Pagan Europe Was Not a Golden Age for Women: The Historical Record

The post answers a claim that pre-Christian European societies treated women better than Christianity did. It gathers classical sources and modern scholarship to argue the opposite. Tacitus describes how a Germanic husband punished an unfaithful wife by cutting her hair, stripping her, and flogging her through the village, with no second marriage possible for her.

Julius Caesar reports that Gallic husbands held power of life and death over wives and children, and that a widow suspected in her husband's death could be tortured and burned. The post cites Dr. Larry Hurtado's point that worshipping female deities did not make a society equal for living women, since legal and domestic structures stayed male-dominated.

Early Irish and Welsh law, as discussed in Josef Weisweiler's study of women among the Celts, barred daughters from inheriting land except in a limited lifetime case. Girls were married at puberty, often at 12 to 14, because pagan marriage was a transfer between male heads of household. The post contrasts this with the medieval European Marriage Pattern documented by Hollingsworth and Hajnal, in which canon law required consent and capacity, and women commonly married in their late teens to mid-twenties.

It credits canon law, citing Pope Alexander III and Gratian, with making coercion grounds for nullity, so a woman could refuse an arranged marriage. The Church outlawed concubinage, polygyny, and unilateral divorce, citing Augustine and the Council of Trent. Under Roman and Germanic law women needed male guardians for legal acts, while Church courts let women sue for annulments and dowries, as Helmholz documented for medieval England.

The post closes with infanticide and infant exposure, permitted under pagan law, condemned by the Didache and the Council of Elvira, and notes that canon law allowed separation for domestic cruelty.