Fifteen Years after “The Genealogical Gaze”. Constructing Family Archives

Abstract

“The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries” was the title of a paper published in 2009. In that paper I argued that in Renaissance Florence, early modern England, and the Netherlands in the Golden Age, from the fourteenth century on, the “genealogical gaze” transfigured family archives into a cultural patrimony to be preserved, expanded, and transferred to future generations. In the same year that my article was published, it was welcomed by scholars of family archives at the Nova University of Lisbon as “part of a broader investigation into the birth of the patrimonial conception of archives, the most recent continuation of which was research into the occurrence of this conception precisely in family archives.” Fifteen years later, I was asked to revisit the brief history of the concept of the “genealogical gaze.” Following this review, I suggest some topics and methodologies that may enrich our understanding of family archives, past and present.