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Lineage interests and nonreproductive strategies
- Source :
- Human Nature. 10:109-134
- Publication Year :
- 1999
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 1999.
-
Abstract
- The nonreproductive role of religious women in the European Middle Ages presents the ideal forum for the discussion of elite family strategies within a historical context. I apply the evolutionary concept of kin selection to this group of women in order to explain how a social formation in which religious women failed to reproduce benefited medieval noble lineages. After a brief review of the roles of noble women in the later Middle Ages, I identify two benefits that nonreproductive women provided within a patrilineal inheritance system. First, spatial segregation and Christian ideology together served to curtail the production of offspring who could pose a threat to lineage interests. Second, cloistered noble women served as a strong political and economic bloc that could further lineage interests within a religious context. Finally, I discuss the evolutionary basis for the formation of groups of nonreproductive women. Using the foundation provided by animal behavioral studies, I apply the twin concepts of cooperative breeding and parental manipulation to noble lineages of the medieval period.
- Subjects :
- Sociology and Political Science
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Context (language use)
Kin selection
Genealogy
Lineage (anthropology)
Politics
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Anthropology
Cooperative breeding
Elite
Sociology
Ideology
Inheritance
Social psychology
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
media_common
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19364776 and 10456767
- Volume :
- 10
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Human Nature
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....efccfd714d430be0133be780458bc0a4