HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

DYNASTIC HISTORY 227Family trees appeared in conjunction with genealogical texts, sometimesas illustrations of them, sometimes as a visual representationof them for the purposes of memory, although diagrams of the familygo back at least to Roman times. Survivals of such materials arerare, however, before the twelfth century, when one of the mostfamous trees, the Welf family tree, appeared appended to the Welffamily history. 47 Most of these diagrams were organized with contemporariesat the bottom and progenitors at the top, reversing thenorms of the modern family tree (which appeared in early moderntimes). Here too the influence of religious models was felt in theform of ‘trees of consanguinity’ and biblical genealogies, like thosecreated by Peter of Poitiers in his study aid, the Compendium historiein genealogia Christi. 48Toward the end of the Middle Ages, as literacy became morewidespread, new families created dynastic texts. Italian merchant familiesof the later fourteenth century and afterwards sometimes createdfamily trees for their ricordanze books, and sometimes genealogies,and these very occasionally turned into fuller accounts of the historyof the family. Their purpose seems to have been in part to accountfor families not only blasted apart by the ravages of plague but alsocut off from their ancestors and collateral relatives by their twelfthandthirteenth-century migration to cities. 49Probably one of the most marked features of dynastic history, however,was the frequency with which it might be reworked or continued,its potentially “living” quality. 50 Writers of fifteenth-centuryvernacular histories were drawing on earlier rhymed vernacular chroniclesand Latin foundation or patron histories; in some cases thematerials had lain fallow for two centuries before being revived. 51Genicot has shown with the genealogy of the counts of Boulogne,begun in the late eleventh century, how a genealogical tradition (thisnot a bare genealogy but one with a simple text) might change overtime. 52 The Norman histories were, in Elisabeth van Houts’s phrase,47Schmidt (1983), 431.48Klapisch-Zuber (1991).49Klapisch-Zuber (1986). Most ricordanze books, however, do not contain familytrees and only a very small percentage have more than a simple tree or list.50Genicot (1975), 27.51Johanek (1992), 207–08.52Genicot (1975b).