I contribute my stone to the quarry of the mythological invention of the
Middle Ages.
In France, Alain Boureau (my master) has recently published a book on the
invention of the droit de cuissage (the supposed right of the lord to spend
the wedding night with the wife of his servile dependants ).
In France, the droit de cuissage was and is commonplace for the feudal
backwardness. It was used during the Ancien Regime, first by the royal
power fighting against aristocratic local power, then by Beaumarchais in
pre-revolutionnary times to criticize Louis XV. The deputees at the
Assemblee Constituante had it in the back of their minds when they
abolished th remnants of feudalism. In the 19th century, when the Middle
Ages were rediscovered, it became an important (pseudo-)scientific debate
between catholics (for the return of the monarchical rule) and
anti-clericals (trying to consolidate republican ideology in France) and
each of them frantically dwelled in the medieval documents (starting to be
published at the time) to find "proofs". Today droit de cuissage it is the
French language equivalent of the American "sexual harrassment".
Alain Boureau investigates the medieval evidences and concludes that droit
de cuissage didn't exist in the Middle Ages. He then studies every
occurences of the myths since the 13th century and tries to contextualize
the use of them. He follows two promissing lines of French historiography.
First of all, when studying the feudal system, one should speak of a 'long'
Middle Age i.e. until 1789. Secondly, French historians, marxists,
neo-marxists or structuralists of the 50s and 60s studied feudalism mostly
as a rational socio-economic system that one could reduce to numbers and
graphs. A. Boureau shows that narrativity and histoire des mentalites
pervade Feudalism.
Alain Boureau, Le droit de cuissage. La fabrication d'un mythe XIIIe-XXe
siecle, Paris, Albin Michel, 1995.
Popular Misconceptions also have an history !!!!
Amities
Charles de Miramon
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