Eugenics is one of those words that seems older than it is. The term itself, though, is actually younger than the movement that it has come to represent. Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin and English public intellectual at large, first proposed his ambitious program of human improvement through selective breeding and sociological investigation in a two-part article, published in 1865 in MacMillan's Magazine and, in much more detail, in his 1869 Hereditary Genius. When the movement's first two names, “viriculture” and “stirpiculture,” proved to be public-relations nightmares, Galton subsequently coined the term “eugenics,” which, derived from the Greek for “good” and “birth,” was meant to imply the “conditions under which men of a high type are produced.” Eugenics, as such, began tinkering with its origins almost from the moment it was conceived. Concerned with establishing its own lineage, it returned relentlessly to history as a means of rationalizing many of the social, economic, and political measures that its proponents believed were necessary for the propagation of a more hygienic future.

The medieval was key to this strategy. As Charles Dellheim notes, Victorian historiography often found itself negotiating two sometimes-overlapping and sometimes-competing versions of the past: the classical and the medieval. Although eugenics had only just begun to come into its own at the sunset of the Victorian age, eugenicist historians were no exceptions to this rule.