After my thread about "casarse" (living together under the same roof   ) I wondered about those separate "women's rooms" in the Middle Ages and if I recall it well also in the 17th till 20th century...
They seem to call it in English: "gynecaeum" and I see now that that was already from Greek and Roman times...
https://www.vertalen.nu/vertaal/nl/en/vrouwenvertrek

Among others: one of my questions:
Had the "heer des huizes" (the master of the house) to ask beforehand consentment from the lady to enter her appartments to ask for entrance for certain actions or could he do that whenever he "wanted"?

Not sure why you call the thread "sleeping together" when you're starting a discussion about drawing-rooms (originally "withdrawing rooms" for the ladies to withdraw to while the men got on with their postprandial man stuff in the dining room).

The Greek "gynaeceum" was originally an area set aside for the worship of deities who did stuff for women, though it would have naturally developed into an area where women could relax and get on with their own postprandial stuff. The Romans were even more into deities with specialised applications so would have absorbed this custom with even more relish. However deities or no deities, I imagine a sanity space for women retained its appeal throughout the ages for anyone fortunate enough to be living in a house with space enough to accommodate it.

Not sure either why you think there would be hard and fast "rules" regarding when and why a man would want to enter this space, whether he reckoned himself a "master" or not. I imagine for his own peace of mind and ego he might do well to steer clear of these spaces altogether.

nordmann wrote:

Not sure why you call the thread "sleeping together" when you're starting a discussion about drawing-rooms (originally "withdrawing rooms" for the ladies to withdraw to while the men got on with their postprandial man stuff in the dining room).

The Greek "gynaeceum" was originally an area set aside for the worship of deities who did stuff for women, though it would have naturally developed into an area where women could relax and get on with their own postprandial stuff. The Romans were even more into deities with specialised applications so would have absorbed this custom with even more relish. However deities or no deities, I imagine a sanity space for women retained its appeal throughout the ages for anyone fortunate enough to be living in a house with space enough to accommodate it.

Not sure either why you think there would be hard and fast "rules" regarding when and why a man would want to enter this space, whether he reckoned himself a "master" or not. I imagine for his own peace of mind and ego he might do well to steer clear of these spaces altogether.

nordmann, I see now that I was with that "vrouwenvertrek" (withdrawing room for the mistress of the house and other women) completely on the wrong foot...(whatever the language, even Greek)...

Of course I thought up to now that the "bedroom" was the domain of the mistress...and the man came in her! bed...
How wrong I was if you see the history of the bedroom and especially the bed...
https://didyouknowhomes.com/the-history-of-the-bedroom/



As I understand it now (perhaps not with the Sultan and his harem?) during the ages it was the same as now...if one of the "couple" let the other one enter in the bed, consented to the entering, they were "sleeping together"? What they did together that was privacy. Or perhaps not, while sometimes half of the family slept in the same bed...

I thought up to now that it was a bit the same as nowadays, where many couples have an apart bedroom for all kind of problems...as snoring...some of my inner circle including our household...

And then I thought that one partner had to have the consentment of the other partner for sleeping one night together...and doing what they wanted to do...even nowadays with more "healthy people on a "gezegende leeftijd" (blessed age) of the eighties...

I learned today that during the Middle-Ages they slept even two times a night interrupted by a period of for instance the love game
https://kunst-en-cultuur.infonu.nl/geschiedenis/178547-slapen-in-de-middeleeuwen-gewoonten-en-gebruiken.html (in Dutch)
With google translate:
This "in-between-piece" was spent by visiting each other, praying together and, for example, doing repairs to the house. But people also preferred to fill those in-between hours with making love. According to doctors, this would be advisable, because people then had more energy and could enjoy the love game...

PS: nordmann I learned from your rich English vocabulary today the word: "postprandial"...

Kind regards, Paul.

Your description, Paul, also conjured up a word - used in this Jake Thackray song to describe a doze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wArg1PQ5O4g

Green George wrote:

Your description, Paul, also conjured up a word - used in this Jake Thackray song to describe a doze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wArg1PQ5O4g

Gil, I tried to find the "doze" in the song but as there were no subtitles a bit difficult to understand all the words (yes, after all those years of hearing and reading English, but only speaking it occasionally...)

