The Genealogical Imagination

Abstract

Abstract There Can Be little doubt that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries English men and women became interested in the histories of their own families in ways they had not been previously. The cultural assumptions and social conventions driving such interests are apparent in the various remarks quoted in the last chapter. Students of the history of historiography have been quick to point out the great strides in historical methodology which are owed to the principal architects of systematic family history, the heralds, and have rightly singled out particular famous examples, from Camden to Dugdale, for their erudition and attention to detail. They have also pointed out the degree to which accurate family history, based on documentary and physical evidence (such as monuments) was a slow process of development, with snares of error impeding the path towards a rigorous and sceptical establishment of genealogies. This picture is too simplistic. While it is correct as to the scholarly virtues and insights of certain leading antiquaries, some but not all of whom were heralds, it overstates the collective importance of the heralds as a group. Moreover, it again assumes that the driving impulse behind the advances in historical method during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a small number of highly educated individuals, while failing to allot any credit to the efforts of the very families which they were studying. To some degree this is a consequence of a rather anachronistic projection of our modern distinction between the ‘professional’ and the ‘amateur’, a division of historical labour that is virtually worthless before the late nineteenth century. It also reflects a lingering positivist notion of the gradual progress of historical knowledge, as the myths and legends accepted by a credulous Middle Ages were gradually dispelled by a heroic few.