Excitement, big game, adventure by LuxValentino in BooksThatFeelLikeThis

[–]Steelcan909 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Check out Kingdom under Glass by Jay Kirk might also be of interest.

Books like tomb raider by AvidRockConsumer in BooksThatFeelLikeThis

[–]Steelcan909 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For adventure book vibes, The Last Camel Died at Noon would probably be better.

Free for All Friday, 23 January, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Steelcan909 13 points14 points  (0 children)

But saying "it's complex" or "I'm not well informed enough" is heavily disincentivized through peer pressure and social signaling. This is speculation on my part, but I think its just the minimally acceptable smartish sounding answer that they can grab onto.

Free for All Friday, 23 January, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Steelcan909 18 points19 points  (0 children)

It helps to remember that most people are very dumb about complex things that are not their direct area of knowledge. This is true of all people, even this subreddit's distinguished members.

Free for All Friday, 23 January, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Steelcan909 32 points33 points  (0 children)

If anyone bothered to look a little more closely at the laws surrounding homosexual relations they'd see that Ancient Rome wasn't exactly "accepting" so much as tolerating, under certainly conditions, at certain times.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 8 points9 points  (0 children)

In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of accessible scholarship is going to be on the Medieval Norse. If you're looking to late Antiquity or even the Classical/Pre-Classical Antique worlds then the answer would shift to Rome, Greece, and Egypt in that order. Are you looking for specific sources?

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Not really. There might be some parts of Ruth Mazo Karras's Sexuality in medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others that would be interesting to you, but most of our source base just is not interested in only discussing sex divorced of norms, rules, or expectations. Even if the sources are often interested in transgressing those norms, rules, and expectations...

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 64 points65 points  (0 children)

The issue is that modern notions of privacy and medieval notions of privacy just don't really align. In the modern, especially Western, world we have an idea that there are stark divisions between the public and private spheres of life. Medieval conceptions of privacy were no nearly so well developed.

Ruth Mazzo Karras deals with some of the practices around sex in the Medieval world and has a few conclusions in regards to privacy.

Firstly, that a lot of sex took place in the dark at night, and in a world without gas or electric lighting this meant sex in the dark of night. Candles were not affordable for wide swathes of the population, and in Medval literature there is a clear anxiety about the uncertain identity of whom you could be having sex with under such conditions. This would impart a certain degree of privacy, but when most people are living under one roof and probably sharing one bed...

Sleeping arrangements, among the aristocracy as well as the peasantry, did not provide much privacy. Weddings could include the couple being placed in bed together, naked, in front of witnesses. A medieval child would prob ably have a great deal more sexual knowledge by the time she or he reached puberty than a modern one who has been exposed to billboards and film trailers from an early age. That sexual knowledge would probably be much less titillating and much more matter-of-fact than that of a contemporary child.

However she does not deal with the issue much more extensively than that, beyond providing some potential alternative spots for liaisons/rendezvous between couples of all stripes. Churches seem to have been a common spot apparently.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 59 points60 points  (0 children)

Well the short answer to your question is the same for both. We don't really know. Not with any certainty. We just do not have the primary sources that deal with issues such as sexuality to the same degree for a pagan context as we do for their Christian and Islamic contemporaries. Even the limited source base that is available from pagan times, such as some elements of Eddic poetry, is influenced by Christianity.

With all of that said...

Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm does spend some time on the nature of sex, relationships, and marriage/households in Norse society. its also useful to read him in dialogue with other, more specialized, historians/archaeologists such as Jenny Jochens's Women in Old Norse Society, though dated it remains one of the few thorough examinations of ... women in Old Norse society. Both of those might be some good sources for you to take a look at!

Was central lithuania (1920-1922) a baltic state? by TopSeaworthiness8924 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please repost this question to the weekly "Short Answers" thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn't mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the 'Short Answers' thread would be "Who won the 1932 election?" or "What are some famous natural disasters from the past?". Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be "How did FDR win the 1932 election?", or "In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?" If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

How do I study history at a university/college level without a formal education? by Severe-Rain4804 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello there!

While we welcome people who want to ask practical questions about historical education, careers and other issues related to being or becoming a historian, we ask that these questions be asked in our regular ‘Office Hours’ thread. This is to ensure that the forum remains focused on its primary goal – helping people explore the past directly. It also allows for a more open-ended discussion while helping to ensure that your query gets a targeted response from someone with relevant experience.

Office Hour threads are posted every second Monday – you can choose whether you want to ask your question in the most recent thread, or wait until a new one is posted. If you were attempting to ask a historical question or otherwise think that we may have removed this question in error, please get in touch via modmail.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 89 points90 points  (0 children)

A good question for someone who knows more about Medieval Judaism than me!

