Bilatéralité vs conceptions androcentriques de la parenté en Europe : quelques réflexions à partir des arbores consanguinitatis de la fin du Moyen Âge

The article examines some ways in which scholars of the late Middle Ages used canon law conceptualizations of kinship to visualize and understand kinship more broadly. A particular focus is on the diagram of the arbor consanguinitatis. The latter had originally been developed to define which kin relations fell under ecclesiastic marriage prohibitions. But in the course of the later Middle Ages it was among other things used in attempts to understand kinship as an element in the organization of society or in genealogical practices. An important branch of historical kinship research in the tradition of Jack Goody and Claude Lévi-Strauss used to assume that catholic canon law conceptualizations of kinship stood in the way of androcentric conceptions, favored weak forms of kinship organization and thus contributed to the uniqueness of the West and its individualism. In contrast, the article argues that important androcentric conceptualizations, in particular patrilinear ones, developed not only despite canon law, but that canon law was involved in their emergence and transformation