Title: Joan A. Holladay. Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages.
Abstract: Medieval people were at least as interested in their ancestors as are modern people searching genealogical websites for their great-grandparents. Accounts of rulers always stressed their families. In the Middle Ages, of course, there were no parish records, newspaper obituaries, or censuses on which to draw, much less genealogical websites, so information on family history and the succession of rulers had to be pieced together from administrative records, charters in church archives, narrative accounts of events, and family memory. Equally important for medieval people as discovering ancestors and predecessors in office was depicting these lines of descent to create a memory for the future. Where modern genealogists are usually content with an ancestor’s name, medieval genealogists wanted to illustrate them. A family tree created in the High and late Middle Ages typically consisted of a series of roundels, each including a miniature representation of a person labeled with his or her name, joined together by lines.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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