IMC 2026: Sessions
Session 1325: Looking Back to the Future: Time, Memory, History, and Genealogy, IV - Genealogy, the Ancestor Effect
Wednesday 8 July 2026, 16:30-18:00
| Sponsor: | The Royal Studies Network |
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| Organiser: | Zita Rohr, Department of History & Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney |
| Moderator/Chair: | Zita Rohr, Department of History & Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney |
| Paper 1325-a | The Genealogy of Amals: Name-Giving Patterns and Time Framing (Language: English) Index terms: Genealogy and Prosopography, Language and Literature - Comparative, Politics and Diplomacy |
| Paper 1325-b | King Ecgberht and the Founding of England in Late Medieval Roll Chronicles (Language: English) Index terms: Genealogy and Prosopography, Hagiography, Language and Literature - Comparative |
| Paper 1325-c | Lineage, Image, and Devotion: Iconographic Configuration of the Dynastic Cult of St Louis in Late Medieval French Devotional Books, 14th Century (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - Painting, Gender Studies, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Religious Life |
| Abstract | Plutarch, writing of Pericles, observes that it is not amiss to wait and be ruled by time, 'the wisest counsellor of all'. Memories, sometimes understood to embody the 'photo-shopping' and refashioning of 'the blemishes of the past', have been refashioned, institutionalized, reinterpreted, and redeployed in a variety of contexts and polities. For Louis XI, history, 'the witness of time', really was 'life's teacher', recalling Cicero’s concept of magistra vita, the female embodiment of history in his commissioning of Le Rosier des guerres, a speculum for his heir the dauphin Charles. Genealogies have been altered, emphasized, and spun as foundational to the establishment of dynasties, kingdoms, regimes, and temporal sovereignties in response to particular priorities. Our four paper sessions explore time, memory, the received history of male authority set against the unexceptional reality of female agency, and genealogy concluding with a discussion in our round table fifth session focusing on the role of the orator/historian/chronicler/'spin doctor', unpicking Cicero’s question: 'by what other voice than that of the orator is history the witness of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, and the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality? |