Books, both real ones and those described in texts, are effective vehicles for women’s genealogies in medieval narratives because of their tactile form and ability to be transmitted. Medieval writers understood books not merely as containing genealogies but also as key participants in genealogical construction and propagation. This chapter explores books in the early twelfth-century Vita sanctae Margaretae reginae Scotorum, commissioned by the new English queen, Edith/Matilda, about her mother, Margaret of Scotland. The Vita asserts a maternal inheritance for Edith/Matilda premised in part on the literary patronage, physical interactions with books, and pious reading of mother and daughter, creating a nonhuman genealogy parallel to their biological one that negotiates a complex Anglo-Scottish-Norman history. This chapter examines the Vita in relation to depictions of book patronage by Emma of Normandy, Adela of Blois, and Constance FitzGilbert; submerged book miracles in the lives of Cuthbert, Columba, and Modwenna; and Margaret’s extant gospel book.

The mobility of elite secular women due to marriage, exile, or ambition is often a key feature of genealogical narratives in medieval chronicles and genealogical rolls. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a particular literary interest in the political consequences and legacies attached to women’s movements, evinced by the prevalence of mobile female founders, such as Albina, Inge, and Margaret of Scotland. This chapter examines how transregional genealogies are constructed in the relationship between text and diagram in works associated with Queen Eleanor of Provence; her mother, Beatrice of Savoy; and her granddaughter Mary of Woodstock. It focuses first on female ancestors and strands of matrilineage in royal genealogical rolls, including the prominent ribbon between Margaret of Scotland and Edith/Matilda. It then turns to Nicolas Trevet’s little-studied Les Cronicles, dedicated to Mary, to discuss an unusual story of Margaret of Scotland’s mother, Agatha of Hungry, accompanied by a matrilineal diagram.

Genealogy, as depicted in medieval texts and images, is an expansive concept that extends beyond the male-oriented model of patrilineage and includes various approaches to matrilineage and women’s legacies. Because genealogy is always constructed, regardless of how much writers insist on its naturalness, literary sources are key to revealing the imaginative ways medieval writers and their patrons conveyed women-oriented narratives. Through an overview of medieval sources and recent scholarship, this chapter opens up the medieval notion of genealogy to show how it both included female characters and drew upon characteristics typical of elite women’s lives. The Introduction presents three features frequently associated with and useful for understanding women’s genealogies: a close relationship between lineage and material textuality, the importance of manuscript context, and mobile notions of time and geography. Analyses of an aristocratic matrilineal diagram and an excerpt of the Anglo-Norman family romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn illustrate these features.