Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Front matter

LEGAL HISTORY LIBRARY 63

Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Margareth Lanzinger

Contents

Preface to the English Edition vıı List of Figures, Graphs, Maps and Tables x ı Introduction ı ı Kinship and Kin Marriage 8 2 Confessional Distinctions 16 3 Administrating Kinship 20 4 Sources in Context 24

2 Conceptsand Discourses 34 ı Marriage Prohibitions: Extent and Counting Methods 35 2 Mercyand Punishment 45 3 Loveand Passion 50 4 Socio-political and Moral Arguments 63 5 Physiological and Medical Discourses 75 6 From ‘Common’ and ‘Strange Blood’ to Racialisation 84

3 Church and State in Competition 93 ı The placetum regium — A ‘formalité si humiliante pour l'Eglise 96 2 State Dispensation Policy under the Banner of ‘the Common Good’ 103 3 The Extent of Marriage Prohibitions: To the Second or to the Fourth Degree? 0 4 Authorisations to Dispense: Divergent and Conflicting Logics 118 5 No More Dispensations from Rome? 128 6 Arbitrary Acts — and Their Limitations 141

Preface to the English Edition

This book has along history. It began as a Habilitation thesis at the University of Vienna. The aim was to investigate kin marriages in light of changing dispensation policies with a focus on the procedural diversity of dispensation practice within a transregional context while also relating such marriages to logics of domestic organisation. The research was conducted as part of a three-year Hertha Fimberg Fellowship (2005-2007) and a subsequent, likewise three-year Elise Richter Fellowship (2008-2011), financed by the Austrian Science Fund (Fwe). I would therefore first like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to this funding body and to these grant programmes’ dedicated employees. This is also the place to express my thanks to the University of Vienna’s Department of History, where both projects were institutionally situated and thus anchored in a collegial atmosphere with very good working conditions. During this period, I was able to share my passion for the research fields of kinship and kin marriage in a productive way with Edith Saurer (1942-2011). I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to Jon Mathieu for his constructive and critical commentaries on this work. And finally, I owe great thanks in myriad ways to Claudia Ulbrich.

Two one-month research stays at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History — now the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory - in Frankfurt in 2009 and 2010 not only afforded me access to outstanding library holdings, especially concerning canon law, but also provided me with an ideal atmosphere for concentrated work. And later on, the period that I spent as a guest lecturer and a visiting professor at the Department of History (Historisches Seminar) of Leibniz University Hannover made it possible for me to complete this book. I have to thank Michaela Hohkamp for this opportunity that turned up at precisely the right time.

The archives used for this research project revealed exceptionally rich source material. For their friendly welcomes and the support they provided me in researching this topic, I extend thanks to their heads and their employees: to Eduard Scheiber of the diocesan archives in Brixen, Albert Fischer of the diocesan archives in Chur and Michael Fliri of the diocesan archives in Feldkirch, as well as to the employees of the diocesan archives in Salzburg, the diocesan archives in Trento, the Tyrolean State Archives in Innsbruck, the State Archives of Bolzano, the State Archives of Trento, the State Archives of Vorarlberg in Bregenz and the Austrian State Archives (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv and Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv) in Vienna.

VIII PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

In thinking about just how to go about investigating this topic, I was able to call upon a multitude of impulses and ideas from the field of historical kinship studies — which in recent years have seen grow continually broader in terms of publications, topics and participating historians — and from exchange with colleagues on the topic itself as well as regarding theoretical and methodical approaches. An important role was played by the discussions that took place at international events such as the Social Science History Conferences and at working group meetings and workshops, as part of which I had opportunities to present individual aspects of this work. Here, I would like to mention above all the working groups: Haus im Kontext — Kommunikation und Lebenswelt (House in Context - Communication and Spheres of Life), Historische Demographie (Historical Demography), Geschlechtergeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Early Modern Gender History) and the Irseer Arbeitskreis für vorindustrielle Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Irsee Working Group on Preindustrial Economic and Social History). Additionally, numerous events outside of such organisational structures as well as university research colloquia provided further stimulating forums.

