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“He was legally betrothed to her, and could not marry anyone else without a formal annulment. Her marriage to Amalric was not legal—” “In which case, Amalric’s children by her are bastards, including that leper boy,” Barry pointed out.
Nope. Under canon law, children of putative marriages were (and are) considered legitimate. Granted, there were plenty of medieval nobility who tried to argue otherwise, but their attempts to completely disinherit their children of a putative marriage seldom worked. For specific examples, consider Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk and Marguerite II, countess of Flanders.
After Hugh’s death, his second wife, Gundreda de Beaumont, tried to get his son by his annulled marriage to Juliane de Vere declared illegitimate so her sons could inherit instead and failed. Marguerite, meanwhile, tried to completely disinherit her sons by her first husband, Bouchard IV d’Avesnes, but was unable to do so. Instead, the county of Hainaut went to her sons by her first husband and the county of Flanders went to her sons by her second husband.
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― We Have Always Lived in the Castle
― We Have Always Lived in the Castle
“And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.” The”
― The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
― The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
“Pepper’s given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune’s marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to Pepper’s surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)”
― Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
― Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
“I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
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“Egg has the truth of it. Aerion's quite the monster. He thinks he’s a dragon in human form, you know. That’s why he was so wroth at that puppet show. A pity he wasn't born a Fossoway, then he’d think himself an apple and we’d all be a deal safer, but there you are.”
― The Hedge Knight
― The Hedge Knight
Shirin’s 2025 Year in Books
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