This would make a great chapter for that book. And wasn't it Marx, or
Engels, who particularly trotted out that myth? I wish I could remember the
source, but have lost much of my library.
At 16.19 09/07/97 -0400, you wrote:
>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
>
>
____
Julia Bolton Holloway, [log in to unmask]
http://members.aol.com/juliansite/Juliansite.htm
Julian of Norwich:
For a soul that seth the Maker of al thyng, all that is made semyth fulle
lytylle
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