In the Middle Ages, the term “bastard” did not always carry a stigma. In fact, it only acquired the full force of an insult from the 19th century onward .  In the past, social experiences of illegitimate filiations were far more complex than we imagine today, as highlighted by the research program “Medieval Filiations, Identity, and Otherness.”

This is the story of a Live Twitch programmed in April 2025 by the very respectable show “De l’eau dans le gaz”, proposed by Terre des sciences , a recognised player in the scientific mediation ecosystem in the Pays de la Loire.

Since the challenge of our research program Medieval Filiations, Identity, Alterity (Fil_IAM) , supported from 2020 to 2025 by the National Research Agency (ANR), was to propose the development of a video game prototype to share research results, why not mobilize the gamers’ experience sharing channel, the Twitch channel  ?

However, some precautions specific to online media had to be taken, with its moderation strategies specific to the world of social networks. We thus avoided leaving the word “bastard” in the titles, we had to warn listeners to refrain from commenting on the “live” using the word “bastard”…

As soon as the interlocutors were not expressly acculturated to the fields of research in human and social sciences, talking about “bastards”, even in the Middle Ages, aroused spontaneous prejudice, a concern, resolved fairly quickly certainly, but very palpable…

This experience highlights a form of misunderstanding, a hiatus between the usual channels of historical knowledge (conferences, university publications) and the general public spaces in which researchers can be invited to share their research.

This invites us to reflect on the modes of transmission of science, on the way in which the codes and imaginations of different eras can collide, and therefore on the perspective and perspective that research provides. What can  knowledge of the logic of filiation in the Middle Ages bring us in the 21st century ?

A complex reading grid

The anecdote shows that the insulting connotation of the term is hard to shake! Perhaps the general public is also not always clear about what it means to do history. For, here, it is a matter of studying, as a historian, a social status, that of “bastards,” “illegitimate sons and daughters,” “natural children,” a variable of identity, the fruit of a legal construction rooted in the normative and political issues of the 9th – 13th centuries  (that of the illegitimacy of filiation).

This involves considering the social trajectories of those who suffer from the resulting legal and social incapacities, which are expressed in exclusion from the scope of ”  hereditas  ” (inability to inherit from one’s ancestors – unmarried parents, and to transmit outside of the bonds established in legitimate marriage), exclusion from access to the sacred orders of the Church, from many professions and corporations attached to the honorability, inherited, of their members, etc.

But this range of incapacities does not in itself reduce the possible grid of readings of what the illegitimacy of filiation or ”  bastardy  ” did to the medieval societies of Latin Europe.

Since 2012, as a medievalist, I have been leading multidisciplinary research programs to explore what illegitimate filiation does to kinship and how bastardy is expressed. With around forty specialists in history, legal history, historical demography, literature, civilization, and linguistics, we proposed a problematic framework in 2016 in Bastards and Bastardy in Medieval and Modern Europe , published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes. We addressed what bastardy reveals about past societies, its legal regimes, the place of bastards in Ancien Régime societies, between stigmatization, discrimination, and integration.

Among the contributions, that of Dominique Lagorgette, professor of language sciences at the University of Savoie Mont-Blanc, provided an overview of the meanings and uses of “bastards” and the often-associated expression ”  fils à putain  ” in a corpus of medieval texts, both literary and non-literary. The aim was to study how this word could move along the axiological scale. The conclusion was that ”  bastard  ” did not acquire its value as an insult until the 19th century  , “an insult by ricochet, insulting others but hurting the recipient.”

Between stigmatization and epithet of honor

Of course, the potential sexual connotation of the use of the word for the purpose of invective was not ignored in certain contexts of enunciation. Of course, the “stain” of “geniture,” as could also be expressed the fact of not being born to married parents in accordance with the socially constructed normative expectations of the time, established the foundations of a discourse on defilement and stain.

It is on this task that the title chosen by the specialist in bastardy in the modern era, Sylvie Steinberg , is built when she published in 2016 a reference work to study “beyond law and theology […] the lived dimension of the links between children and parents”.

The “cursed seed” denounced in Deuteronomy (for those who were not then the “bastards” of the Middle Ages, not even yet the “sons of priests”) is reinterpreted from text to text, deploying the semantic fields of impurity , corruption, incompleteness.

Similarly, the ”  defectus natalium  ” which defines an “irregularity” in access to priestly ordination induces an “alteration” of the quality of birth as a ”  vitium  ” of the body, or an incompleteness. Similarly, the pastoral promotion of the honorability of canonical marriage could be carried by the work on the language of the undefiled (nuptial) bed, the ”  thorus immaculatus  ” of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 13).

But not every use of the term “bastard” is tantamount to stigmatization in the Middle Ages. It can function as a title, almost an epithet of honor in certain configurations, particularly in noble groups. Marie-Lise Fieyre’s work on the bastards of the Bourbons may enrich research on bastards in noble and princely lineages .

A need for historicity

With the Fil_IAM program, the aim is to renew the reading grids of medieval bastardy, also mobilizing the methodological contributions of ”  disability studies  “. Thus, we grasp scripts of incapacity, the stakes of administrative-political operations of rehabilitation of sons and daughters marked by an alteration of the quality of their birth and more or less hindered in their social integration according to other variables (social group of belonging of the father, of the mother, gender, place in the sibling group, etc.).

The misunderstanding is clear: “bastards” is a bitter insult today, but historians can take hold of this object, insofar as it could indeed be the mark of an insult, but also insofar as it might not be…

The persistent misunderstandings have had the merit of revealing the need for historicity, for the dissemination of historical knowledge, particularly related to medieval periods, to all audiences.

Author Bio: Carole Avignon is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Angers