Involvement in research networks also opened up opportunities for both theoretical and substantive work. In this context, I would like to give explicit mention to the international research network Gender Differences in the History of European Legal Cultures, the research association of the Leibniz project “Kinship in the Premodern Era. Institutions and Forms of Thought of Intergenerational Transfer” (Verwandtschaft in der Vormoderne. Institutionen und Denkformen intergenerationeller Ubertragung) headed by Bernhard Jussen in Frankfurt, the corın programme on the History of the Family (Storia della famiglia. Constanti e varianti in una prospettiva europea secoli xv-xx) that was coordinated by Silvana Seidel Menchi in Pisa from 2006 to 2008 and the cost Action A-34 “Gender and Well-Being: Work, Family and Public Policies’, coordinated by Cristina Borderias of the Universidad de Barcelona. Of special value in terms of deeper conceptual questions and problems, moreover, were two discussion groups — one with Ernst Langthaler and Annemarie Steidl in Vienna, and the other with Michaela Hohkamp, Kirsten Rüther and Simon Teuscher in various places.

Funding from the rwr made possible the 2015 release of this book’s German-language edition both in print and as an open access publication. The decision to publish an English-language edition of this book came thanks to its character as a basic empirical study that employs a broad range of perspectives to offer new insights into the kin marriage phenomenon. This is the first study to have examined and interrelated the logics surrounding kin marriages during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the perspectives of

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION Ix administration, canon and civil law and the state. The period at issue here is widely viewed as having been the decisive phase during which this phenomenon enjoyed broad societal presence, above all in various public discourses. Comparing how marriage projects involving close consanguineous and affinal kin were administrated by the Church in the four neighbouring dioceses of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trento shows that these dioceses acted in starkly differing ways. Furthermore, this book analyses highly revealing marriage dispensation requests and thus source material that is altogether quite extensive and exceptionally rich. Such analysis serves to make visible the arguments, strategies and logics of those couples who were affected by the marriage impediment of close consanguineous and/or affinal kinship. With this, the present publication opens up an abundance of new perspectives — on church power and associated ambivalences, on Josephinism including its contradictions and the difficulties encountered by its implementation in parts of the Habsburg monarchy and on marriage concepts and emotions, matters of household organisation and the attitude toward stepmothers. In this way, the present study’s findings shed new light on the long transition from the early modern period to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thereby making important contributions to various fields of research.

It hence remains for me to once again thank the Austrian Science Fund for supporting this volume’s English translation and enabling its release as a printed and open-access publication as well as the University of Vienna and its Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies for their provision of funds and grants for translation and proofreading. And finally, sincere thanks are due above all to Christopher Roth for his thoughtful translation and resolution of the numerous associated challenges as well as Christine Brocks for her meticulous final proofreading.

Vienna, September 2022

Figures, Graphs, Maps and Tables bh wn M

Figures

The second and third unequal degree of consanguinity 42

Depiction of the prohibited degrees 169

Vinzenz Gasser’s form for dispensation requests that were to be forwarded toRome 195

The marriages of the Metzler siblings in Schwarzenberg 292

Graphs

Papal dispensation requests in the Diocese of Brixen, 1831-1890 concerning cousin marriages compared with requests overall 336

Maps

The Dioceses of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trento after 1818 7

Deaneries of the Diocese of Brixen as reorganised in 1818 166

Papal dispensation requests in the Diocese of Brixen by deanery, 1831-1890, in absolute numbers 337

Papal dispensation requests in the Diocese of Brixen, 1839-1890, as a percentage of total concluded marriages in each deanery 339

Tables

Papal dispensation requests in the Diocese of Brixen, 1831-1846 251 Papal dispensation requests in the Diocese of Brixen, 1847-1862 252 Episcopal dispensations in the Tyrolean deaneries (selected years) 334 Close-degree requests in the Diocese of Brixen, 1831-1890 335

Introduction

Thus all social action is seen to be the result of an individual's constant negotiation, manipulation, choices and decisions in the face

of a normative reality which,

though pervasive, nevertheless offers many possibilities of personal interpretations and freedoms.!

