We began this study with a critical reading of the myth regarding medieval concepts of the flat shape of the earth. There are, of course, some people who, still today, are convinced that scholars until the time of Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492 assumed that the Earth was a flat disk.1 Subsequently I have dealt with the myth of the chastity belt, and I believe that I could demonstrate how much the idea concerning this allegedly medieval invention to protect a wife’s chastity during her husband’s absence also pertains to the world of myths, primarily established and colported in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. To conclude this study,
I propose to look at a third, highly fashionable myth, also closely connected with love, marriage, sexuality, and power in the Middle Ages, the lord’s privilege to take the virginity of the newly-wed bride, that is, to sleep with her in the first night after the marriage rituals have been completed. As William Chester Jordan defines this myth, “([m]any modern writers of historical fiction imagine a Middle Ages in which lords had a special right that inhered in them as lords, hence the phrase ‘droit du seigneur,’ which literally means nothing more than the ‘the lord’s right.’ More suggestive and describing the same putative right is the Latin phrase ius primae noctice, or ‘right of the first night.’ ”
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...it_Du_Seigneur
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