Historians sometimes have the bad habit of assuming that laws and edicts passed in bygone eras actually meant something. They note a law that prohibits Behavior X, and assume that this somehow suppressed that behavior, without noting that the same government continued to pass similar laws regularly and frequently over the following decades or centuries, suggesting that the original prohibition had little if any effect. In reality, ancient and medieval states were far weaker than we ever assume, and deviant... Read more