In recent years, the field of historical kinship studies has taken on sharper contours as well as a greater measure of diversity and nuance. Various aspects and forms, meanings and chronologies of kinship practice have been and still are being discussed, contributing to the change of conventional conceptions of history that were championed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the banner of progress and modernisation. Significant here is the finding that kinship,? though repeatedly ‘disappeared’ from the history of modern Europe, did indeed retain its efficacity in the modern era as a structure of ordering and orientation, as knowledge formation and as a category that gave rise to inclusion and exclusion. It follows that kinship can no longer be

1 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory”, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 93-113, 94-

2 “Kinship has been said to have been in decline at almost every moment during Western history.” David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long-Term Development’, in Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development, 1300-1900, ed. David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu (New York/Oxford, 2007), pp- 1-32, 1. An overview of research on this topic is provided in a review of this volume by Frangois-Joseph Ruggiu, “Histoire de la parenté ou anthropologie historique de la parenté? Autour de Kinship in Europe”, Annales de Demographie Historique 1 (2010), 223-256. On “narratives of decline” see also Simon Teuscher, “Verwandtschaft in der Vormoderne: Zur politischen Karriere eines Beziehungskonzepts”, in Die Ahnenprobe in der Vormoderne. Selektion - Initiation - Repräsentation, ed. Elizabeth Harding and Michael Hecht (Münster, 2011), pp. 85-106.

© MARGARETH LANZINGER, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004539877_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY 4.0 license.

regarded as an “archaic organisational principle”? This notion was much rather an inheritance from nineteenth-century sociologists, philosophers and intellectuals that effectively obscured the view. For “the first thing’, writes a critical Carola Lipp, that they “expelled” from the ranks of socially and politically relevant categories in their definition of modernity was “the concept of kinship”.*

By contrast, newer research regards kinship as a “historical factor sui generis’, as a significant principle structuring social relationships — relationships between and within generations as well as between men and women. Whether or not these relationships were sustained by a special attention economy and by loyalty must be verified in each individual case, however, for kinship simultaneously represented a social realm of competition, dispute and conflict.® Particularly in recent years, historians and representatives of other disciplines have produced numerous studies on how kin relations manifested themselves in different places and periods.’ Still, a great many questions remain open.

3 Jon Mathieu, “Verwandtschaft als historischer Faktor. Schweizer Fallstudien und Trends, 1500-1900”, Historische Anthropologie 10, 2 (2002), pp. 225-244, 225.

4 Carola Lipp, “Verwandtschaft — ein negiertes Element in der politischen Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts”, Historische Zeitschrift 283 (2006), pp. 31-77, 31, 34-

5 JonMathieu, “Ein Cousin an jeder Zaunliicke’: Uberlegungen zum Wandel von Verwandtschaft und ländlicher Gemeinde, 1700-1900”, in Politiken der Verwandtschaft: Beziehungsnetze, Geschlecht und Recht, ed. Margareth Lanzinger and Edith Saurer (Göttingen, 2007), pp. 55-71, 59; Mathieu, “Verwandtschaft als historischer Faktor”. Ida Fazio also opposes a primarily reactive view of kinship as “defence or protection” in processes of social change. Her desire is to liberate both kinship and the market from the antagonistic relationship implied by this view. Ida Fazio, “Parentela e mercato nell'isola di Stromboli nel x1x secolo”, in Famiglie. Circolazione di beni, circuiti di affetti in eta moderna, ed. Renata Ago and Benedetta Borello (Rome, 2008), pp. 141-181, 141.

6 See Detlef Berghorn, Verwandtschaft als Streitzusammenhang. Eine Fall-Geschichte in Beziehungen im hohen Adel des Alten Reiches, 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna/Cologne, 2021).

7 A selection of these would be: Eva Labouvie and Ramona Myrrhe (eds.), Familienbande - Familienschande. Geschlechterverhältnisse in Familie und Verwandtschaft (Cologne/Weimar/ Vienna, 2007); Lanzinger/Saurer, Politiken der Verwandtschaft; Johannes Pflegerl and Christine Geserick, Kinship and Social Security in Austria. A Social History for the 20th Century (Innsbruck, 2007); Sabean/Teuscher/Mathieu, Kinship in Europe; Johannes F.K. Schmidt et al. (eds.), Freundschaft und Verwandtschaft. Zur Unterscheidung und Verflechtung zweier Beziehungssysteme (Constance, 2007); Andreas Holzem and Ines Weber (eds.), Ehe - Familie - Verwandtschaft: Vergesellschaftung in Religion und sozialer Lebenswelt (Paderborn, 2008); Gerhard Lubich, Verwandtsein. Lesarten einer politisch-sozialen Beziehung im Frühmittelalter (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna, 2008); Heidi Rosenbaum and Elisabeth Timm, Private Netzwerke im Wohlfahrtsstaat: Familie, Verwandtschaft und soziale Sicherheit im Deutschland des 20.

