Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe by Hans Hummer (review)

Rather than provide a structural account of how medieval kinship functioned, this provocative and engaging book takes a discursive approach to describing what being kin meant and how kinship contributed to group consciousness. Medieval kinship was more (or less) than blood relations: it was a spiritual relationship forged in medieval Christian patterns of thought and association.

Hummer devotes the substantial first third to unpacking the baggage that "kinship" has accumulated. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the work and personal lives of Johann Bachofen (d. 1887), Henry Maine (d. 1888), Fustel de Coulanges (d. 1889), John Ferguson McLennan (d. 1881), and Lewis Henry Morgan (d. 1881). Historicizing modern kinship studies reveals that long-dominant approaches had their origins in the melting pot of nineteenth-century reactionary politics and the emergent disciplines of social science. Hummer argues that each of these scholars' work was informed by a shared belief that "ancient" forms of kinship, which were still visible among colonized peoples, were being replaced by other forms of industrial civil society in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 describes how medieval evidence acquired a place within this evolutionary scheme, giving special attention to the entanglement of German medievalists with the work of early anthropologists like Maine. Even after anthropologists abandoned the idea that societies evolved from one stage to the next, kinship retained its status as a primary organizational principle, a social system that followed rules and procedures and could explain how stateless societies functioned. Chapter 3 describes how the rising tide of French and German structuralism, which began to ebb only in the first decade of this century, proceeded to study medieval kinship's peculiarly secular social mechanisms in an intensely spiritual world.

In chapter 4, Hummer proposes that we should instead seek out an "indigenous" (meaning emic) conception of medieval kinship. Where waistcoated anthropologists once presumed that biological kinship, being acquired at birth, is therefore at the origin of all other kinds of social structures, Hummer argues that kinship was only one element within the medieval "social cosmology," and that kin relations were always already shaped by other "domains" of sociality, particularly religion (109). Modern scholars have taken biological kinship to be fundamental, but for medieval people divinely forged links were infinitely more durable, more meaningful, and ultimately more real than carnal bonds. Chapter 5 locates the roots of this transcendental kinship in ancient philosophy. From Plato, to Aristotle, to Augustine, kinship was more a political than a biological association; Augustine's claim that God was his pater was a political statement as much as a biographical one, and one that challenged the Roman social order.

In the third part, Hummer demonstrates from western European case studies that the bonds of medieval kinship were primarily rooted in spirituality rather than biology. Chapter 6 discusses the immediate post-Roman episcopal aristocracy's cultivation of amicitia, exemplified by the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris, Ruricius of Limoges, and Avitus of Vienne, whose notions of kinship were bound up with imperial dignity, cosmopolitanism, and episcopal office-holding. In chapter 7, the development of a new kind of source-base—monastic charters and hagiographical foundation legends—demonstrates a reorientation of kinship-consciousness in the seventh century, away from old Roman aristocratic lines of expression and toward the perpetuity that only monastic establishments could then provide. In the process, lofty family pedigree became intertwined with the holiness of individual saints. Chapter 8 uses the encyclopedia of Hrabanus Maurus, Dhuoda's handbook for her son, and the history of Nithard to describe the ninth-century semantics of family relationships. That these authors spoke effusively about the spiritual significance of terms like pater and genitor but were reticent—from our point of view—about their own blood relations reveals how kinship was consistently taken to be part of a divinely ordained cosmic order even by laypersons such as Dhuoda and Nithard.

A complex argument in chapter 9 reveals this order in operation by inverting the typical prosopographical method. Instead of piecing together "an autonomous...