The Facts of Life in Rural Counter-Reformation.

The article presents an exploration into the interdisciplinary influence of human ethology and sociobiology upon the study of gender roles and theories of cultural constructions of marriage and sexual behavior. The author provides a social study of a village in Tuscany in the late 16th- and early 17th-century, suggesting that the mating and marriage behaviors of the society corresponded to psycho-biological demands rather than cultural constructions.