Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

Hans Hummer was born in Oklahoma and raised in Kansas. He completed his doctorate at UCLA in 1997, and in 1999 he joined the history faculty at Wayne State University, where he teaches medieval European and world history. He has published articles on the political and social history of early medieval Europe in Deutsches Archiv, Early Medieval Europe, and Francia. In 2007 the Society for French Historical Studies recognized his book Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm 600-1000 with the David Pinkney Award, granted annually to the most distinguished book in French history published by a North American scholar.