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The phrase crisis of the aristocracy represents a model of historical interpretation that undertakes to describe and explain critical phenomena affecting aristocratic society on the basis of socio-economic and ideological factors. In 1965 the English social historian Lawrence Stone introduced this concept to historical scholarship in his Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, using the English aristocracy as an example. Since then historians have generally agreed that the hypothesis of a general crisis of the aristocracy is extremely problematic…

Proof of noble birth or proof of ancestry meant evidence of representation of descent from 4, 8, 16, or more noble ancestors. Important primarily in German-speaking Europe, it was a normative instrument of exclusion intended to seal off an institutional or corporate/social inner sanctum from unwelcome intruders. To prove noble birth in the form of a so-called  Aufschwörung confirming an individual’s nobility or elevating him to the nobility, the individual being tested and the witnesses had to swear to the individual’s descent – nobility and legitimat…

Unquestionably honor, the “law of the nobility” (A. von Kotzebue, 1792), was a core value of the aristocracy; it has been able to maintain its legitimacy from the time of the corporatist ideology of the knights in the high Middle Ages to the present day (Nobility; Knight; Class consciousness). Recent studies of the social and cultural history of the early modern period have made the category of honor the absolute monarch of social relationships, but in the area of research on the nobility there …

1. Concept and forms Ever since Hecataeus of Miletus collected genealogíai (“information about [noble] families”) in the 6th century BCE, the term ‘genealogy’ has denoted the art of ascertaining the place of a subject within his or her biological kin (Latin genus or  gens), or of reconstructing and portraying the succession of generations within a family. The genealogical perspective may be the world's oldest and most widespread method for determining the class (Estates of the realm) and rank of a person in society and for recalling, recording, and presenting the past.In the e…