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Many have heard of the infamous "jus primae noctis" or right of first night, the purported right of a lord to sleep with newlywed peasant brides. As Alain Boureau has shown, this was (as so often!) a post-medieval invention rather than an actual historical practice (cue @fakehistoryhunter.net!)

I regret to report that it is actually impossible to successfully search online for any information about a (non-extant) church called "Notre-Dame-des-Brûlés" 😅

OK why isn't all the "Inventaire-sommaire des archives départementales antérieures à 1790" digitized online somewhere?!

Extremely obscure trivia question, has anyone run across instances in medieval French where "lettre(s)" is treated as masculine? I'm surprised to have encountered an example from the registers of the parlement of Paris, where you'd think they'd have seen the word often enough to know it's feminine!

'Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.'

I actually exclaimed "whoa!" when I got to the blending step—remarkable results here! Fantastic tutorial for any of us trying to get more legible microfilm images, massive thanks @elakdawalla.bsky.social!

Further adventures in French toponymy bring us to the wonderfully named Saint-Morice-aux-Riches-Hommes(-et-Femmes): Saint Maurice of the Rich Men (and Women)! While only the shorter form is used today, the 'and women' was used in the C14 (when, perhaps coincidentally, the lord was also a woman).

Say one has a photo of a microfilm of a manuscript that's (inevitably) rather grainy, anyone know the best way to clean it up a bit to make it more legible? I've got e.g. GIMP, plus other more rudimentary tools, but don't know what kinds of filters or other techniques would be best to apply...

Absolute devastation in this Wikipedia article

My new research hobby is wandering around Dicotopo at a high zoom level and marveling at the micro-toponymy of rural landscapes: names for everything! (And I *still* can't find all of the places mentioned in my documents. Where *is* the Motte Loys?)

I would like to dedicate today's hours of fruitless research to all the many generations of (French) historians who said weirdly specific shit without giving a single friggin' citation to follow up 🙃