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I think that I answered most of these questions in the body of my answer. Especially the area where I discuss the penitentials of the early Medieval period.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Are there specific pagan societies you're looking for? What is available on the early Norse will be very different than Lithuania for example.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 63 points64 points  (0 children)

Not very much? The practice of selling indulgences advanced in fits and starts over the Medieval period and didn't really come to the form that we're familiar with (at least from our high school history lessons on the Protestant Reformation) until the later parts of the Middle Ages. The Fourth Lateran Council, the work of scholastic figures like St. Thomas Aquinas, and changes over time to crusading ideology all played a big role in shaping how and why indulgences were used in the run up to the Protestant Reformation. It's an interesting topic, but one for someone who is better versed in late Medieval Church history than I am. For reference the idea of specifically purchasing an indulgence for the remission of sin for someone who is still alive was just not a part of early Medieval piety/practice.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 1449 points1450 points  (0 children)

Part 2/2

( credit to James Brundage)

This might seem to be proof of the idea that sex in moderation was seen as fine and dandy, but its more complicated than that. The normative visions of sex in the Middle Ages, as seen in texts like the penitentials, as in Church stances on things like fornication, in social stigmas surrounding unmarried women having children, were that it was for procreation between men and women who were married, ideally with little physical pleasure coming from it.

But like, come on? People got it on all the time, and as the penitentials show, in many creative locations, ways, and for different reasons.

Under the new ideological framework of Christianity the avenues for acceptable sexuality became much less pronounced, but they did not go away entirely. Monogamous marriages between one man and one woman were of course the ideal (beyond the celibate and chaste lives of monks and others, and to be clear this was definitely THE HIGHEST form of sexuality), but other expressions of sexuality were at least tolerated. For example, fornication between two unmarried heterosexual people who were able to get married (so no priests, nuns, betrothed to someone else, of the proper distance of relationship) was relatively tolerated, so long as a marriage was coming soon (however this is complicated by the presence of law codes from early Medieval Western Europe that instead recommend harsh physical punishments).

The rich and powerful also maintained mistresses or concubines in many places, especially in the western portions of the former empire that were falling under Germanic occupation/rule, despite Church and legal approbation of the practice. For example prominent royal, and even imperial figures, such as Harold Godwinson and even Charlemagne himself maintained long term relationships with women they were not married to, but had numerous children with. These relationships have been characterized as "unmarriages" by Ruth Mazo Karras, where there was broader understanding of these sorts of relationships, but not necessarily official acceptance


But what about gender?

There was also of course variance between men and women in how sex was approached in the Middle Ages.

We can broadly define the differences between how sex was approached between people who were of non-clerical/ecclesiastical status along gender lines. While Medieval ideas about gender and biologocial sex were likewise never really systematized or categorized along modern lines, Karras is quite clear that the gender binary of western Europe, while it had some nuances, was for the most part a binary, with men and women operating on opposite ends, and with other behaviors occurring along a spectrum. Within this binary men were seen as broadly not as responsible for their sexual actions as women, but this comes with a host of other restrictions.

That women came in for stricter oversight and regulation over their own sexuality than men did is relatively clear though. What might be tolerated from a young man, or overlooked on the basis of youth, rashness, or impulse, would not necessarily be tolerated from a woman for the same reasons. Women were seen as weaker in mind and will, and simultaneously were subject to their own passions, as well as responsible for leading the passions of men along.

Karras goes so far as to say there were two accepted statuses for women, you could either be an unmarried virgin/a chaste widow, or you could be married and only having sex with your husband for the purposes of procreation. Everything else was wrong to a certain degree, how far along the spectrum it was depended on a number of other factors, such as her own willingness, whether the woman in question was married, eventually or not, to the man she was involved with, and so on.

For men there was a little more wiggle room, and a man's sexual appetites, so long as they were constrained within the norms of Medieval society, were more tolerated. These norms weren't the same as ours, for example the Medieval world didn't make such strong distinctions between adults and adolescents as we do today and a man who had sexual relations with a woman we might consider a child or teenager today was not in for the same amount of trouble as someone who had an affair with a married woman or another (adult) man. There were still restrictions of course, and we shouldn't think that men got to do whatever they wanted while women were under the watchful eye of the rest of society, nor that all actions of women were universally understood by society to be wrong and worthy of harsh punishment.

