It really isn't gratuitous though - it's a pseudo-mediaeval universe, this is what people were like back then, like it or not.
Hmm. Not so sure. More like it's what GRRM fantasises things were like back then.
People have continued to be people throughout history, a mixture of good and bad. It would be wrong to assume that people always thought in the exact same way we do now* but they seem to have acted for good and ill in a way not much different from present times.
The period that most often gets mentioned in reference to Martin's books is the War of the Roses - rife with conflicts, murders and executions so I don’t see some of the more adult events and themes in his book to be too out of place for his mostly high medieval influenced ‘period’.
That aside, speaking as someone who is trying to write historical fiction there is a real quandary on how to approach murder, rape and other sexual violence. We can be sure that it was going on, especially during wars when laws are often less enforced or ignored (see the end result of many sieges throughout history) but as a writer of fiction do you ignore sexual violence completely
where it would have existed or find a way of addressing it?
There's a character in the book I'm trying to write that there is documentary evidence that shows he was a pretty nasty piece of work, including murder, theft and at least one rape (of a nun). I'm 'lucky' in this particular case that the person in question, while a named character doesn't appear in person in the main narrative I've written but needs to be mentioned for context (he's an important character and although dead by the time of the main story has had a significant effect on the earlier events and the subsequent actions of other main characters (including royalty))**.
What I would hate to do would be to write about sexual violence in a sensationalist or exploitative way but not mentioning it at all seems to be too much of a cop-out and a bit too Victorian in its bowdlerisation. So I'm unsure how differently Martin should approach it. I think it would be fair to say he wasn't writing for the screen and as I said previously, I think that for some the take on sex and nudity in GoT on screen is perhaps more gratuitous than in similar productions by HBO such as Rome.
Researching medieval law can be interesting to reveal just how similar our society is rather than how different to earlier times. Even a lot of our current laws on sexual violence are incredibly recent and when you read about how courts undermined new or existing laws against rape in medieval times, some similarities are as striking as they are unpleasant to read - The Statute of Westminster in 1285 had a specific section on rape that supposedly codified rape as one of the serious crimes of the land. In practice local courts either ignored or undermined this law by deterring complaints through attacking the reputation of women who brought claims, unpleasant pre-trial processes such as virginity checks, acquitting defendants and bringing claims of false accusation with subsequent severe punishment against women whose claims were not proven.
Apologies about the lengthy reply, not getting at you in any way just something I have been thinking about since this thread started.
* E.g. There's a tendency in a lot of medieval historical fiction for characters to be quite anti-clerical in a way that would rarely have been the case - yes at particular times of dissatisfaction with the church and clergy but not a generally held opinion all the time. There are often characters in medieval historical fiction that are pretty much displaying a post-enlightenment view of the world, which conforms more to our view of the world now than the medieval one. Bernard Cornwall is particularly guilty of this one.
** It's set in the late Anglo Saxon period/Norman Conquest - narrative is mostly on events after 1051 but reference is made to events at least as far back as the mid 900s.
