Aministrated Kinship

Recent years have seen the field of historical kinship research become more finely differen- tiated. A central point is the realization that kinship, which has repeatedly been discounted in the context of modern European history, did indeed still play a significant role during this period as a structure of order and of orientation, as knowledge formation, and as a category that entailed inclusion and exclusion. Kinship is therefore to be viewed as a significant structuring principle of social relationships as well as of those between generations, within generations, and between the sexes. A striking phenomenon that emerged around the middle or end of the 18th century was the observable increase in marriages within close degrees of kinship. Affinal kin were subject to marriage prohibitions commensurate with those that applied to consanguineous couples. In the Catholic context, these prohibitions which reached back four generations remained efficacious and unchanged from 1215 to 1917. Getting around such prohibitions required a so- called dispensation, which typically had to be obtained from by the Papal authorities in Rome in cases of closely related bridal couples. The objective of this book was to sketch out an impression that is differentiated according to region and social factors. During the time period at issue here, dispensations were contrary to the opinion that has occasionally been voiced in related studies anything but a mere formality. This can be seen both in the high number of unsuccessful dispensation requests and in the elaborate adminis- trative procedures involved. Indeed, with the intervention of the Austrian state in the regulation of marriage prohibitions and in the processes of granting dispensations from the 1770s onward, and particularly with the Marriage Patent of 1783, the states and the churchs administration of kinshipbetween which there occurred both conflict and cooperation assumed a central and simultaneously political significance. Just how contested this field was from the late eighteenth century onward is made clear by the associated dis-courses, which were characterized by positions derived from theology, law, medicine and the natural sciences (Chapt. 1). And viewed with an eye to the examined dioceses of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trento, the various lines of reasoning exhibited by the ecclesiastical and state administrators and authorities responsible for dispensation practice were every bit as controversial. As this study shows, the enlightened state did not succeed in positioning itself relative to the church by way of legal reforms designed to ease administrative processes (Chapt. 2). And during the nineteenth century, the administrative procedures in the various dioceses would differ widely (Chapt. 3). In the research produced so far, marriages between cousins have generally been far better represented than those between close relatives by marriage. But during the 1830s and 1840s, marital unions at close degrees of affinity faced a policy of extreme resistance by the papacy of Gregory XVI. In this difficult situation, mediation and statements of recommendation played a decisive roll. And at the same time, these requestsabove all in the classic constellation of widower and sister-in-lawbring to light specific logics of spatial and social proximity (Chapt. 4). Despite the fact that opinions regarding potential negative health con-sequences or degeneration had been around for quite some time, it was only in the final decades of the nineteenth century that cousins actually had to reckon with slimmer chances of receiving a dispensation (Chapt. 5). Even if these sorts of marital unions did indeed play a