What’s in a word? The etymology and historiography of dynasty – renaissance Europe and beyond

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces the problematic way in which the word ‘dynasty’ has evolved in western languages and historiography. Analysing European historical dictionaries (sixteenth century to present), and thousands of printed book titles (fifteenth–twentieth centuries), it shows how the word's meaning shifted significantly following publication of volume 5 of the Encylopédie in 1755 – from its ancient sense of ‘government, regime’ per se, to ‘a hereditary line of princes’ specifically. This relatively recent linguistic change has created a risk of anachronism and conceptual confusion in twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship on early modern Europe, where ‘dynasty’ has been variously taken, e.g. to refer to the history of government, succession practices and/or royal subjectivity. The article outlines the findings of a major project on the Jagiellonian dynasty (c.1385–1572) which has tackled this linguistic-conceptual problem, by attempting to recover how medieval/Renaissance sources described this ruling lineage in an era before ‘dynasty-as-family’ had entered political-historical vocabulary.