Department of English

• Monday, March 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich) for a talk titled “Kinship Diagrams and the Quest to Dematerialize Relatedness.”

Professor Teuscher writes:

"Since antiquity, most systematic accounts of kinship in Western Europe had evolved around the transmission of material or immaterial “things”: property, a crown, the succession to offices and rights. In the eleventh century, however, heated debates about incest prohibitions among some of the Catholic church’s leading scholars led to the development in canon law of a completely new systematization and quantification of kinship relations. This new model explicitly aimed to transcend the material world, property, and juridical status, relying instead on facts of physiology, descent, and sex, in ways that can easily be mistaken to be about “biology” in a modern sense. Paradoxically, this attempt at dematerializing kinship brought about a whole new material culture of genealogical diagrams and artefacts that will be the focus of my presentation. While those from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were mainly meant to inform ecclesiastic courts, as time progressed, the canon law systematization of kinship was transferred over to secular law and administration, helping to implement new forms of inequality and hierarchy based on birth descent."

Simon Teuscher is professor of medieval history at the University of Zurich. His research interests include the history of urban societies, relatedness, and administrative cultures in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. His books include Lords’ Rights and Peasants’ Stories (Penn 2012) and (with Erdmute Alber, David Sabean, and Tatjana Thelen), The Politics of Making Kinship: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Berghahn 2023), and he is currently completing a monograph on medieval theories of kinship.