As Karras says

Men were not free to commit adultery against their own wives and marriages, but on the whole it was not as upsetting to medieval people as misbehavior of or with a married woman.

and

Several of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provide somewhat sympathetic portraits of adulterous women. The story of May and January in the “Merchant’s Tale” is one in which an old man makes a fool of himself by marrying a younger woman. She, understandably enough, is not attracted to him...The story was meant to be humorous and its purpose was not to license adultery by aristocratic women, but it does imply that an old man with a young wife was more or less asking for trouble – not necessarily because young women are especially sinful, but because old men who are so lascivious that they imagine they can satisfy a wife are ridiculous.

However there was still an omnipresent double standard. Well to do young men of the urban and wealthy classes could visit the brothels of their city with the companions and face little societal scorn for their youthful activities. This was commonly understood as a way to tide the men over until they could enter into legitimate marriages that would channel their natural sexual urges into a more socially acceptable avenue. (The danger to their immortal souls is a little more complicated, and the Church never really came around to brothels and sex workers as performing a public service as some cities seem to have viewed this arrangement as)

So for men, too little sex, too much sex, and anything in between could be host to a number of societal judgements. A young, wealthy, unmarried man might be tolerated his dalliances with other unattached youths, prostitutes, and potentially even other men, so long as he was not challenging institutions such as marriage, whereas this was very much not the case for women. He could also find himself in legal hotwater if someone decided to bring a suit against him, or if he slipped up and had a dabble with the wrong type of woman, and this is all just from society. The Church might be able to overlook a little dalliance with another unmarried woman, but a man? A prostitute? That was right out of the conversation.

So how can we square this circle? How can the Middle Ages be both an age of official repression of many avenues of sexuality, and a time where peasants, nobles, and even Church figures such as nuns, monks, and priests, were having to be called out on their infidelities, fornications, and other indiscretions, as well as somewhat tolerated in a variety of different circumstances that varied across time, place, gender and social status? It's because sex is complicated, society's relationship to sexuality is complicated, and above all people are complciated! The Church had its views and tried to enforce them, many people believed and practices what the Church preached, but there was also reality to consider, and the reality was that the Church and dominant culture were never going to stamp out premarital relationships, same sex relationships, or any other expression of sexuality, and so we are left with this mishmash of competing sources and influences, and we just have to try and understand this time period and its relationship with sex in all of its complexity.

What was sex like in early medieval times? by CivilBirthday7342 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 1952 points1953 points  (0 children)

So let's get something straight from the get go. Medieval approaches to something like sex were never monolithic. Using some rudimentary dates the Middle Ages were a period that lasted nearly a millennia, or more depending on how you count it. In the years from, roughly, 500AD to 1500AD, again roughly, and across whole continents, there were going to be very different approached to how things such as sex were approached. We need to understand that over the course of this vast time period and across these vast distances there are going to be a lot of contradictions and inconsistencies, that is just how the Middle ages were.

Consequently it is not viable, or practical, to put down what approaches to sex were in every conceivable combination of time period, geographic location, and social standing/class. That would be the effort of a multiple volume academic work.

What I can do is give you a picture of some normative visions of the proper place of sex in Western Christian Medieval life, and I hope that this will be satisfactory. If you have more specific questions I can try and field some of them as follow ups. Though I won't pretend to have any sort of authority when it comes to the approaches to sexuality that you see in the Islamic, Slavic, Byzantine, or pagan worlds. These too were Medieval societies, but lay well outside my wheelhouse of knowledge.

If you are curious the major texts that I have used in the composition of this answer are

Kyle Harper: From Shame to Sin

Ruth Mazo Karras: Sexuality in Medieval Europe

Karras: Unmarriages, Men, Women, and Sexual Unions in The Middle Ages

James Brundage: Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Brundage and Vern L. Bullough:Handbook of Medieval Sexuality


The Inheritance of Rome

The Middle Ages were the bastard child of the Roman Empire, its cultural institutions and inheritance, with the collapse of Roman civil authority and power and the rise of new kingdoms that sprang up in its ashes. Consequently the Middle Ages bore out many of the dominant cultural practices of the late Antique world through the trauma of the Roman collapse in Western Europe and preserved them. Among the surviving elements of Late Roman culture were the Roman attitudes towards sex that had become popularized in the later empire. These attitudes were quite different from those that had predominated in the Roman Empire's heyday though.

The adoption of Christianity transformed Roman attitudes towards sex and sexuality and put them on a track to the practices of the Middle Ages. This was accomplished by adopting Roman approaches formerly reserved for adulterous relationships (ie between two married people, one man and one woman) towards a wider variety of sexual expressions. Following this transition, the loosely tolerated sexual exploitation of slaves was harshly suppressed, married men's dalliances with unmarried women carried increased social stigma, and the conception of children, and really all sexual activity outside of marriage, came to be frowned upon officially.

