Rereading Isidore

Notes

About 620 AD, Isidore of Seville wrote a kind of dictionary in Latin, the Etymologiae. In it, the Spanish bishop sets out the meanings of a wide range of learned terms, along with conjectures about their origins. This listing provides the earliest evidence that stemma diagrams were not only used in cerebral matters of philosophy, but also in the highly practical matter of tracing family relationships.

The Etymologiae is not arranged alphabetically, but by subject. Parts v, vi and vii of Book IX are devoted to kin relationships.

Entry vi.28 offers this definition of the Latin word stemma: By stemmata one denotes the twigs that lawyers draw so they can then measure the degrees of kinship, for example, he's the son, he's the father, he's the grandfather, he's a paternal cousin and so on.[*]Stemmata dicuntur ramusculi, quos advocati faciunt in genere, cum gradus cognationum partiuntur, ut puta: ille filius, ille pater, ille avus, ille agnatus [Patrologia: et cognatus], et ceteri, quorum figurae haec [Patrologia: ...hae sunt]. -- Orig. IX.vi.28 Isidore does not suggest any etymology for stemma, and closes the entry with the indication: These persons are in the diagrams.

The diagrams that follow are three radically different variations of the so-called arbor consanguinatis, a matrix diagram which has been used for two millennia to compute which kinsfolk may marry without committing incest, or which kinsfolk may inherit if a person dies without a testament. [*]That in the Visigothic Codex Euricianum appears to have been drafted in about 475, that in the Byzantine Notitia Dignitatum in about 400. See: Schadt , Hermann. Die Darstellungen der Arbores Consanguinitatis und der Arbores Affinitatis: Bildschemata in juristischen Handschriften. Tubingen: Wasmuth, 1982. The three matrices which Isidore presents are triangular, rectangular and concentric (the links are to digital manuscripts.[*]This E-Codices manuscript of the Etymologiae now at St. Gallen in Switzerland has been dated to 880-890, some 250 years after Isidore's death.).

Isidore does not explore the diagrams' legal significance, but merely offers them as scholarly references, doubtless obtained from some legal text he has seen, in support of the survey of kinship vocabulary which he has just outlined.

The standard interpretation through the centuries— and it is easy to see why scholars would jump to such a conclusion— has been that the figures which Isidore presents after his stemma definition are the selfsame stemmata which he has just defined. After all, the matrices do include father, son, grandfather and paternal cousin. In the surviving manuscripts of the Etymologiae, the text of the stemma definition is generally copied onto a page of its own and placed above the triangular matrix, as if it were a caption attached to that diagram.

We do not know what ancient jurists called such a matrix, but legal writings, particularly the Sentences of Julius Paulus (pre-300),[*]Gradus autem dicti sunt a similitudine scalarum locurumve proclivium, quoted at Schadt 24 describe computation of relationships as being "like climbing a ladder" or scala. It would be plausible to suppose that the matrix itself might have been referred to, at last informally, as a scala. Over later centuries, these matrices were to acquire four different technical names [*]Arbor juris, arbor consanguinatis, arbor affinitatis (which has a slightly different purpose) and stemma. and stemma came to be seen as one synonym for this type of diagram. The oldest surviving document containing a matrix of this type, from the late 9th century, has become known as the Stemma of Cujas, after a collector, Jacques Cujas, who published it in 1564.[*]Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L'Arbre des Familles. Paris: Éd. de La Martinière, c 2003. Here page 32; also Ombre 37. Lindsay's modern critical edition of the Etymologiae [*]Lindsay, Wallace Martin (ed). Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarvm sive originvm libri XX. Oxford: Clarendon, 1911. headlines the matrices as Stemma I, II and III. The pre-eminent modern analyst of such matrices, Hermann Schadt, also uses the term stemma throughout his book as a synonym to broadly describe consanguinity and affinity tables, perhaps for want of any other term that could embrace all of them.

There are however good grounds for thinking this usage is a misnomer, or at least not in harmony with pre-medieval Latin usage, and that editors and scholars have misunderstood Isidore's intention. One must question whether Isidore really did intend his reader to believe that a matrix was in any sense the same thing as a stemma:

