‘<i>Out of Lust for Money’</i>? Agency and Marital Strategies in Eighth‐Century Italy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article analyses early medieval Italian marital practices and inquires how Lombard women played the system to increase their agency. It contends that in the eighth century, demographic and social developments created conditions that could favour women in negotiating marriages. These women used their position of power to bargain for better nuptial agreements, resulting in an increase in agency and power within the household. Such perceived imbalance prompted royal authority to intervene, leaving traceable marks in eighth‐century legislation, most notably under King Liutprant (712–44). To contextualise these legal interventions, the article first scrutinises earlier laws for marital practices, introducing basic terms such as morgincap, meta and faderfyo. Then, investigates the demographic and cultural factors related to marriages, including the distribution of the population, the level of celibacy and monastic confinement and rules that limited marital arrangements (such as legislation against incest). Finally, it considers Liutprant's laws for evidence of strategies used by women, considering the dialectics between agency and normative constraints.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".