Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between a man and a woman in which the couple does not want or cannot enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar but mutually exclusive.
Concubinage was a formal and institutionalized practice in China until the 20th century that upheld concubines' rights and obligations. A concubine could be freeborn or of slave origin, and her experience could vary tremendously according to her master's whim. During the Mongol conquests, both foreign royals and captured women were taken as concubines. Concubinage was also common in Meiji Japan as a status symbol, and in Indian society, where the intermingling of different social groups and religions was frowned upon and a taboo, and concubinage could be practiced with women with whom marriage was considered undesirable.
Many Middle Eastern societies used concubinage for reproduction. The practice of a barren wife giving her husband a slave as a concubine is recorded in the Code of Hammurabi and the Bible, where Abraham takes Hagar as pilegesh. The children of such relationships would be regarded as legitimate. Such concubinage was also widely practiced in the premodern Muslim world, and many of the rulers of the Abbasid caliphate and the Ottoman Empire were born out of such relationships. Throughout Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, slave concubinage resulted in racially mixed populations. The practice declined as a result of the abolition of slavery.
In ancient Rome, the practice was formalized as concubinatus, the Latin term from which the English "concubine" is derived. It referred to any extramarital sexual relationship, most often that between a wealthy or politically powerful man and a woman of low social origins kept for sexual service. The marital status of the man was irrelevant and the concubine's children did not receive an inheritance. After Christianization of Roman Empire, Christian emperors improved the status of the concubine by granting concubines and their children the sorts of property and inheritance rights usually reserved for wives.
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The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of enslaved people have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places. Slavery has been found in some hunter-gatherer populations, particularly as hereditary slavery, but the conditions of agriculture with increasing social and economic complexity offer greater opportunity for mass chattel slavery.
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelled mediæval or mediaeval) lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, aligning with the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD before transitioning into the Renaissance and then the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: antiquity, medieval, and modern.
Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between a man and a woman in which the couple does not want or cannot enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar but mutually exclusive. Concubinage was a formal and institutionalized practice in China until the 20th century that upheld concubines' rights and obligations. A concubine could be freeborn or of slave origin, and her experience could vary tremendously according to her master's whim.
L'UE J introduit les étudiants à l'analyse territoriale à la grande échelle à la lumière d'une hypothèse de recherche. Une séquence d'opérations est proposée: étude de terrain; identification de princ