clever plaintiff figured out how
to exploit some scraps of theological doctrine. After that time, more
and more plaintiffs began to do the same.

For example, towards the end of the 12th century, a regent countess of Champagne rushed to make use of an allegation of illegitimate birth
against her nieces, in an effort to secure her son’s succession.
Daughters could inherit in this region, and so these sisters did have a
claim to the county once ruled by their late father. But the regent
countess denounced the sisters as the product of an illegal marriage and therefore not legitimate heirs of their father. The strategy worked in
that both daughters did eventually renounce their claims to the county,
but not without first obtaining a great deal of money, enough to make
them both extremely wealthy. As this suggests, the papacy had a far more passive role than is often imagined.

As bastardy began to acquire its modern meaning, in the early 13th
century, it remained the case that the papacy focused on the regulation
of illicit unions rather than the exclusion from succession or
inheritance of those born to illicit unions. Hatred of illicit sex did
trump dynastic politics on occasion. Hatred of the children born to such
unions did not. There is very little evidence to suggest that an
interest in keeping illegitimate children from inheriting noble or royal
title outweighed political or practical considerations in the same way
that the policing of illegal marriages sometimes did.

Understanding the changing meanings of bastardy helps us to arrive at a
clearer picture of the workings and priorities of medieval society
before the 13th century. Society then did not operate subject to rigid Christian canon law rules. Instead, it measured the value of its leaders
based on their claims to celebrated ancestry, and the power attached to
that kind of legitimacy. To be sure, marrying legitimately certainly
received a good deal of lip service throughout the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, in this pre-13th-century world, the most intense attention
was paid not to the formation of legitimate marriages, but to the
lineage and respectability of mothers. Only beginning in the second half
of the 12th century did birth outside of lawful marriage begin to render
a child illegitimate, a ‘bastard’, and as such potentially ineligible to inherit noble or royal title.Aeon counter – do not remove

/Sara McDougall is an associate professor of history at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and a member of
the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center./

/This article was originally published <https://aeon.co/ideas/the-strange-story-of-inventing-the-bastard-in-medieval-europe>
at/ Aeon /and has been republished under a/ Creative Commons /licence/.

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