The jigsaw puzzle of fitting together individuals into family groups and demonstrable lines of descent is, for most people, the essence of genealogy. But when one begins working with lineages as early as the 10th century, one must reconsider what "family" means -- because a blood relationship didn't always meet the test for a titled landowner more concerned with inheritance and maintaining a power base than with warm feelings based on DNA. Bouchard is an expert in the subject of family in medieval Europe, the understanding of politics in the context of family-based marital strategies, and the transformations which the Continental aristocracy underwent around A.D. 1000. She deals with the temptation among non-genealogically trained historians to make unfounded assumptions based on name similarities, and describes how an otherwise patrilineally inclined nobleman might indeed pay more attention to his mother's lineage if hers was the more powerful family, and how best to make use of the Church's definition of incest (marriage within seven degrees of kinship) and the legal documents such an issue might create. Besides the establishment of the Rudophian dynasty in Burgundy and the Berengarians in Italy, and family power structures among the counts of Autumn, she gives special attention to the Bosonids in Provence, about whom I have not seen much other analytical work published. There is also an intriguing appendix on the "problem of the three Bernards" in relation to the dukes of Aquitaine in the 9th century. And the author provides not only a very thorough bibliography but more than a dozen detailed charts of the families under discussion.

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