Hans Hummer begins his book with a challenging statement—“The fact of the matter is kinship did not exist in Europe during the Middle Ages” (3). His suggestion is that modern scholars have read their own ideas back onto the past (yet again) and created the idea of kinship as a defining category and of its centrality to medieval political life. In setting up this proposition, he makes some excellent points, especially that we need to focus on what medieval peoples cared about, not what we do; as well as on the idea that medieval kinship terminology was as much about “intimacy” as “blood relationships” (155).
Hummer's book is divided into three sections, by which he organizes the thematic presentation of his argument. With the first section covering the background of the idea of kinship; the second his own definitions regarding kinship; the third his source base from early medieval western Europe.
Section 1 is basically a historiography of the idea of kinship from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. This work, especially chapter 1, is a fascinating recounting of the scholars who developed the idea of kinship and, in Hummer's terms, read it back into the past. Hummer notes, astutely, that “Kinship can seem so obvious to us as a sociological given that it is difficult to see it as having a history” (31), and he does good work to provide the history of it in scholarship. The more modern piece, beginning in chapter 3, is more fraught as he engages with the Annales school (several pages of which are solely cited to Bloch and Duby) and then the work of scholars like Schmid and Brunner. Here, Hummer's own tone comes through in the text much more when he repeatedly notes the perceived shortcomings of these authors and their conceptions of kinship, governance, and other topics.
Section 2 provides an outline of what Hummer thinks kinship is and how to use it. It is here that he reveals that what he meant by kinship does not exist is that kinship did exist, but it is not reducible to biology; and that it includes all consciously formed bonds and was not “an autonomous base structure independent of other domains such as religion and politics” (108). Here, in chapter 4 in particular, Hummer follows the recent trend in anthropology (on which he relies a great deal) of destroying kinship, only to resuscitate it in new and different forms. While in chapter 5, he interrogates ancient sources, occasionally through the lens of his nineteenth century scholars, to see what they say about kinship—concluding with an investigation of Augustine's own family through his writings.
Section 3 is where Hummer musters his evidence and progresses chronologically through Frankish territory, from the Merovingian period to the Carolingian, to demonstrate that kinship was not constructed biologically but existed within a religiously constructed worldview. In chapter 6, this involves a nice discussion of Sidonious and his many letters, in which he constructed a structure of intimates, utilizing kinship language. Similar examples are adduced in the other chapters (this section is the bulk of the book), with the aim to demonstrate that relationships were constructed by individuals beyond biological kinship and that there was little care for biological kinship demonstrated in the writings of the Franks; while at the same time there was a great deal of care for the spiritual world evinced in those same writings. Here as well Hummer challenges the uses of cartularies and how they have been used for modern purposes rather than the purposes for which they were constructed.
In totality, this is a book that deserves to be read by all medievalists concerned about kinship and genealogy, which is a lot of us. That said, there are problems with some of the concepts with which Hummer deals. First, at a meta level, he speaks repeatedly for medieval Europe, as in the opening quotation above, but he is actually only concerned with early medieval Frankish territories. This is a privilege denied to those of us who work on non-West territories and something to be aware of in all works, not just this one. Second, while I am wholly in agreement about not reading modern concepts back into the past, the idea that if you have to work hard to find kinship relations means kinship relations were not important (seen specifically in reference to Bouchard on page eighty-nine and the whole discipline of prosopography throughout) is just incorrect. There are many things in the medieval past that we need to work to uncover—as Hummer does for Hrabanus's natal family (263), and it is worthwhile to do so and advances our understanding of the past. Additionally, while terminology does change and can be utilized for different things (I think of a well-known story of a departmental secretary many years ago who signed letters “your humble servant” when he was no one's servant!), medieval people did use kinship terminology for kinship—AND to express intimacy. There is so much to the medieval world that we do not, and cannot, understand because so much has been lost, including the mindset and what constituted “common knowledge.” Thus, while Hummer's book is a fascinating challenge to ideas of kinship in medieval studies, I think it goes too far in his focus on dismissing kinship as a category of discourse. One example of which would his suggestion at the beginning that the lack of a “De consanguinitate” (4) indicates that medieval peoples did not care about kinship.
Hummer's use of anthropology and his fascinating historiography of the use and idea of kinship in western scholarship are valuable additions to the field. He is correct, as well, that we should not take the ideas of previous generations for granted, or as rote fact, and thus his challenge to modern scholarship advances medieval studies as a whole.