Isidore describes a stemma as looking like ramusculi, literally small branches or twigs, although the tables of consanguinity in no way resemble twigs.
The matrices, especially the triangular form, are eminently unsuitable for mapping out the pedigrees and descent of real-life families. Whereas twig-like diagrams can be split and joined at will, a matrix presents any family solely from the standpoint of its first person, the ego or ipse.
To use a matrix as a documentary record of a real-life family, each cell would have to contain large numbers of kin who among themselves would be only distant cousins. Many other cells would be empty. A triangular matrix would add to the confusion by recording great-great-grandchildren in direct proximity to distant ancestors.
The Latin term stemma was demonstrably used in antiquity as an abstract noun to denote a particular genealogy, not a legal scheme. The evidence that the word might also had been used as a noun to concretely describe any diagram is neutral, since we have only the barest of documentary evidence pre-dating Isidore about any genealogical diagrams at all.
It is obvious from the nature of the matter that there can never be a single, standard pattern to describe a genus or family, since the number of children, and even of spouses, varies node by node. There is no one-size-fits-all template. Every genealogy is specific.[*]It is of course true that a breeding or ancestry chart, strictly limited to two parents, four grandparents and so on, is a template, but these are modern creations, and there is no evidence whatever that animal pedigrees or genetic-heritage records were compiled in ancient times. If Isidore had wished to illustrate a stemma in that sense, he could only have used a real-life or fictional example. It is plausible to suppose that he might have been reluctant to include such a trite thing in his encylopaedic work and did not bother, or that this was one of the unfinished matters he left when he died. By contrast, the incentive for him to insert the matrices was strong, as the systematic illustration does enrich the many kinship-term definitions offered in part vi.
His words only loosely link his stemma definition to the figures that follow, saying that the matrices depict the kin relationships which he has just named (in fact all the kin relationships making up part vi of Book IX), but the text does not explicitly state that the figures are stemmata as such. Some manuscript copies have different wordings where the linking is more explicit.[*]Lindsay, op. cit.: fig. haec esse debent : figura est . but this appears to be an alteration or corruption by later scribes.
Isidore, or the unidentified text he is quoting from (little of Isidore's content is original: most is drawn from older books), specifically describes where a stemma is used: in a lawyer's office. In some ways, law practice has not greatly changed in 2,000 years. Any lawyer, when approached by a client, spends a great deal of time trying to ascertain and weigh up the facts. Once conclusions are reached, it is often a relatively quick matter to apply the law to those facts. In dealing with inheritance, the legal advisor would be principally occupied during the consultation with sketching the client's twig-like "family tree" in order to identify who the grandparents had been, who the paternal relatives were and so on, as Isidore describes. Using such a real-life stemma, the legal degrees of kinship could then be counted through the nodes. The counting method of itself, as taught in these matrices, would not need to be redrawn during each client interview: a well-off lawyer might possess a copy of the matrix in his library and a poorer one would rely on what he had long ago absorbed into memory by studying the arbor consanguinatis diagram during his legal apprenticeship.

All of these considerations suggest that readers of Isidore have been misled over many centuries, substituting the matrices for the ramusculi which Isidore and indeed any other Latin speaker in Antiquity would have had in mind. One only needs to consider the casual way in which Persius assimilates the ramus to its stemma to see how naturally these terms belonged with one another in pre-medieval Latin.

An deceat pulmonem rumpere uentis stemmate quod Tusco ramum millesime ducis censoremue tuum uel quod trabeate salutas? (Saturae, 3.28. See English translations by Kline and Ramsay.) [*]Ramsay's Loeb translation, "Are you to puff out your lungs with pride because you come of Tuscan stock, yourself the thousandth of the line?" is probably not quite accurate: Persius is more likely to be saying "you're an Nth twig of some ancient stemma." Kline's comes closer: "Would you prefer to burst your lungs boasting, yours is the thousandth branch on an Etruscan tree?"

It is notable that the most scrupulous recent translation into English of the Etymologiae, under Stephen A. Barney,[*]Barney, Stephen A., et al.. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. was careful not to conflate the stemma definition in this passage with the diagrams below it, or to perpetuate this long-lived misunderstanding. It reads:

The family tree that legal advisors draw up concerning lineage is called a stemma, where the degrees of relationship are spelled out - as, for example, 'this one is the son, this one is the father, this one the grandfather, this one the relative on the father's side,' and all the rest. Here are the figures for these relationships [my italics].

I have not yet been able to check the other recent translation, [*]Throop, Priscilla. Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. Charlotte: MedievalMS, 2005. The annotated translation into French by Marc Reydellet (Les langues et les groupes sociaux. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984) offers no comment on the passage. issued in 2005 by Priscilla Throop.

It seems far more likely that legal practice in the late Roman period, when Isidore's sources were written, employed two separate diagrams: on the one hand, an ad-hoc stemma drawn up to represent an actual family, with personal names, and on the other hand, a matrix of kinship terms as a computational aid to assist in discovering the degree of kinship between any two persons on the true-life stemma. Follow the link to see the schematic depiction on this website of the two diagrams side by side.

If this argument is correct, Isidore's stemma definition can be seen in a fresh light, as a important witness to the common use of twiglike diagrams named stemmata in western antiquity to graphically portray family relationships.

Next: The Transition to Print

Previous: Cassiodorus

Back to History Table of Contents

Back to Macro-Typography on the Web