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Flesh and Blood in Medieval Treatises on the 'Arbor Consanguinitatis'
| Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, there appeared several successive versions of treatises on the arbor consanguinitatis–a kinship diagram that was used to determine rights of inheritance, to calculate degrees of kinship, and to define the limits of incest. Many of these treatises digress into more general reflections on the nature and meaning of kinship. The paper examines such treatises in a comparative perspective in order to trace shifts in the understanding of kinship. Although the treatises deal with consanguinity, it is not before the 15th century that they begin to address the topic of sanguis. The paper presents the hypothesis that metaphors of flesh—that had dominated earlier—harmonized with concepts of kinship stressing the importance of marriage, of connections between living people, and of horizontal networks. In contrast, blood metaphors came with concepts that placed stronger emphasis on decent, connections between the living and the death, stable hierarchies, and coherent kin-groups.
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