Genealogical Knowledge in the Making: Tools, Practices, and Evidence in Early Modern Europe

✍ Scribed by Jost Eickmeyer (editor); Markus Friedrich (editor); Volker Bauer (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 360
• Series: Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History; 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

New series

This book examines how genealogical knowledge was produced in Early Modern Europe. It studies the procedures and difficulties of genealogical research and highlights the many challenges that had to be overcome in the process of establishing family histories. Archives had to be visited, stone inscriptions had to be deciphered, and countless individuals had to be identified. The papers demonstrate that none of these tasks were simple and that the results of the research efforts often remained ambivalent. How early modern genealogists went about studying these questions is investigated here in a comparative perspective that includes cases from Germany, Italy, France, Wales, and beyond.

✦ Table of Contents

Editorial
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Genealogy and the History of Knowledge
A Ridiculous Science?
The Production and Application of Genealogical Knowledge in Elias Reusner’s Academic and Poetical Works
How an Early Modern Genealogist got his Information
Writing Genealogy in Wales, c.1475–c.1640: Sources and Practitioners
Negotiating Genealogy in Eighteenth-Century Germany
The Production of Genealogical Knowledge and the Invention of Princely ‘Dynasties’
Family Input in the Making of a London Genealogical Directory in the Eighteenth Century
The Genealogist at Work
Genealogy and Heraldry as Means of Noble Self-Affirmation in Italy: the Case of the Cesi (c.1477–1630)
The Production of Genealogical Knowledge for the Arrangement of Archives of Noble Families (Portugal, Fifteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries)
Generation, Theft, and Dynasty in Eighteenth-Century Württemberg
How to Disentangle Four Generations of Anthonii Matthaei – and Why
Index