Despite these strictures, interest in ‘fables and endless genealogies’ has remained a pervasive feature of society up to the present day. The two facets of this interest are inextricably bound together. Genealogies are meaningless without the attendant ‘fables’, or rather the social discourses conceptualised through ‘fables’, which inscribe meaning upon them. Likewise, discourses of family, ethnicity and nationality are commonly instrumentalised through the medium of genealogy. During the Middle Ages, this same tendency stimulated the production of genealogical writing right across Europe. This book offers the first full analysis of one particularly rich instance of such genealogical writing, which developed in medieval Wales.

Just as social discourses emerge from and are maintained by society (or those with power in society), so genealogy does not exist without its inherent and inescapable subjectivity. Put simply, genealogy is ‘about’ individuals or families of individuals. In any representation of genealogy, there is present an implicit or explicit desire to demonstrate the relationships between specific people. The subjective and instrumental aspects of genealogy are well encapsulated by the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of ‘genealogy’: ‘an account of one's descent from an ancestor or ancestors, by enumeration of the intermediate persons; a pedigree.’ For the purpose of defining medieval genealogies, one might go further. Although many medieval genealogies assume the form of ‘an account of one's descent’ or a ‘pedigree’, some genealogies take a different perspective, describing, for example, the descendants rather than ancestors of an individual. Either way, the crucial aspect of a genealogy according to this definition is that it is an account of the relations of a specified subject.