What’s in a Word? The Etymology and Historiography of Dynasty – Renaissance Europe and Beyond

Abstract

The history of dynasties per se -'the timeless topoi of dynastic power' -is today intensively studied by historians. 1 Yet the history of 'dynasty' as a word or concept has not received significant attention, in spite of the word's ubiquity across many fields and its enduring resonance in wider culture. 2 This article suggests that the story of 'dynasty' the word or idea might significantly complicate our study of 'dynasty' the topic. It argues that the term 'dynasty' is in fact surprisingly etymologically unstable, both in the past and the present, rendering it a problematic term for historians. This ancient word's meaning in historical (and wider) discourse has changed fundamentally in the past 250 years, and in the process also diversified, acquiring multiple, alternative, potentially incompatible uses. The long-term change in the word's meaning exposes historians to the risk of serious anachronism, of misreading our pre-modern sources. The modern plurality of meanings, meanwhile, carries the risk that our own language as scholars is inconsistent, imprecise and unsteady, and that meaning is gradually leaking out of this familiar super-word altogether.This article will explore the problem of the word 'dynasty' in four steps: etymology, historiography, Jagiellonians, and implications. We will first trace the word's etymology from Aristotle, using both historical dictionaries and bibliographical data from seven historic libraries: its peaceable existence in the medieval and early modern periods, through the ferment of the nineteenth century, up to the present. The modern (post 1950s) historiography on dynasties in early modern Europe (c.1450-1700) will then be used as a case-study, to show how in this one field the word confusion over 'dynasty' (between historians and their sources, and amongst historians themselves) has created potential structural cracks in some of the major characterisations, or analytical models, of the period. In light of this, the key findings of a collaborative project on Europe's Jagiellonian dynasty (c.1386-1572) are here set out for the first time, as one example of how we might seek to navigate the linguistic pitfalls present in studying a major ruling lineage of the late medieval and early modern period. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for writing the history of times and places well beyond Renaissance Europe, not least in light of the global turn. C.S.L. Davies, in a series of celebrated articles on the Tudors, in which he discovered that sixteenth-century English monarchs did not go by that name, complained bitterly that the word 'Tudor' 'saturates modern writing on the period', 'warps our understanding', having 'acquired a spurious sense of glamour or magnificence'. 3 We might ask whether the same can be said of 'dynasty' itself, a word which Davies noted in passing was also absent in his sources but which, nonetheless, successfully managed to escaped his ire. 4 'Dynasty' has a thorny etymological history. 'Dynastia', when encountered in a sixteenth-c...

Framing Emptiness: Response to a Grandiloquent Discussion of Dynasty

“…', the author of a more thoughtful contribution to this collection asks. 8 Its editors associate current usage of the term 'dynasty' with hegemony and colonialism. What does it mean for me?…”