The Cultivation of Heredity

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the theme of ancestry recurs again and again in literature, politics, and ordinary social discourse. Like the notion of antiquity, to which it was often related, ancestry figures prominently in the early modern perception of the past and its relationship to the present. This chapter will explore some of the shifts in early modern attitudes to ancestry; the next chapter will deal more specifically with the relation between these changing perceptions and the social circulation of historical, and especially genealogical, knowledge, with special attention to what is often called the ‘pedigree craze’ of the late sixteenth century, and to the shift in attitudes to the legitimacy of imagined or fabricated lineages. Pride in one’s ancestors is in some form or other a characteristic of most cultures, but it is especially important to those in which individual identity is shaped by family ties and blood relationships. In some societies, the relationship to ancestors can be felt as religious experience.