Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-231) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: genealogical awareness / Stéphane Jettot -- I. Enlightened locations and genealogical awareness. Middle-class genealogies in eighteenth-century Paris: fathers or progeny? / Nicolas Lyon-Caen and Mathieu Marraud -- Nobility and genealogy: circulation and appropriation of debates over nobility in genealogical history books in France during the early modern period / Valérie Piétri -- Mestizo police: administrative rationale versus Spanish blood (Mexico City, late eighteenth century) / Arnaud Exbalin -- II. Rethinking individual and family memories. 'Sighing for past greatness'? Dynastic senses of family identity in England c.1650-1800 / Henry French -- From dynastic to administrative directories: the changing scope of genealogical writings in eighteenth-century Germany / Volker Bauer -- 'Our domestic misfortunes': perpetuating the lineage at all costs in Prévost's Le Doyen de Killerine (1735-1740) / Audrey Faulot -- III. Renewed potentials for librarians, antiquarians and natural scientists. Ancestry in France: from privilege to proscription / William Doyle -- 'Minutely attentive to every circumstance': John Nichols and the culture of genealogy in the late eighteenth century / Julian Pooley -- The genealogical order and the emergence of the concept of 'race' in natural history / Claude-Olivier Doron.
Summary:
While their importance has been fully recognized and extensively studied in early modern Britain and in the Victorian period, the long eighteenth century has been too often presented as a black hole regarding genealogy. Enlightened values and urban sociability have been presented as inimical to the praise of ancestry and birth. In contrast, however, various studies on the continental or in the American colonies have shed light on the many uses of genealogies, even beyond the landed elite. Whether it be in the publishing industry, in urban corporations, in scientific discourses, genealogy was used not only as a resilient social practice, and a tool to include newcomers, to organise scientific and historical knowledge or to express various emotions. This volume aims to reconsider the flexibility of genealogical practices and their perpetual reconfiguration to meet renewed expectations in the period. Far from slowly vanishing under the blows of rationalism that would have delegitimized an ancient world based on various forms of hereditary determinism, The different contributions to this collective work demonstrate that genealogy is a pervasive tool to make sense of a fast-changing society.
Series:
Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment, 2634-8074 ; 2021:08
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.