Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century

Articles on the significance of genealogy and kinship ties in determining political events in the middle ages.

In recent decades historians have become increasingly aware of the value of prosopography as an auxiliary science standing at the crossroads between anthropology, genealogy, demography and social history. It is now developing as an independent research discipline of real benefit to medievalists. The geographically and chronologically wide-ranging subjects of the essays in this collection, by scholars from the British Isles and the Continent, are united bya common theme, namely the significance of genealogy and kinship ties in determining political events in the middle ages. The papers, including a review of the history of prosopography and some of its major successes as a method by Karl Ferdinand Werner, range from general considerations of prosopographical and genealogical methodology (including discussion of Anglo-Norman royal charters) to specific analyses of individual political and kinship groups (including the genealogy of the counts of Anjou and a rehabilitation of the prosopographical material in Wace's Roman de Rou). The main geographic focus is England and France from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, but other areas as diverse as Celtic Ireland and the Latin Principality of Antioch also come under prosopographical scrutiny.

Contributors: DAVID E. THORNTON, ANNE WILLIAMS, C.P. LEWIS, DAVID BATES, ELISABETH VAN HOUTS, EMMA COWNIE, JUDITH GREEN, JOHN S. MOORE, K.S.B. KEATS-ROHAN, CHRISTIAN SETTIPANI, HUBERT GUILLOTEL, KATHLEEN THOMPSON, VERONIQUE GAZEAU, MICHEL BUR, ALAN V. MURRAY, DANIEL POWER.

Dr K S B Keats-Rohan is Director of the Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research and Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford.

Daniel Power is Professor of Medieval History at Swansea University. He is the author of a number of works concerning France and the British Isles in the Central Middle Ages, including The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (2004). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (of London) and of the Royal Historical Society.

Elisabeth van Houts is Honorary Professor of European Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College.