ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Systems of quantifying kinship and descent in Western Europe, ca. 1100 and 1600

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, I

English Abstract

The paper examines systems of quantifying kinship and descent––and what they were meant to measure. It traces changes in how such systems were used in Western Europe over the extended period between 1000 and 1600, and investigates underlying assumptions about what is transmitted by descent. The oldest elaborate systems of kinship quantification, the first extant diagrams to support the calculation of degrees of relatedness, and the first specialized treatises on this topic were entirely unrelated to the transmission of either blood or biological traits. Little by little kinship quantification was applied to new purposes: to implement the incest prohibitions of the Catholic church, or to reinterpret ideas about “natural friendship” among kin in the writings of Aristotle who did not himself operate with a graduation of kinship. Only in the fifteenth century, were elaborate quantifications also applied in procedures of measure noble descent, the purity of Christian blood and admixtures of blood between different categories defined by ancestral origins in the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and in their early colonies. Such uses paved the way for racial taxonomies. While the principles of calculation and the diagrams that facilitated them, remained largely the same, their purposes and the ideas of what was shared among kin changed radically.

Author

• Simon Teuscher, University of Zurich