This paper explores the significance of spiritual genealogy as a historiographical device in Franciscan representations of the order’s past during the medieval and early modern period. Certain visual exponents of this heuristic – murals, engravings, and manuscript paintings of Franciscan family trees – have been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. I argue that these visual family trees are only one manifestation of a broader tendency to represent and analyse Franciscan order history in genealogical terms. Other manifestations include written historiography, as well as genealogical images other than trees. The versatility of these visual and verbal genealogical representations of the Franciscan past made them into an adaptable means for communicating a variety of messages, apart from emphasizing Franciscan community in a general sense.First, I discuss the main developments in visual representations of the Franciscan family tree during the late medieval period, in tandem with closely related written perspectives on Franciscan order history, so as to point out the perennial conversation between its textual and visual manifestations. By shifting away some of the attention from the visual tree-model in favour of seeing it as part of a larger tendency in textual culture to represent order history in genealogical and/or arboreal terms, it becomes clear that late medieval Franciscan genealogical representations offer a particular, eschatological perspective on order history, associated with Spiritual and Observant Franciscan contexts.Second, my examination of the same phenomena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when family tree visualisations became much more widespread, suggests that the genealogia emerged as a particular form for organising and presenting written order histories, current among all Franciscan orders. I outline the contours of this diversified sub-set of Franciscan order historiography that employed genealogy as a versatile heuristic, connecting Franciscan communities to a shared familial past, often elaborating links or occasionally even claims to certain local territories.Overall, it shall become clear that textual and visual representations of the order’s past often – but not necessarily – went hand in hand, and that genealogical perspectives on Franciscan order history were a deeply-seated heuristic device that exceeded the visual rhetoric of the tree diagram.
Development of the Genealogical FamilySearch Database and Expanding Its Use to Map and Measure Multiple Generations of American Migration
