European family makes a serious claim to bridge it with its genealogy. The unsupported claim of the Roman house of Massimo to a descent from Fabius Maximus is respectable beside such legends as that which made Lévis-Mirepoix head of the priestly tribe of Levi, but even the boast of such remote ancestry has now become rare. The ancient sovereign houses of Europe are, for the most part, content to attach themselves to some ancestor who, when the mist that followed the fall of the Western empire begins to lift, is seen rallying with his sword some group of spearmen.
Authorities.—Genealogical works have been published in such abundance that the bibliographies of the subject are already substantial volumes. Amongst the earlier books from the press may be noted Benvenuto de San Georgio’s Montisferrati marchionum et principum regiae propagium successionumque series (1515); Pingonius’s Arbor gentilitiae Sabaudiae Saxoniaeque domus (1521); Gebweiler’s Epitome regii ac vetustissimi ortus Caroli V. et Ferdinandi I., omniumque archiducum Austriae et comitum Habsburgiensium (1527): Meyer’s work on the counts of Flanders (1531), and Du Boulay’s genealogies of the dukes of Lorraine (1547). Later in the same century Reineck of Helmstadt put forth many works having a wider genealogical scope, and we may cite Henninges’s Genealogiae Saxonicae (1587) and Theatrum genealogicum (1598), and Reusner’s Opus genealogicum catholicum (1589–1592). For the politically inconvenient falseness of François de Rosières’ Stemmata Lotharingiae ac Barri ducum (1580), wherein the dukes of Lorraine were deduced from the line of Charlemagne, the author was sent to the Bastille by the parlement of Paris and his book suppressed.
The 17th century saw the production in England of Dugdale’s great Baronage (1675–1676), a work which still holds a respectable place by reason of its citation of authorities, and of Sandford’s history of the royal house. In the same century André Duchesne, the historian of the Montmorencys, Pierre d’Hozier, the chronicler of the house of La Rochefoucauld, Rittershusius, Imhoff, Spener, Lohmeier and many others contribute to the body of continental genealogies. Pierre de Guibours, known as Père Anselme de Ste Marie, published in 1674 the first edition of his magnificent Histoire généalogique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne et de la maison du roy et des anciens barons du royaume. Of this encyclopaedic work a third and complete edition appeared in 1726–1733. A modern edition under the editorship of M. Potier de Courcy began to be issued in 1873, but remains incomplete. Among 18th-century work Johann Hübner’s Bibliotheca genealogica (1729) and Genealogische Tabellen (1725–1733), with Lenzen’s commentary on the latter work (c. 1756), may be signalized, with Gatterer’s Handbuch der Genealogie (1761) and his Abriss der Genealogie (1788), the latter an early manual on the science of genealogy. Hergott’s Genealogia diplomatica augustae gentis Habsburgicae (1737) is the imperial genealogy compiled by the emperor’s own historiographer.
Modern peerages in England may be said to date from that of Arthur Collins, whose one-volume first edition was published in 1709. The fifth edition appeared in 1778, in eight volumes, to be republished in 1812 by Sir Egerton Brydges, the “Baptist Hatton” of Disraeli’s novel, who corrected many legendary pedigrees, besides inserting his own forged descent from a common ancestor with the dukes of Chandos. From this work and from the Irish peerage of Lodge (as re-edited by Archdall) most of the later peerages have quarried their material. With these may be named the baronetages of Wotton and Betham. Of modern popular peerages and baronetages that of Burke has been published since 1822 in many editions and now appears yearly. Most important for the historian are the Complete Peerage of G. E. C[ockayne] (2nd ed., 1910), and the Complete Baronetage of the same author. The Peerage of Scotland (1769) of Sir Robert Douglas of Glenbervie came to a second edition in 1813, edited by J. P. Wood, and the whole work has been revised and re-edited by Sir James Balfour Paul (1904, &c.). Of the popular manuals of English untitled families, Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Commoners (1833–1838) is now brought up to date from time to time and reissued as the Landed Gentry.
Lists of pedigrees in English printed works are supplied by Marshall’s Genealogist’s Guide (1903), while pedigrees in the manuscript collections of the British Museum are indexed in the list of R. Sims (1849). Valuable genealogical material will be found in such periodicals as the Genealogist, the Herald and Genealogist, the Topographer and Genealogist, Collectanea topographica et genealogica, Miscellanea genealogica et heraldica and the Ancestor. In Germany the Deutscher Herold is the organ of the Berlin Heraldic and Genealogical Society. The Nederlandsche Leeuw is a similar publication in the Low Countries.
