Testing out the Route

Gabrielle Spiegel

  • The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage by Alain Boureau, translated by Lydia Cochrane
    Chicago, 310 pp, £15.25, September 1998, ISBN 0 226 06743 2

Confusion between myth and historical reality has long plagued medieval scholarship, and nothing illustrates this better than the question of the so-called droit de cuissage, which is the subject of Alain Boureau’s book. Known to the Anglophone world in its 19th-century Latin form as the jus primae noctis (a prudish rewriting of the French), the droit de cuissage stipulated the seigniorial lord’s right to deflower newly married brides on his domain.

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