Jahrhunderts (Constance, 2008). See also the special issues of Traverse 3 (1996), “Starke Bande. Verwandtschaft, Arbeit und Geschlecht”, ed. Frederic Sardet and Marianne Stubenvoll; of L'Homme. Z.F.G. 13,1 (2002), “Die Liebe der Geschwister”, ed. Karin Hausen and Regina Schulte; of Historical Social Research 30, 3 (2005), “Siblings - Parents - Grandparants’,

Research desiderata here include deeper investigation of the increase in the number of kin marriages® that can be observed from the middle or, at the latest, by the end of the eighteenth century in various European contexts — a trend that was to continue into the twentieth century. Marriages between close blood and affinal kin must be accorded a considerable degree of importance in modern history — not only with an eye to the figuration of gender relations and intergenerational relations but also in connection with the formation of alliances, of social milieus and hence of a society’s very foundations. It is with this phenomenon, which would appear at first glance to have been widely prevalent, that this study begins — with the intent of arriving at a nuanced impression.

On the basis of the belief that man and woman became ‘one flesh’ via the union of their bodies, affinity was subject to prohibitions on marriage that ran parallel to the ones pertaining to kinship by blood. In the Catholic context, such restrictions — which extended four generations back — remained valid and efficacious over a very long period of time, from the beginning of the thirteenth ed. Georg Fertig; of Berliner Blätter. Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge 42 (2007), “Verwandtschaft machen. Reproduktionsmedizin und Adoption in Deutschland und der Türkei”, ed. Michi Knecht et al.; and of WerkstattGeschichte 46 (2007) “Tanten”, ed. Michaela Hohkamp.

8 Cf. André Burguiere, “Cher Cousin’: Les usages matrimoniaux de la parenté proche dans la France du 18° siècle”, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52, 6 (1997), 1339-1360; Gérard Delille, Famille et propriété dans le Royaume de Naples, xv—x1x° siècle (Rome/Paris, 1985), pP- 369-370; Jean-Marie Gouesse, “Mariages de proches parents (XvI‘—xxX¢ siècle). Esquisse d'une conjuncture’, in Le modèle familial Européen. Normes, deviances, controle du pouvoir. Actes des séminaires organisés par l’École francaise de Rome et (‘Universita di Roma (Rome, 1986), pp. 31-61; Jean-Marie Gouesse, “Parente, famille et mariage en Normandie aux XvII* et xvill* siècles”, Annales ESC 27, 4-5 (1972), 139-1154; Mathieu, Verwandtschaft als historischer Faktor, pp. 238-242; David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 217-237; 274-292; 379-396; Edith Saurer, “Stiefmütter und Stiefsöhne. Endogamieverbote zwischen kanonischem und zivilem Recht am Beispiel Österreichs (1790-1850)’, in Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ute Gerhard (Munich, 1997), pp. 345-366; Marion Trévisi, “Le mariage entre parents a La Roche-Guyon (Vexin francais) au xvi1I* siècle: une étude de la perception du lien de parenté dans le cas des mariages avec dispense”, in Eheschließungen im Europa des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts: Muster und Strategien, ed. Christophe Duhamelle and Jiirgen Schlumbohm (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 241-265.

g Cf. Margareth Lanzinger, “Und werden sein die zwey ein Fleisch. Das Eheverbot der Schwägerschaft”, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Wissenschaft und Kunst ı-2 (2006), 36-42. On ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ in the sense of bodily substances that serve as metaphors for kinship bonds cf. Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Flesh and Blood in Medieval Language about Kinship’, in Blood & Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, ed. Christopher H. Johnson et al. (New York/Oxford, 2013), pp. 61-82.

century all the way to the beginning of the twentieth century. Overcoming these marriage prohibitions required a so-called dispensation. The procedure associated with procuring a dispensation depended on the type and proximity of kinship at issue and changed over the centuries. During the period of time concerned here, decisions on dispensation requests in close degrees were usually made by the papal authorities in Rome. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were by no means an easy time for prospective couples who were related closely by blood or affinity. Moreover, the granting and refusal of dispensations gave rise to much debate: at inns and in village gossip as well as in the English Parliament, in tracts by jurists, theologians, physicians and heredity theorists, and in dramas and fictional prose. Throughout the nineteenth century, the subject of kin marriages proved fit to agitate and preoccupy individuals and institutions in all kinds of ways.