But about the word "doze" I immediately thought at the Dutch word: "doezelen" and "indoezelen", but after checking it seems not to be used that much in Dutch. Perhaps is it Southern Dutch from Belgium?
In any case I found it as an existing word (we use it everyday) instead of "insluimeren")
And I didn't find it in the Dutch dictionary but on a German site about Dutch ...
https://www.buurtaal.de/blog/schlafen

But not only in bed one sleeps. Who in the evening after a long day relaxes in a sofa, becomes quickly "slaperig". From there is it only a small step to:
 wegdommelen, indommelen, indoezelen, wegdoezelen, indutten, insoezen oder insluimeren.

Kind regards, Paul.

The word in question, Paul was "postcoital".

I think your angle of approach, Paul, is seriously flawed. It seems to assume pretty uniform bedroom designs, cultural attitudes and economic class membership, and that's even before one examines the rather obvious variables of couples trying to have children, trying to avoid having children, in loive, out of love, prone to headaches, and all the other things that still dictate "typical" bedroom sleeping habits these days just as much as they must have done long ago. And what about the vast majority of people for whom sleep itself was a luxury once, not to mention a bed in which to engage in it?

You are, I think, exhibiting something of a bourgeois boudoir bias in your assumptions (only rich women could declare the marital bed their domain and accord it a distinct name - other less wealthy women presumably had more subtle ways of marking out territory), and even when it comes to bourgeois boudoirs your assumptions are still way too presumptive, methinks. For example, sleeping together in medieval times was, like much else that we take for granted these days, a minefield in which one's morals and health were hostages to fortune the moment one approached the boudoir, whether married or not, and there seems to have been no universal custom or standard of behaviour that could be made to apply, least of all one which secured body and soul against the threat.

Even among those who could well afford beds and bedrooms in which any single custom might be enforced the declared causes of death of three men, who lived within a century or so of each other in medieval times, carry in combination a cautionary tale against assuming too much a common standard or attitude: King Louis VIII, poor chap, was to die of what his doctors termed "ill advised celibacy", saving himself for his wife while out on crusade and allowing his body to accumulate dangerous levels of semen retention according to the best medical research of the day. His distant relation Ralph, Count of Vermandois, avoided the semen retention problem but then died of fornication with his third wife against doctor's orders (they had reckoned she was so young that she might have the effect of "drawing" too much of his vital juices in one go), while meanwhile in England old John of Gaunt eventually emulated his own name, having wasted away and ultimately expiring altogether from what was deemed excessive fornication, according to his physicians, in which he engaged with several ladies "out of respect for his wife". In all three cases the men's attitude to the marital bed, its function and sanctity, varied wildly even though each in their own way seemingly wished to adhere to some medieval notion of both "love" and "morality". In all three cases too the wife got the blame!

nordmann wrote:

I think your angle of approach, Paul, is seriously flawed. It seems to assume pretty uniform bedroom designs, cultural attitudes and economic class membership, and that's even before one examines the rather obvious variables of couples trying to have children, trying to avoid having children, in loive, out of love, prone to headaches, and all the other things that still dictate "typical" bedroom sleeping habits these days just as much as they must have done long ago. And what about the vast majority of people for whom sleep itself was a luxury once, not to mention a bed in which to engage in it?

 
Thank you nordmann for pointing to my selective approach. Of course you are right again. Bed and bedroom are only a fraction of the sleeping together among humanity.
I am not sure if the poor Roman city dweller of the Principate had a bedroom or even a bed for his own and for his partner...
https://romaninsulae.weebly.com/dangers-of-living-in-an-insula.html
https://theromanlifeforum.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/the-roman-insulae/



I want to comment on the other paragraphs later, as I already had prepared for Gil's reply about "postcoital"...and for lack of time...

Kind regards, Paul.

Green George wrote:

The word in question, Paul was "postcoital".

 
yes, yes, Gil, "doze" as a "postcoital"...

But yes Gil "coital" behaviour" can have big consequenses for the population. As I learned at school about the "coitus interruptus". Yes even  in a Catholic school in Belgium in the Fifties!

