Genealogical Diagrams

Notes

This page, still to be written, will introduce two medieval stemmata, each of which is the oldest of its type and probably points back to methods used in late antiquity to diagram genealogy. One is the kinship of Cunigunde, a formal display of a queen's personal descent from the emperor Charlemagne, and the other is the twiglike stemma of Lambert, Canon of Saint-Omer, a rough set of notes for private use:

• The Carolingian ancestry of Cunigunde
• Lambert's notes on his Flemish family

The page will also argue that stemmata were not made exclusively for display and boasting, but were also— perhaps even primarily— graphic tools to test and prove legal issues in a clear way that would quickly silence pettifoggers:

• Three uses of stemmata to prove legal issues

The Library of Latin Diagrams by Jean-Baptiste Piggin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.