The Invisible House: Agentic Prosopography and the Recovery of Dispersed Medieval Kinship

Medieval genealogy is exceptionally vulnerable to the structure of its archive. Surviving documents privilege inheritance, title, property and institutional continuity, while cadets, cousins, wives, clerics, household associates, witnesses, patrons and other lateral actors frequently disappear from conventional narratives. Later pedigrees can therefore impose linearity upon relationships that may once have been experienced as far more distributed communities of kinship, obligation, patronage and memory.

This paper asks whether generative AI can make a longstanding but previously impractical form of historical inquiry more achievable: reconstructing relationships dispersed across people, places, archives and documentary traditions without collapsing possibility into proof. Developed through The Invisible House, a study of Ridel/Rudel networks across eleventh- and twelfth-century western France, southern Italy and England, the method treats the aristocratic family not simply as a succession of inheritors but as a distributed social system.

An LLM-assisted research environment interrogates charters, cartularies, editions, prosopographical databases, spatial relationships and scholarship iteratively and at scale, allowing weak connections between otherwise separated actors and archives to become visible. Rather than treating nominal similarity as evidence of identity, the method distinguishes source assertions, relational inferences and identity hypotheses, preserving the epistemic status of each claim. Generated hypotheses must survive human source inspection and attempts at falsification before entering the historical argument.

The paper argues that generative AI's most productive role in medieval prosopography is therefore not automated genealogy, but an interrogative layer between archive and scholar. By recovering overlooked actors and relationships, it may also expose the limits of later pedigree traditions themselves: beneath the linear genealogies through which medieval families were subsequently remembered lie older, dispersed networks whose surviving traces suggest that kinship, identity and family memory followed more complicated paths.