Just how contentious this topic was, in particular from the late eighteenth century onward, becomes apparent in the associated discourse populated by theological, legal, medical and scientific positions. Representatives of confessions and states, scholars and practitioners of scientific disciplines held divergent views. And from the perspective of the dioceses studied here, those of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trento, the logics of the church and state bureaucracies and authorities responsible for dispensation policy and practice were sources of repeated controversy. The period of time covered here thus witnessed a battle for definitional power regarding the sensibility and extent of marriage prohibitions, the perception of incest and the ‘danger’ associated with kin marriages. Analysing this phenomenon in its diverse discursive and conceptual, legal and political, administrative and bureaucratic, as well as familial and household-organisational contexts is the objective of this book. These contexts, in a way that is closely interwoven, lead us through numerous stations ranging from the local parish house and town hall to the Roman Curia and the Imperial Court Chancellery in Vienna.

David Sabean has argued that pressure ‘from below’ caused all European states to make a de facto transition to a liberal dispensation policy or in fact do away altogether with the prohibitions on consanguine and affinal marriage from the mid-eighteenth century onward.!° This presupposes the jurisdiction of a liberal state in this material. In Austria, however, the period in question

10 David Warren Sabean, “Kinship and Class Dynamics in Nineteenth-Century Europe”, in Kinship in Europe, Sabean/Teuscher/Mathieu, pp. 301-313, 310-31; Sabean/Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe’, p. 21: “From around the middle of the eighteenth century, pushed from below, the older prohibitions became subject to pro forma dispensations or were abrogated altogether.”

reveals only “liberal interludes”:" during the Josephinism of the 1780s and the era of liberal government between 1867 and 1878. Even if here, as well, the laws of the state did attempt to break the Catholic Church's lock on the granting of dispensations from the 1770s onward, the Church remained involved to varying extents throughout the entire nineteenth century. It even functioned as the primary actor in dioceses such as that of Brixen. The more liberal provisions regarding kin marriage adopted by Prussia, France and Great Britain contrasted with legal frameworks in other territories where the Church managed to retain its normative power largely intact.

Dispensation was no mere formality. This is shown by numerous rejected requests, but also by the uncertainty associated with the administrative procedures as well as by the detours and strategies to which affected couples repeatedly resorted in order to reach their goal. One crucial prerequisite for success that became evident over the course of this research was tenacity: refusal to give up a marriage project as well as perseverance even after receiving signals that it was hopeless and encountering ever-new obstacles. Viewed in the context of dispensation practice, tenacity was a significant social resource that can also be read as an element of a certain political culture.

In the 1770s, a political power struggle arose in Austria that revolved around staking out the extent of marriage prohibitions and incest taboos as well as the matter of jurisdiction when it came to the procedures involved in dispensation-granting. State intervention in dispensation-related matters caused the administration of kinship to take on conflicting and converging forms as it entered a new phase: Church and state now competed for definitional authority over marriage prohibitions and the handling of dispensatory power. The way in which kin marriages were dealt with was quite generally characterised by the unconsummated separation of Church and state where matters of marriage were concerned.!? While France implemented this

11 Onthis term see Karl Vocelka, Geschichte Österreichs. Kultur — Gesellschaft - Politik, 3rd ed. (Munich, 2002), p. 216. See also the contributions by Pieter M. Judson, “Early Liberalism in Austrian Society”, in Der deutsche und österreichische Liberalismus: Geschichts- und politikwissenschaftliche Perspektiven im Vergleich, ed. Helmut Reinalter and Harm Klueting (Innsbruck, 2010), pp. 105-120; Alfred Ableitinger, “Die historische Entwicklung des Liberalismus in Österreich im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert’, in ibid., pp. 121-147; Helmut Reinalter, “Liberalismus und Kirche in Osterreich im 19. Jahrhundert’, in ibid., PP- 149-160.

