Hummer Hans - Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

This study examines expressions of kinship between the late Roman Empire in the West and the twelfth century in Europe. It will focus on the areas of Continental Europe ultimately harnessed to Frankish rule and the aristocrats who dominated the historical stage and were responsible for its records. It will assume that the familial consciousness of those who made up this aristocracy was inseparable from the institutions which gave shape to the administrative and political order. That is, it will not assume that kin groups were (are?) self-evident and autonomous social phenomena whose existence has been obscured by our sources which must be purged of rhetorical contaminations so that we can see more clearly the social reality beyond them, and then processed by the methods of social history into an historical vision of the past recognizable to us. Rather, the study explores the ways that kinship, as a constituent of indigenous social cosmologies, expresses itself through, and is expressed by, the political and religious order, so much so that it is nearly impossible to speak of the former without accounting for changes in the latter.

Studies of kinship generally presume that kinship can be treated as a consistent and basic organizing principle of human social organization and that its patterns can be derived from historical records by tracing genealogical connections between individuals within a kin group. Indeed, its naturalness seems self-evident since historical sources are replete with references to kin ties and frequently deploy the language of kinship to widen the circle of affective bonds beyond blood relations. Despite the ubiquity of kinship in the sources, the genealogies have not been particularly easy to retrieve from the medieval record. As soon as one begins to trace out a kin group, the trail just as quickly fades, often leaving behind a smattering of names which seem to belong to descendants, but lack the context necessary to establish firm genealogical connections (assuming they had existed).

Why this should be the case is not so easily explained. Source discontinuities pose some problems in that their unevennessthe density of documentation in a region giving way to a thinner record, to records of qualitatively different sort, or to none at allcan make it impossible to trace relationships. However, even in instances where we do possess a concentration of documents, genealogical connections remain surprisingly elusive. Given the conviction that kinship was a basic element of medieval social life, why were they not exhibited more clearly?