Modern criticism of the older genealogical methods will be found in J. H. Round’s Peerage and Pedigree, 2 vols. (London, 1910), and in other volumes by the same author. The Harleian Society has published many volumes of the Herald’s Visitations; and the British Record Society’s publications, supplying a key to a vast mass of wills, Chancery suits and marriage licences, are of still greater importance. The Victoria History of the Counties of England includes genealogies of the ancient English county families still among the land-owning classes. English pedigrees of the age before the Conquest are collected in W. G. Searle’s Anglo-Saxon Bishops, Kings and Nobles (1899).
Genealogical dictionaries of noble French families include Victor de Saint Allais’s Nobiliaire universel (21 vols., 1872–1877) and Aubert de la Chenaye-Desbois’ Dictionnaire de la noblesse (15 vols., 1863–1876). A sumptuous work on the genealogy and heraldry of the ancient duchy of Savoy by Count Amédée de Foras began to appear in 1863. Spain has Lopez de Haro’s Nobiliario genealogico de los reyes y títulos de España. Italy has the Teatro araldico of Tettoni and Saladini (1841–1848), Litti’s Famiglie celebri and an Annuario della nobilità. Such annuals are now published more or less intermittently in many European countries. Finland has a Ridderscap och Adels Kalender, Belgium the Annuaire de la noblesse, the Dutch Netherlands an Adelsboek, Denmark the Adels-Garbog and Russia the Annuaire of Ermerin. But chief of all such publications is the ancient Almanach de Gotha, containing the modern kinship of royal and princely houses, and now accompanied by volumes dealing with the houses of German and Austrian counts and barons, and with houses ennobled in modern times by patent. A useful modern reference book for students of history is Stokvis’s Manuel d’histoire et de généalogie de tous les états du globe (1888–1893). The best manual for the English genealogist is Walter Rye’s Records and Record Searching (1897), while an ill-arranged but valuable bibliography of English and foreign works on the subject is that of George Gatfield (1892). (O. Ba.)
GENELLI, GIOVANNI BUONAVENTURA (1798–1868), German painter, was born at Berlin on the 28th of September 1798. He was the son of Janus Genelli, a painter whose landscapes are still preserved in the Schloss at Berlin, and grandson to Joseph Genelli, a Roman embroiderer employed to found a school of gobelins by Frederick the Great. Buonaventura Genelli first took lessons from his father and then became a student of the Berlin academy. After serving his time in the guards he went with a stipend to Rome, where he lived ten years, a friend and assistant to Koch the landscape painter, a colleague of the sculptor Ernst Hähnel (1811–1891), Reinhart, Overbeck and Führich, all of whom made a name in art. In 1830 he was commissioned by Dr Härtel to adorn a villa at Leipzig with frescoes, but quarrelling with this patron he withdrew to Munich, where he earned a scanty livelihood at first, though he succeeded at last in acquiring repute as an illustrative and figure draughtsman. In 1859 he was appointed a professor at Weimar, where he died on the 13th of November 1868. Genelli painted few pictures, and it is very rare to find his canvases in public galleries, but there are six of his compositions in oil in the Schack collection at Munich. These and numerous water-colours, as well as designs for engravings and lithographs, reveal an artist of considerable power whose ideal was the antique, but who was also fascinated by the works of Michelangelo. Though a German by birth, his spirit was unlike that of Overbeck or Führich, whose art was reminiscent of the old masters of their own country. He seemed to hark back to the land of his fathers and endeavour to revive the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. Subtle in thought and powerfully conceived, his compositions are usually mythological, but full of matter, energetic and fiery in execution, and marked almost invariably by daring effects of foreshortening. Impeded by straitened means, the artist seems frequently to have drawn from imagination rather than from life, and much of his anatomy of muscle is in consequence conventional and false. But none the less Genelli merits his reputation as a bold and imaginative artist, and his name deserves to be remembered beyond the narrow limits of the early schools of Munich and Weimar.
GENERAL (Lat. generalis, of or relating to a genus, kind or class), a term which, from its pointing to all or most of the members of a class, the whole of an area, &c. as opposed to “particular” or to “local,” is hence used in various shades of meaning, for that which is prevalent, usual, widespread or miscellaneous, indefinite, vague. It has been added to the titles of various officials, military officers and others; thus the head of a religious order is the “superior-general,” more usually the “general,” and we find the same combination in such offices as that of “accountant-general,” “postmaster-general,” “attorney-” or “solicitor-general,” and many others, the additional word implying that the official in question is of superior rank, as having a wider
