ABSTRACT
As an initiation into the practical workings of the conceptual complex of heredity, we shall begin on legal ground, focusing on that part of inheritance which intersects with the law, identifying what Michel Serres might have called a “regional epistemology.”1 Heredity, insofar as it concerned early-modern lawmakers, was a process and a pattern of movement indicated by the Latin terminology, transmittere ad heredes, literally, “to send across or beyond to heirs.” The goods transmitted were primarily property and social identity, each of which relied upon the other to great extent for defi nition and legitimation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a different kind of good-a moral, metaphysical good that was legible on the body and transmitted through the blood-joined the list of hereditary concerns. But this part of the story will occupy later pages.
