PERHAPS THE MOST influential, and the most contested, of writings on genealogy is Michel Foucault's 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Its definition works against all expectations: genealogy is opposed to sanguinity, continuity, and tradition because it is defined against the notion of the survival of transhistorical essences. It likewise stands in contrast to the notion of evolution that would establish a fixed origin, a time of an immutable and uncorrupted truth, which can only be the matter of metaphysics and myth. Nevertheless, Foucauldian genealogy does not refute transmission; rather, it acknowledges transmission that operates through violent interruptions and (re)emergences, and is neither dependent nor calqued on the biological sequence of human generations and linear time that traditionally serve as narrative frameworks for history. Foucauldian history traces the transmission of singularities, their (dis)appearance and return under different guises, through an analytics of discursive shifts in the apparatus (le dispositif), a system of relations between the elements of a heterogeneous ensemble consisting of various discursive and non-discursive mechanisms, techniques, and knowledge structures (discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions). Finally, it considers sanguinity – that is, blood – to be a symbolics rather than a physiology.

Genealogy has been a central notion in the study of medieval literature, culture, and society for several decades, yet medievalists have deployed genealogy at the other extreme from the Foucauldian method of “genealogical analysis.” They have focused on genre definition and classification of source material, rather than on discursive or epistemological issues. In its most restrictive meaning, “the Middle Ages called Genealogia … a self-standing work, written or drawn to present a filiation of one family or individual,” a work “that establishes the ascendancy of one personage or lineage, and nothing more.” For the discipline of history, genealogy is a written or hand-drawn document of filiation that forms a clear-cut genre, and thus provides a model for reading the medieval historical mindset. But the dilemma of how exactly to read medieval genealogy can be summarized in two questions: Can medieval genealogy be narrowly identified with filiation, primogeniture, and bloodline? Does its narrative reflect a historical reality of medieval practices of kinship or is it an effect of discourse?