: In early twelfth-century Flanders, Walter of Vladslo was an eminent peer, second in eminence only to the Count of Flanders. Yet according to Galbert of Bruges’s twelfth-century journal, Walter of Vladslo was also a cuckold. Men, unlike women, face the problem of biological parental uncertainty. As Galbert’s history makes clear, this parental knowledge gender inequality can have dire consequences for eminent men as well as ordinary men.Walter of Vladslo’s wife deceived him by switching infants. Galbert of Bruges reported:
The father truly believed to be his son the boy, to whom the supposed mother, the wife of the aforesaid Walter, had earlier pretended dishonestly to have given birth. But the infant to whom she had given birth had died in childbirth. She thus replaced him with the shoemaker’s son,

