Introduction
In the High Middle Ages, nobility began to commission genealogical literature to, among other goals, resist the centralization of royal power. However, despite the European increasing focus on patrilineage and primogeniture between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, bilaterality remained important in both Portuguese and Castilian kinship structures (Ribeiro Miranda 2011).
One of the objectives of the project “FEMIber” (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program, 2023-) is to explore kinship relations in two relevant and underresearched works: the Crónica de Castilla and the Livro de Linhagens do Deão, albeit from different perspectives. In the first phase of the project, a prosopographical database of all women mentioned in the Crónica de Castilla was generated. With women being greatly unterrepresented, formalizing and quantifying their ties demonstrated that the work’s kinship model was neither agnatic nor vertical.
In the following phase of the project, a different digital approach is applied to the account Livro de Linhagens do Deão (ca. 1343), the second of the three extant Portuguese genealogies. Despite several editions —the last one by Alves Moreira and Martins Ferreira published in 2022 —–, this anonymous work has received rather limited scholarly attention. The male-centered notion of lineage in the title is extracted from its prologue, but it is quite misleading, since the account is not limited to fathers and (first-born) sons. In fact, in addition to a remarkably high number of women, the work includes multiple marriages, concubines, illegitimate children, as well as people who did not produce offspring.
Data
The data is being collected manually. The table “People” records the context and the lineage(s) in which people are mentioned, next to their gender, titles, posts/offices, toponyms, and events they are linked to. Regarding their interpersonal consanguineal and affinal ties, three types are recorded: parent/child, spouses/partners, and siblings. These edges are undirected, and there is no distinction between inferred and explicit ties, as both the medieval and modern reader would have no issues identifying them. Generally, the model is aligned with the factoid approach (Bradley / Pasin 2015), which does not question the validity of the source’s claims. However, it departs from it by going beyond recording only explicit statements. This modification is based on the gender-related, patriarchal constraints expressed in the Livro de Linhagens do Deão.
Methodology
The bilateral practice of relatedness in this Portuguese narrative is explored with metrics of social network analysis. Via the net-based platform Nodegoat, common measures, such as degree, closeness, betweenness, and clustering coefficient, are used to show how this way of distant reading can lead to new insights, such as identifying the kinds of networks the included people form and the individuals’ structural significance. Furthermore, some simple genealogical statistics are conducted (identification of parents, number of marriages, tracking childlessness, titles, etc.), while the inclusion of gender adds more structure to the model and helps detect the gender bias in the work.
Objectives
In this paper, the Livro de Linhagens do Deão serves as an exploratory environment to help draw conclusions about the usefulness —and limitations —of these methods for this type of historical narratives. The data extracted from the first five sections is used to present the issues encountered in data modeling (e.g., people’s identification, name linkage, textual inconsistencies), as well as to share preliminary visualizations. The selected sections are of high genealogical density, focused on the descendants of Egas Gomes de Sousa and prominently placed at the beginning of the work.
Understood as a strategy of political legitimization, lineage and kinship structures help identify compositional tendencies and patterns within each family as well as in the work as a whole. While the data is by no means complete, the greater presence of women expands our understanding of the familial order of that period. Additionally, by looking at the distribution of people’s attributes across lineages and segments, it will be possible to see if and how these elements contribute to the individual and collective identity in the mid-fourteenth-century Portugal.
Acknowledgement
This work is part of the project which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101064789.