ı2 At the beginning of the period under examination, the integration of Austria’s territories into a unified state was still far from having been accomplished — but it was this period in particular during which massive processes of centralisation were initiated. At that time, ‘state’ as an entity (der Staat) and as an adjective (staatlich) was a term denoting a position that was simultaneously opposite and separate from the Church.

separation in 1792 with its policy of mandatory civil marriage, the situation in Austria featured a back-and-forth in terms of competencies that would drag on for decades. For closely related would-be spouses, this not only entailed laborious and obstacle-strewn administrative processes but also fundamental dependence on the Church’s mercy, a consequence that was far more severe in a socio-political sense. After all, there existed no legal claim whatsoever to a dispensation.'? These circumstances gave rise to a melange of conflicting interests that proceeded to determine the actions taken by members of the state and church administrative hierarchies. Emst Hanisch has stated that the “long shadow of the state” was responsible for the underdeveloped collective consciousness of civil society in Austria.!* But at least on the regional level and from the perspective of the nineteenth century, the persistence of the Church’s long arm surely made a no less powerful contribution as an underlying factor.!>

This study’s spatial scope encompasses four dioceses that occupied a contiguous area now situated in Austria, Italy and Switzerland (see Map 1). The differences between them should provide insights into the spectrum of dispensation practices and the structured repertoires of action associated therewith.!° The Diocese of Brixen encompassed the northern parts of historical Tyrol and hence an area whose Catholicism was pronouncedly political and ultramontane in character.” The nineteenth century saw the addition of Vorarlberg, a region where industrialisation set in early.'® The neighbouring Swiss Diocese of Chur, by way of contrast, represented a confessionally mixed area. Salzburg — just like the ecclesiastical territories of Brixen and Trent — was ı3 Angela Groppi identifies the same logic in her study on institutional care for the destitute elderly in Rome as typically Catholic. This, she writes, was based on the idea that the benefactor — there, as here, the Catholic Church — earned gratitude on the part of those benefited that would not have had to be shown an institution if there had existed a legal claim to said benefits. Angela Groppi, Il welfare prima del welfare. Assistenza alla vecchiaia e solidarieta tra generazioni a Roma in eta moderna (Rome, 2010), p. 70.

ı4 Ernst Hanisch, Der lange Schatten des Staates. Österreichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, 1890-1990 (Vienna, 1994).

15 On the influence of the clergy especially in Tyrol cf. Helmut Alexander, “Zur regionalen Herkunft des Priesternachwuchses der Diözese Brixen im 19. Jahrhundert”, Histoire des Alpes / Storia delle Alpi / Geschichte der Alpen 3 (1998), 309-325-

16 On this concept cf. Gadi Algazi, “Kulturkult und die Rekonstruktion von Handlungsrepertoires”, L’Homme. Z.F.G. 11, 1 (2000), 105-119.

ı7 Fora general impression see Josef Fontana, Der Kulturkampf in Tirol, 1861-1892 (Bolzano, 1978); Gustav Pfeifer and Josef Nössing (eds.), Kulturkampf in Tirol und in den Nachbarländern: Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums des Tiroler Geschichtsvereins (Sektion Bozen) im Kolpinghaus Bozen, 9. November 2012 (Innsbruck, 2013).

18 Cf. Hubert Weitensfelder, Industrie-Provinz. Vorarlberg in der Frühindustrialisierung 1740-1870 (Frankfurt a. M./New York, 2001).

Vorarlberg Vicariate-general

Feldkirch

Diocese of Salzburg

Innsbruck è

Diocese of Brixen/Bressanone

Tyrol eChur

Diocese of Chur @ Brixen/Bressanone

Switzerland

© Bolzano

Diocese of Trent

® Trent/Trento

MAPI The Dioceses of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trento after 1818 Source: Digitised by Mario Mosser from the original in: Erwin Gatz (ed.), Die Bistümer der deutschsprachigen Länder von der Säkularisation bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg, 2005), map 2: Neuumschreibung der Bistümer in Tirol und Vorarlberg. Die Bistumseinteilung Tirols und Vorarlbergs seit 1818.

secularised as a former ecclesiastical territory in 1803 and only permanently integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy in 1816, following a multi-year interlude of Bavarian and French rule. Furthermore, Salzburg’s Prince-Archbishop Count Hieronymus von Colloredo — in contrast to the Prince-Bishops of Brixen — had been an adherent of enlightened Josephine policies during the late eighteenth century. The Diocese of Trento, for its part, was responsible for the southern parts of historical Tyrol. This not only included Italian-speaking areas but also parts of present-day South Tyrol.!9

19 The parishes in the lower Vinschgau and in the Sarn, Fassa and lower Eisack valleys were appended to the Diocese of Trento in the nineteenth century. The Adige or Etsch Valley with its towns of Meran and Bozen already belonged to it.