That "coitus interruptus" that even among the French rural communities had a deep impact on the population growth in the second half of the 19th century...and was part of one or perhaps the first "population transition"...and just to the applying by the men of the "coitus interruptus"...
https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-model/
https://historum.com/threads/the-slow-growth-of-frances-population-in-the-19th-century.180788/
https://www.persee.fr/doc/comm_0588-8018_1986_num_44_1_1653
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691645681/the-female-population-of-france-in-the-19th-century

And as an aside: I always thought that "Etienne van de Walle" (as I had one in our factory as shiftleader) was a name from here in West-Flanders, but see...
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_601_0011--etienne-van-de-walle-1932-2006.htm#
But it is perhaps no coincidence as we had many people from here migrating to Pennsylvania and all..

And I think Gil that we are still speaking about the subject "Sleeping together"...

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul wrote:

... "coitus interruptus" that even among the French rural communities had a deep impact on the population growth in the second half of the 19th century ...

Catholic adherence to this method also had a deep impact on Irish population growth at one time - it sky-rocketed.

nordmann, thinking and reading further about what you wrote in your latest message, I was surprized how much there was written about the psychology of sleeping together, but I got a bit lost with all that psychobabble and don't want to start with it, although my original aim of this thread was indeed the psychological impact of sleeping together or separated...but seeing it is such a can of worms, I perhaps wisely abstain.

In my search I found however that a bed and beds seems to be a product of Victorian customs, as for instance a twin bed versus the old fashioned marital bed.

And so I concentrate now on physically sleeping together of families and extended families, seemingly in the beginning even with visitors.

Perhaps is "sleeping room?" better than the usual? "bedroom"...and it is the same in Dutch, French, German:
"slaapkamer, chambre à coucher, Schlaffzimmer"
After all in the beginning there were no beds...

I learned especially from this article among all my research:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/communal-sleeping-history-sharing-bed

And about the "pig" together  from the site:
But if anyone were to get any kind of rest while sleeping next to others, lines had to be drawn and rules applied. Large families assigned spots to each member according to age and gender. The British called this “to pig.” In his book, At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch recounts how one 19th-century Irish family slept in birth order with the mother and sisters on one side of the bed and father and brothers on the other, followed by the odd guest or traveling peddler.

And I think it is coincidentally that the writer points to the Irish family, as she seems to have no bias to Irish as I think to see New York Jewish Hungarian roots
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adee-braun-01300811
Excuses for the link...it was seemingly the only way to prove that the author and my source was a reliable source...and thanks also to Adee Braun...

And so we're back to poverty again ... an economic status in which the vast majority of humans have always lived and in which "custom" is subservient to "need". Over-interpretation of isolated data in order to extrapolate customs and trends is not only fraught with the danger of misattributed generalisation, it is in fact totally pointless.

I really don't see where you want to go with this discussion. The premise that the physical environment in which one sleeps can be down to choice, habit and social custom only works in relation to social class, and higher ones at that. And even then the evidence suggests that fulfilling this rather basic human physical need is such an imperative that its solution is as varied as there are human beings, physical environments in which to fulfil it, and personal interpretations of each particular circumstance over millennia.

You need to either drastically refine the parameters of your discussion or else abandon it as a bad job, I reckon.

Of course you are right nordmann, as it is such a broad subject that it is even perhaps difficult to choose even a specific subject in that category.

And nordmann you know me now already for my veering off of a topic...but it is still about "sleeping together" under one roof...

As I read today in the daily paper...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Wife-who-failed-in-conjugal-duty-to-have-sex-takes-case-to-European-Court-of-Human-Rights
From the site:
An appeals court said the woman’s decision not to have sex with her husband constituted a violation of the obligations of marriage, making her solely responsible for their divorce

But the essence is not only the subject of the "marital obligations", but also here about money...if one partner is put in fault for the judge, that partner will not have the same rights on the common (marital?) property (at least it is that way in Belgium (code Napoleon?)...
And you can say in the turmoil of a divorce, who thinks about...? But I have found out by experience that that is an important factor in a divorce.

And I who thought that in the nowadays lay France (lay now by law, but once upon a time being Catholic) they wouldn't make fuss about old fashioned "marital obligations"?

If it was in the right wing Catholic Poland...and yes I forgot...I think in France is it as overhere?: you have hetero and homo marriages (I have a homo marriage in the family)...
What if one partner refuse to allow the use of her/his "facilities" to the other partner...?
And yes in Poland again trouble? As they follow the latest "utterings" of the Catholic pope...I know, I know the man is not fully the boss in his own "house"....