George Jack Lecture 2025 Professor Wendy Scase --- (University of Birmingham) Thinking with Visual Devices: Genealogy and a Gentry Family of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

This lecture will focus on the genealogical and heraldic visualisations of Cheshire landowner Humphrey Newton (1466-1536) and his family. It will explore the use of visuals and diagrams in the writings of a gentry family on the cusp of the late medieval and early modern periods with particular focus on the visualisation of genealogy. Carefully planned and sumptuously decorated genealogical diagrams such as those representing the descents of English kings are familiar to scholars, but less well known are attempts to harness visual devices to represent the pedigrees of families lower down the social hierarchy. It will then consider where members of the household could have obtained models for their genealogical visualisations, and what these materials might contribute more broadly to our knowledge of the reception, use, and audiences for visual devices in the period.