Genealogy as a Heuristic Device for Franciscan Order History in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity: Texts and Trees

This paper explores the significance of spiritual genealogy as a historiographical device in Franciscan representations of the order's past during the medieval and early modern period. Certain visual exponents of this heuristic – murals, engravings, and manuscript paintings of Franciscan family trees – have been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. I argue that these visual family trees are only one manifestation of a broader tendency to represent and analyse Franciscan order history in genealogical terms. Other manifestations include written historiography, as well as genealogical images other than trees. The versatility of these visual and verbal genealogical representations of the Franciscan past made them into an adaptable means for communicating a variety of messages, apart from emphasizing Franciscan community in a general sense.

First, I discuss the main developments in visual representations of the Franciscan family tree during the late medieval period, in tandem with closely related written perspectives on Franciscan order history, so as to point out the perennial conversation between its textual and visual manifestations. By shifting away some of the attention from the visual tree-model in favour of seeing it as part of a larger tendency in textual culture to represent order history in genealogical and/or arboreal terms, it becomes clear that late medieval Franciscan genealogical representations offer a particular, eschatological perspective on order history, associated with Spiritual and Observant Franciscan contexts.

Second, my examination of the same phenomena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when family tree visualisations became much more widespread, suggests that the genealogia emerged as a particular form for organising and presenting written order histories, current among all Franciscan orders. I outline the contours of this diversified sub-set of Franciscan order historiography that employed genealogy as a versatile heuristic, connecting Franciscan communities to a shared familial past, often elaborating links or occasionally even claims to certain local territories.

Overall, it shall become clear that textual and visual representations of the order's past often – but not necessarily – went hand in hand, and that genealogical perspectives on Franciscan order history were a deeply-seated heuristic device that exceeded the visual rhetoric of the tree diagram.

Medieval genealogical representations of Franciscan order history

The late medieval exponents of the Franciscan family tree serve as the starting point of my discussion of perspectives on Franciscan genealogy. This tree image is relatively well-known because it has recently attracted the attention of several art historians, who usually connect its iconography with Lignum Vitae representations (discussed below). In what follows I complement these existing perspectives by also considering coeval written accounts of the Franciscan family tree and again other (non-genealogical) Franciscan tree visualisations. As a result, it becomes evident that the late medieval Franciscan family tree iconography is indeed only one expression of a particular (not necessarily visual) perspective on Franciscan order history, articulated by ideologies of apocalyptic renewal associated with Spiritual and later Observant Franciscan contexts. My analysis of these late medieval Franciscan tree representations thus suggests that genealogy was the stuff of history.

Visualisations of the biblical tree of Jesse – widespread from the twelfth century onward – are an important step in the development toward the 'family tree' representations of the later Middle Ages. The motif is based on a prophecy in Isaiah 11:1 "And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root."¹ This was typically interpreted as foretelling the Incarnation and as referring to the genealogy of Christ.² Jesse is often depicted in a reclining position, with a stem growing from his abdomen that branches out to hold Old Testament ancestors of Christ and a centrally positioned Virgin (fig. 1).³

Figure 1.

Tree of Jesse, tympanum of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, sculpted by Pierre des Aubeaux, c. 1512–13 (later damaged by Huguenots). Photograph by the author.

During the later Middle Ages, family tree representations of religious orders eventually emerged from a complex melting...