This last chapter provides a bridge between the political uses of royal genealogies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through a short study of a unique genre – genealogical maps – which enjoyed unparalleled success in England. Both royal genealogy and maps used word and image to define and celebrate political sovereignty; both were kinds of texts which, thanks to their aesthetic appeal, provided a pleasant and useful way of communicating information. The polymath John Dee famously wrote that maps could ‘beautify…Halls, Parlours, Chambers, Galleries, Studies, or Libraries’ of monarchs, noblemen, gentry, and scholars. Dee was also a great expert on genealogies, and, in order to boost his own social status and reputation, he commissioned a vellum roll over six feet in length decorated with heraldry and a self-portrait, representing his descent from King Arthur and his kinship with the Tudors, other European monarchs, and even the rulers of the Indies. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the antiquary Robert Burton highlighted the benefits of looking at maps for the melancholic person: ‘what pleasure’, he wrote, ‘can there now be, then to view those elaborate Maps of Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, &c?’ Interestingly, Burton ranked heraldry (and, implicitly, its germane art, genealogy) at the same level as maps: ‘What so full of content, as to read, walk, and see Maps, Pictures, Statues, Jewels, marbles…so exquisite and pleasing to be beheld’ – a statement valid, as he added a few lines later, also for ‘Devices, Escutchions, coats of arms’. Heraldry and genealogy had a double-sided nature as didactic texts and decorative objects.

Genealogies shared with maps symbolic and social meanings: symbolically, they exalted the (seemingly) natural connection between the nation and the monarch and the strength of the political state; socially, they visualised national consciousness, ethnocentrism, and secular power. Connoisseurs of antiquity and geography stored samples of these two genres close to one another in their libraries. For instance, to cast a glance outside England, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini stored in his print collection maps together with portraits and genealogies of rulers.