This book examines how genealogical knowledge was produced in Early Modern Europe. It studies the procedures and difficulties of genealogical research and highlights the many challenges that had to be overcome in the process of establishing family histories. Archives had to be visited, stone inscriptions had to be deciphered, and countless individuals had to be identified. The papers demonstrate that none of these tasks were simple and that the results of the research efforts often remained ambivalent. How early modern genealogists went about studying these questions is investigated here in a comparative perspective that includes cases from Germany, Italy, France, Wales, and beyond.

Between 1514 and 1663 the genre known as Heroides, coined by Ovid, was maintained almost entirely by modern Latin poets. This book considers the period, which has up to now remained almost unheeded in the history of the genre. It looks at the collections of epistles by relevant authors (Eobanus Hessus, Andreas Alenus, Jacob Bidermann, Baudouin Cabiliau, Jean Vincart, Jacob Balde) in their context within the history of literature, considers their intertextual relationships and functional directions and renders them accessible with individual analyses of example poems.