The Role of Wealth in Defining and Constituting Kinship Spaces

In order to understand the workings of early modern transfers of wealth, it is important to study the different ways wealth could be transferred. It is assumed that marriage and inheritance formed a fundamental part of these transmissions which brings marital property regimes, inheritance law and practice into focus. But, as much as the law regulated marriage and inheritance, kinship played a vital role in its implementation and actual practices. Kinship studies thus help to analyse certain axis of conflict and competing interests involved and also to identify changes over time. The character of wealth and claims on wealth which changed hands via marriage and inheritance played an important part as well and affected the negotiations. The project therefore adopts two specific approaches to be able to link the legal, social, economic, and kinship aspects. First, kinship is understood as space: kinship spaces can be defined as social spaces that are constructed via communication and interaction, via processes of negotiation, via memory, and via competition and conflicts. Just how this construction and structuring of kinship spaces took place is the core issue to be investigated. Second, the project uses material culture stud- ies to define the character of the wealth which was negotiated. Linking both and contextualizing them within legal and gender studies will shed light on the workings discussed. In order to gain this insight, it is necessary to analyze wealth transfers and wealth arrangements with regard to their so- cial, generational, and gender-specific implications. How was inheritance negotiated? Who was in- volved and what influence did they have? What constituted the wealth to be transferred and did this change the outcome? What role did moveables (i.e. the trousseau) play and who had claims on the real estate (i.e. the house)? How was this negotiated in a marriage and afterwards? And how did this affect gender relations and kinship spaces? Did this change over time? The ideal laboratory in which to pursue this projects goals is the region of southern Tirol including todays Trentino for several reasons: it is an area where Romanic and Germanic legal cultures met and overlapped, and which stands out for its exceptionally high volume and density of source material on civil-law matters (notarial registers, court books). Written law dates back to the 16th cen- tury and had also precedents. The relevant documents will be chosen according to defined criteria and analyzed with quantitative and qualitative methods. The project aims to apply a new approach based on the linkage between kinship, marital property, inheritance and material cultural. Wealth is conceptualized as a significant medium via which kinship spaces were constructed and structured.

The Role of Wealth in defining and constituting Kinship Spaces from the 16th to the 18th Century The project started from the fact that the bulk of wealth in early modern Europe was transferred and acquired via two ways: marriage and inheritance. What inheritance laws provided for in the various regions and who had what rights to an inheritance was closely linked to ideas of kinship and marriage. As it turned out in the course of our research, there were always powerful axes of competition involved. An important result of the research project is that the options for action of men and women and what they were able to implement in practice did not only depend on inheritance law and practice, but also on the prevailing marital property law - in our case it was mainly separation of property - or the respective interaction of inheritance practice and marital property regimes. The hypothesis of the project was the surmise that wealth functioned as a significant medium via which kinship spaces were defined and constituted. In this context, kinship spaces can be defined as social spaces that are constructed via communication and interaction, via negotiations, competition and conflicts. Concerning the question of how kinship was modelled and strengthened by wealth, we were able to work out different legal instruments: a certain preference for sons over daughters in inheritance, a limited freedom to make a will in favour of spouses, a ban on major gifts between spouses or a right to buy back real estate between relatives. Conversely, a strong position of relatives meant a weaker position of spouses, but - depending on the context -also of 'strangers'. With regard to wealth transfers and arrangements, we have observed differences between urban and rural areas, in different social milieus and between the sexes, but also across the period covered. Southern Tyrol offered the ideal laboratory for our research. This is mainly due to the fact that we were able to evaluate very extensive and rich archive material. Contracts, wills, and inheritance proceedings were of particular interest in addition to manifold contextual material. A special and, as a result, very productive approach of our project was the broad definition of wealth. This includes not only land and money, but also legal claims derived from it, as well as everyday objects or objects that served as stores of value or had symbolic meaning. This approach has led to highly differentiated results according to settings and constellations with regard to access to wealth and the production of inequality. The project is anchored in historical kinship research, gender history, material culture research, history of consumption, social and economic history, and history of the social practice of law.