'Mes souvenirs sont peut-être reconstruits': Medieval Studies, Medievalism, and the Scholarly and Popular Memories of the 'Right of the Lord's First Night'
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2005
Abstract
Since the establishment of modern academic discourse in the nineteenth century, medieval (and other) scholars have insisted on separating scholarly from affective approaches. A look at the reception history of the Right of the Lord's First Night demonstrates how popular collective/cultural memories have defied and are still defying more than 100 years of published scholarship on the subject. As a result, the essay proposes that medievalism, a meta-perspective that takes into account the affective as well as scholarly reception of the middle ages in postmedieval times, provides a viable conciliatory alternative to the stand-off between the two intimately related but outwardly mutually exclusive discourses negotiating the past in contemporary culture.
WMU ScholarWorks Citation
Utz, Richard, "'Mes souvenirs sont peut-être reconstruits': Medieval Studies, Medievalism, and the Scholarly and Popular Memories of the 'Right of the Lord's First Night'" (2005). English Faculty Publications. 7.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/english_pubs/7
Published Citation
Utz, Richard. "'Mes souvenirs sont peut-être reconstruits': Medieval Studies, Medievalism, and the Scholarly and Popular Memories of the 'Right of the Lord's First Night,'" Philologie im Netz. 31 (2005): 49-59.