8 CHAPTER 1 1 Kinship and Kin Marriage

The broad notion of kinship prevalent during the Middle Ages and the early modern period narrowed markedly as time went on. While the definition of kinship provided by the mid-eighteenth-century Zedlers Universallexikon had included diverse social relations such as guild or university colleagues, thereby encompassing all members of such institutions,”° such definitions proceeded to shrink in a way not unlike that of the shrinking piece of shagreen in Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin." In the normatively Catholic context, however, it still did encompass blood relations and affinal kin all the way out to the fourth degree — which reached back four generations to common great-great-grandparents — as well as an extended network including godparents, godchildren and their parents as spiritual kin.?? The rules to this effect remained unchanged from 1215 to 1917 and thus over an impressively long period of 700 years. The notion of kinship according to the ecclesiastical and civil laws that underlay marriage prohibitions was defined independently of whether such kinship was lived or activated and updated in certain situations — and was therefore something of which the kin in question were conscious. All that mattered here were genealogically reconstructable degrees of blood and affinal kinship. The issue of who was counted among one’s kin in everyday life from a personal perspective, however — for example, when deciding whom to invite to a wedding or inform about a death in the family — could involve an entirely different logic. Individual disciplines and ‘national’ academic cultures have researched and debated kinship with varying intensity.2? Modern-era German-language

20 Article: “Verwandt”, in Johann Heinrich Zedlers Grosses vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste..., vol. 48 (Leipzig/Halle, 1746), col. 141-146. On this see also the broad-based concept of ‘friinde’ — meaning ‘friends’, but also a synonym for ‘relatives’ — in the study by Simon Teuscher, Bekannte - Klienten — Verwandte. Soziabilität und Politik in der Stadt Bern um 1500 (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna, 1998).

21 This is the metaphor used by Gerard Delille: “Comme un peau de chagrin, laire de la parenté s'est restrainte de manière décisive et brutale. Delille, Famille et propriété, p. 365. With reference to the mid-twentieth century in the USA and the “urban middle class areas of society”, Talcott Parsons spoke of the “isolated conjugal family”. Talcott Parsons, “The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States”, American Anthropologist, New Series 45, 1 (1943), 22-38, 27, 29-32.

22 Cf. Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon (eds.), Spiritual Kinship in Europe, 1500-1900 (Basingstoke, 2012); Guido Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern Italy (Aldershot, 2009 [2006]); Bernhard Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice. Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages (London/Newark, 2000).

23 A broad overview is provided by Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water. Siblings and Their Relations, 1780-1920 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 14-28. In the context of research on kinship pertaining to the Middle Ages, Bernhard Jussen compares German-language approaches and and Anglo-Saxon historiography were relatively late in taking up the theme of kinship in the sense of a politically, socially and economically efficacious organisational structure. It was the influence of anthropological approaches that first sparked greater interest during the 1980s, primarily in the field of social history. A pioneering work that opened up new research perspectives was the 1984 volume on emotions and material interests edited by Hans Medick and David Sabean.?* Major impulses also came from Italian micro-history, above all from Giovanni Levi's study L'eredità immateriale — Inheriting Power -, which was published in German translation in 1986 and in an English translation in 1988.25 At first, these and other impulses did not result in a systematic or continually expanding, independent field of historiographic research.?° The past two a half decades, however, have not only led to a considerable increase in the number of related publications but also to projects and events that, taken together, now do indeed allow us to speak of a field of historical kinship studies.?7 concepts with French ones and points out the differences: Bernhard Jussen, “Perspektiven der Verwandtschaftsforschung fiinfundzwanzig Jahre nach Jack Goodys ‘Entwicklung von Ehe und Familie in Europa”, in Die Familie in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Karl-Heinz Spieß (Ostfildern, 2009), pp. 275-324. On varying emphases see also Margareth Lanzinger and Edith Saurer, “Politiken der Verwandtschaft. Einleitung”, in Politiken der Verwandtschaft, ed. Saurer/Lanzinger, pp. 7-22; Margareth Lanzinger, “Parenté et genre: des mariages par alliance’, in Genre, femmes, histoire en Europe. France, Italie, Espagne, Autriche, ed. Anna Bellavitis and Nicole Edelman (Paris, 2011), pp. 233-253, 233-239-