I trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already.

However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.