medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> I'd like to ask something about the NT genealogies of Christ. Do we have any
> grounds for assuming that ancient or medieval readers would have understood
> Biblical genealogies in the "genealogical" manner that we ourselves do?
A "genealogical" interest in Biblical genealogies had certainly
become explicit by the 12th century when, as literature on the Tree
of Jesse makes clear, the ideological importance of noble inheritance
made a genealogical perspective understandable. The structure of
Peter of Poitier's Genealogy of Christ is even more explicit:
manuscripts generally take the form of a rotulus on which the OT
genealogy of Christ is traced in a manner entirely comparable to the
"family trees" made for noble families. Arguably, the extensive
series of images of Christ's ancestors that also begin to emerge in
the later 12th century, such as in the stained glass of the
clerestory in the new east end of Canterbury Cathedral, respond to
the same values. In artistic terms, this appears to be a new
phenomenon, and one might suspect that, as you suggest, before this
time, the biblical genealogies were considered quite differently.
Jim Bugslag
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