Summary: Often times, the way the Middle Ages are presented, are as an era where everyone was lily white and a time when men were men and women were women. A time of hyper masculinity where all the guys were muscle bound warriors with big bushy beards and a bone structure that makes them look like extras from Clan of the Cave Bear. But just like everything else that pop culture has taught us about the Middle Ages, including the commonly used moniker “the dark ages”, it was more complex than that. King Oswiu didn’t have access to a special masculinity gene that has been lost to time. There were cultural pressures at play that lead to some of the themes, but not everyone fit the mold. People are people... and our antiquated view of England is exactly that… antiquated… so it really should be corrected. And we’re going to start doing that with this episode. So to start with, where did it come from? Well, it looks like it came from the Victorians. As we go forward in the show, you’ll find that a lot of our strange notions of the past tend to come from the Victorians… but of course it would, they really were rather enthusiastic about history and archaeology. Unfortunately, they hadn’t yet incorporated objectivity into their practices, so it’s staggering how many biases they brought into their studies. In fact, part of our long standing historical obsession with Rome comes from how much the Victorians identified with Rome. But for our current discussion, the Victorians have influenced our view of the past through their own views on masculinity and gender roles when looking at written records and archaeological digs. And here’s how. Naturally, in the 18th century, we lacked the ability to look at archaeological remains and determine, on a genetic level, what the sex of the deceased was. We just didn’t have the technological ability to do that yet. So archaeologists did the best they could and looked at osteological factors (basically, what the bones look like) and looked at what was buried with the body, and then interpreted the findings. Now looking at the bones is actually rather difficult. And that’s because humans aren’t all that sexually dimorphic. What that means is that the difference between men and women isn’t all that significant when compared with other primates. On average, modern men and women only differ in weight by about 20%, and the overlap between the sexes is huge. And those differences have varied significantly through time, they aren’t static, and actually there was very little difference between the sexes in prehistoric times, so much of those differences in body weight could be linked to lifestyle and diet rather than just raw genetics which makes interpreting bones on just size comparisons rather problematic. And there’s another complicating factor when looking at these graves. What you’re looking for are secondary sex characteristics. Differences between men and women like the shape of the pelvis and of the skull. But these were differences that came about due to puberty. So prepubescent bodies are definitely an issue for determining sex by osteology. So yeah, just looking at bones is pretty tough. And don’t forget that this was before we could look at their genetics. Consequently, the antiquarians were looking for a bit of help on that matter… and that’s where grave goods came into it. Surely, what was buried with a body could help determine the deceased’s sex, right? Well, not necessarily. The thing is that the lives of the upper class Victorians, who were generally the ones doing this research, were strictly segregated by sex. There were activities that were reserved for men, and activities reserved for women. So when these Victorian antiquarians were looking at the remains they assumed there was a close connection between sex and gender, so when they saw spears, they determined the body was male… and when they saw sewing implements,
