The Role of Wealth in Constituting Kinship Spaces

In early modern European societies, a large proportion of wealth of women and men was transferred via marriage and inheritance. With this, marital property systems such as separation or community of property and inheritance law and practice and their interplay move into the focus of interest. But also peoples options for action and realisation gain centre stage. However, kinship and gender relations were no less important for the practical design of wealth transfers. From this perspective, conflict axes and competing interests become visible, that could differ significantly from region to region, depending on the social milieu and family configuration. In order to analyse these interrelationships and to link legal, social, economic and kinship aspects, the project follows two approaches. First, kinship is understood in the sense of social spaces that have been created through interaction and communication, through processes of negotiation, but also through competition and conflict. How this was achieved is the core question of the project. The key is provided by wealth transfers and arrangements and their social, generational and gender implications. Secondly, we work with a broad concept of wealth that includes land, monetary values, rights and claims that could be derived from it, and objects, as well as options and forms of financing real estate purchases and, closely related to this, access to credit and creditworthiness. This also enables us to sharpen our view of social inequality and to ask how it was generated and perpetuated. What is new about our approach is the linking of kinship, marital property, inheritance, material culture, forms of financing and credit relationships. Wealth is conceived as a central medium through which kinship spaces were created and structured. However, wealth also points beyond marital, family and kinship ties to local and translocal contexts. In detail, a whole series of questions arise: how inheritance claims and marital property arrangements were negotiated, about exclusion from succession and alternatives, about forms of finance and transfers, how conflicts and reconciliation were dealt with, how agreements on wealth were reached, and about securing wealth and its potential to be transformed. The ideal laboratory for the implementation of our questions and hypotheses is southern Tyrol in comparison to today`s Lower Austria, two regions that were significantly shaped by diametrically opposed property regimes: separation of property existed in Tyrol and community of property in Lower Austria. Thus, the question arises whether and how these regimes affected kinship logics. Documents from the rich archival holdings will be quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated in time periods and samples and they will be interlinked, both according to configurations and settings and in the reconstruction of case studies.

The aim of the project was to analyse the management of wealth in the context of marriages, family and kinship relations. In order to gain in-depth insights, case studies are needed. The reason for this is that questions of wealth were shaped by specific legal, gender, political-territorial, social and economic contexts. This was particularly true in the early modern period, when inheritance and marital property regimes, guardianship of orphans and for women in legal matters were by no means uniformly regulated, even within the Habsburg Monarchy. The broad concept of wealth proved very useful in the project. It includes not only land and money, but also rights and claims, objects (used in everyday life or as a store of value) as well as possibilities of financing the purchase of property and criteria for access to credit. Particularly fruitful was the comparison between southern Tyrol, with its marital separation of property and transfer of property on the basis of kinship and Lower Austria, with its marital community of property and the great importance of property transfer through marriage and remarriage. The most important result of the project is the reconstruction of the consequences of these two settings, for which differences between small town and rural practice were also identified. Janine Maegraith's habilitation thesis on the South Tyrolean courts of Brixen and Sonnenburg and Matthias Donabaum's dissertation on the princely town of Eggenburg and the lordship of Kattau in Lower Austria are currently in progress (scheduled for completion in 2025). While in southern Tyrol relatives or notables acted as guardians for the assets of children who had lost their fathers, in Lower Austria guardianship was organised through orphan funds, which acted as credit institutions. Access to credit was a key issue in this second phase of the project. The innovative approach was to look at debts that can be located in the marital and family context -inheritance shares or wives' marriage portions - and debts that have arisen through other credit relationships, and to reconstruct how and for what purposes borrowed money was used, including by women. The case study on Kastelruth by Margareth Lanzinger uses the history of the rise of a family of innkeepers to show how they established themselves locally through marriage and kinship, trade and the assumption of functions, and how they acted in a variety of economic ways - including their activity as moneylenders. Overall, all three parts of the project demonstrate that a broad contextualisation of property is essential to understanding the agency and social and economic logics of early modern men and women. Interests based on marital, family or kinship relationships competed with each other and had to be reconciled with local and seigneurial views.