Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages

Images and image cycles with genealogical content were everywhere in the high and later Middle Ages. They represent families related by blood as well as successive office holders and appear as family trees and lineages of single figures in manuscripts, on walls and in stained glass, and in sculpture and metalwork. Yet art historians have hardly remarked on the frequency of these images. Considering the physical contexts and functions of these works alongside the goals of their patrons, this volume examines groups of figural genealogies ranging across northern Europe and dating from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century. Joan A. Holladay considers how they were used to legitimize rulers and support their political and territorial goals, to reinforce archbishops' rights to crown kings, to cement relationships between families of founders and their monastic foundations, and to commemorate the dead. The flexibility and legibility of this genre was key to its widespread use.

1. Rivalling/reviving Rome: environmental genealogies in palace halls; 2. Structuring the past: history and genealogy in thirteenth-century England; 3. Crowning the king: coronation rights at Cologne and Reims; 4. Advertizing allegiances: tombs and tomb cycles; 5. Flattering founders: genealogical imagery in cloister chronicles.

Joan A. Holladay is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas, Austin. Author of Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel Willehalm Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century (1997) and Co-Editor of Gothic Sculpture in America, volume 3 (2016), she has held positions as Visiting Senior Fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art; Hohenberg Chair of Excellence, University of Memphis; and NEH Professor of the Humanities, Colgate University. In 2008, she received the Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of Texas's College of Fine Arts.