The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

The Church’s obsessions with sexual matters were very different from St. Paul’s. It had little to say about polygamy or the begetting of many bastards, although both were commonplace and against doctrine. Instead, it concentrated on three things: first, divorce, remarriage, and adoption; second, wet nursing, and sex during periods when the liturgy demanded abstinence; and third, “incest” between people married to within seven canonical degrees. In all three cases the Church seems to have been trying to prevent lords from siring legitimate heirs. If a man obeyed the doctrines of the Church in the year 1100, he could not divorce a barren wife, he certainly could not remarry while she lived, and he could not adopt an heir. His wife could not give her baby daughter to a wet nurse and be ready to bear another in the hope of its being a son, and he could not make love to his wife “for three weeks at Easter, four weeks at Christmas, and one to seven weeks at Pentecost; plus Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—days for penance or sermons; plus miscellaneous feast days.” He also could not bear a legitimate heir by any woman closer than a seventh cousin—which excluded most noble women within three hundred miles. It all adds up to a sustained attack by the Church on the siring of heirs, and “it was not until the Church started to fill up with the younger brothers of men of state that the struggle over inheritance—over marriage—between them began.” Individuals in the Church (d...

(disinherited younger sons) were manipulating sexual mores to increase the Church’s own wealth or even regain property and titles for themselves.