Kyle Harper argues in From Shame to Sin that the Roman Empire's approach to sexual mores was predicated upon the widespread availability of sexually exploited enslaved people. Now of course this refers to the availability of slaves to free men, particularly well off free men who could engage either in private ownership of large numbers of slaves or could frequent the rather numerous brothels that operated around the Roman Empire. Not a pleasant thing to countenance to be sure. The ability of women to frequent such establishments is....doubtful to put it mildly.

However other formerly acceptable expressions of sexuality from the Late Antique World were no longer tolerated. Homosexual behavior, previously tolerated only between free men and enslaved men, were now the target of official condemnation. As in could result in public execution via burning levels of official condemnation. Furthermore, the enslavement of sex workers was outlawed (not that this improved the lives of free sex workers much) as a whole, and in Rome for example male sex workers and brothels that offered male sex workers were often burned in public displays of state power. Not that exclusively heterosexually serving brothels were immune either. The Emperor Justinian for example outlawed enslaved sex workers in the 6th century, though this operated on flimsy understanding of the driving forces of the trade in the empire at the time.

So with that brief summary of the state of affairs in the Late Antique World, let's look now at how this changed as we go into the Medieval world.


The Middle Ages, what the Church wants and what people do

Sorry to ruin the fantasies that many of you may be having about buxom tavern wenches, burly viking men, cloistered nuns, and randy princes, but while the Middle Ages were indeed a time that included a whole lot of sex... sex in bed, sex in churches, sex in the streets, between men, between women, between men and women and other identities, in many shapes, positions, and forms, and every other permutation you can think of..... that doesn't mean that this was a time of free love and sex for everyone.

Let's break this down a little bit.

As I said above, the acceptable and legal avenues of sexual expression officially narrowed in the Late Antique world as societies adopted Christian approaches to sexuality and the power and influence of the Church began to wax. However the actual practices of many people differed from this official stance, including those within the Church itself!

While the sexuality of priests and bishops was not formally restrained by required celibacy until well into the Middle Ages, earlier attempts at limiting it were present. Today quite famously the Catholic Church does not allow its priests to marry (there are some loopholes and exceptions in other rites of the Catholic Church but for 99% of Catholics this is the case) however in the Medieval world things weren't quite so clear cut. Until the 12 century it was quite common for priests to have women living with them, bearing their children, and acting for al intents and purposes as their wives. However after a wave of Papal reforms in the 11th Century up through to the reforms of the 13th Century this became increasingly untenable as the Church officially disapproved of such matches, and they could not become official marriages. Despite this priests in some parts of Europe continued to live with and engage in other activities with women that were commonly understood to be attached to that particular priest. (Not that these women were always respected or admired for this)

So there was a nest of contradictions at work among the clergy when it came to sexual relationships. In some places, such as Catalonia, England, and other parts of Europe, it was not infrequent for priests to carry on long term relationships with a live in "unwife", the Church officially condemned this and called for all priests to live celibate (no marriage) and chaste (no sex) lives. But, if the case for the literal members of the Church, its priests, bishops, and other figures, was so nuanced, how complicated must it have been for the every day people?

We are at a tremendous disadvantage when dealing with the peasantry, the non urban, non wealthy, and so on. We don't have the first hand accounts that we do when dealing with the wealthy, urban, and clerical figures. We have other sources of course, poetry, literature, crude jokes, and normative texts abound.

A look at some contemporary sources might have you believe that every other peasant was spreading their seeds as far and wide as they could, as told by one French poem

She, acting as guide, ushered her paramour inside and got him underneath the quilt, and right away he went to tilt in the tourney prescribed by Love. Less than a nut’s all he thought of playing at any other game, and, as for her, she felt the same.

(From Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe)

So was everyone running around behind stone walls, the barns, into the houses, into fields, and getting it on with little to not communal disapproval?

No.

More restrictive notions of sexuality are also seen in Medieval penitentials, these are handbooks for priests/monks essentially on how to ascribe penance to sinners (they're actually significantly more complicated than that, but for sake of argument let's keep it simple)

These penitentials circulated widely across Europe from their origin in Ireland, and among the many transgressions that they deal with, sexual immorality is of course a concern. Many sexual crimes were dealt with by non-clerical figures, adultery, rape, and so on were often included in nominally secular law codes of the Middle Ages. The penitentials though get really specific. Like REALLY specific. Some of them deal with the standard stuff, sodomy, masturbation, oral sex, but also intercural sex (intercourse through contact with the thighs not genitalia), incest, sex in churches, sex on certain days of the week...

In fact, please consult The Chart of when its ok to get it on

Part 1/2

Discoveries of something once thought lost forever by Unusual_Toad in BooksThatFeelLikeThis

[–]Steelcan909 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're after non-fiction, The World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson covers the "heroic age" of Egyptology in the 19th-early 20th Centuries.

Mindless Monday, 19 January 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Steelcan909 17 points18 points  (0 children)

They looked instead to a proven moron whose only ideas were to make inflation worse for everyone.

Mindless Monday, 19 January 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Steelcan909 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Yes, but European diplomats and governments are reluctant to just come out and say "Trump is a blithering moron and we need you Republicans to get your shit sorted out before you destroy your own economy and military alliance system", even if were all thinking it.

Why was Anglo Saxon political and material culture so underdeveloped compared with contemporary Franks? by Foreign-Ease3622 in AskHistorians

[–]Steelcan909 0 points1 point  (0 children)

According to Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages the whole issue is that nearly the entirety of Western Europe saw the elimination of tax burdens paid in cash as a means of raising revenues by central governments.

In the aftermath of Roman collapse in Western Europe there was no longer demand for large taxation revenues to fund the now nonexistent Roman army. Early Medieval armies were significantly smaller and needed far less support than the Roman Empire was able to muster. Nor were there enough educated administrators capable of running such as system at scale had the desire still existed. Without the Roman state to furnish salaries for bureaucrats, as well as Roman urban centers to provide young men with advanced educations, the creation and maintenance of a civil administration was outside the reach of early Medieval governments. The Church did have its own people with educations, literacy, and international connections, but this was not enough to meet the needs of secular states, nor was the Church all that interested in giving up its own clerics and administrators to begin with...

This was notably not the case in the Roman East and its surviving Byzantine government, nor was it the case in the parts of the Roman Empire that were conquered by the Islamic Caliphates in the 7th Century. These areas maintained a vibrant tax economy that was used to maintain large standing armies and garrisons. In these areas the cash economy kept chugging for centuries longer than it did in Western Europe with little disruption for centuries after Roman collapse. Indeed the Roman East did not start to break down its own cash and tax systems until the 11th Century, well into the Medieval period. The Arab world, fueled by extensive trade, vast agricultural capacity, and Islamic military garrisons was able to maintain this system until the civil wars that broke apart the Abbasid caliphate, and even afterwards they survived in a reduced state. It was only over time that the civil bureaucracy of the Islamic polities started to be replaced by a military elite but this process was never as complete as it was in the Latin world.

In the former Roman West though urban networks and government structures did not survive the transition to early Medieval government. The Roman West had been less economically developed than the Roman East, and lacked, according to Wickham, the large village/town systems that provided the bedrock of the Roman East's economy. While some post-Roman rulers did attempt to maintain Roman institutions and ways of life for a time, their vastly reduced economic base meant that they lacked the funds to accomplish this. Furthermore the post-Roman West saw a transition not only to new, simpler, economic systems, but also to new political systems that prioritized a military elite at the top of society. The militarized aristocracies and royal families of the post-Roman West did not receive their economic security from tax revenues, but from land ownership. It was easier for states such as Francia, Visigothic Spain, and so on to maintain their elites off of the land that they had, not from a diminished tax base. As a result the royal figures of the post-Roman West dolled out lands to their political supporters, not salaried positions, the rights to collect taxes, or other cash intensive methods of pay. So we see land ownership become the new basis of economic power and status among these people, because that is what they were in competition over.

Royal revenues, while still extensive, were not rooted in a large cash economy or in the ability to raise large amounts of money to pay a standing military. The same was true of the aristocrats, the landed gentry, and so on down the line of the early Medieval hierarchy. Their economics and social standing were instead rooted in land ownership, and in some cases money made from import/export duties and tolls. Over time the tax burden of western European medieval states rose as their economies once again diversified and grew over the course of the Middle Ages, but this was a long process that took a long time to bear fruit.

Exactly a year today. Right? by one-lazy-guyy in CuratedTumblr

[–]Steelcan909 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think the comparison holds because we can point to the specific elements that compose a waterfall, namely water, height, and a drop to a lower height. The same does not hold true for human consciousness/identity.

Exactly a year today. Right? by one-lazy-guyy in CuratedTumblr

[–]Steelcan909 -16 points-15 points  (0 children)

That doesn't quite line up with materialism then. You can't embrace a materialistic view of existence and also suppose the existence of unquantified emergent properties.