Administrated Kinship

By the mid-18th century (or by the end of that century, at the latest), one can observe a no- ticeable rise in the number of marriages between close relatives that occurred in various European countries. This rise occurred despite the fact that marriages between blood rela- tives or between women and men related by marriage were forbidden in the Catholic world if they had one or more common ancestors within four generations. This norm was a con- stant fixture of canon law from 1215 to 1917. Marriage practices, however, changed dramat- ically during the period studied here. The abovementioned type of marriage prohibition could be circumvented by obtaining a so-called dispensation. For couples related at close degrees (out to and including the second), such dispensations were typically granted by the papal authorities in Rome. And though applying for such a dispensation entailed a great deal of effort and expense, the number of requests increased across all social milieus. It was thus that marriages between close relatives ceased to be an exclusive privilege of the aristocracy. Papal dispensation documents and administrative material from four dioceses those of Brixen, Chur, Salzburg, and Trento provided the source material used in this study. In contrast to many others in the field, this study is not based primarily on the granted dis- pensations; instead, it places the underlying processes and institutions front and centre. The analysis here also encompasses the numerous rejected requests in the interest of capturing this phenomenon in its full breadth. Whats more, the interventions of the Austrian state in marriage prohibitions and dispensation-related proceedings that began in the 1770s placed state and church jurisdictions in competition with each other. And finally, just how contro- versial and contested kin marriages were is also made clear by the theological, legal, medi- cal, and natural science-related positions present in the associated discourses. Chapter 1 highlights the various views held by representatives of religious confessions and states as well as by scholars and practitioners of scientific disciplines. The effect on dispensation prac- tice had by the competing church- and state-centred legal contexts toward the end of the 18th century is discussed in Chapter 2. Just how diverse the administrative processes on the level of the respective dioceses were during the 19th century is the theme of Chapter 3. The evaluation of the dispensation documents shows two couple constellations to be most con- spicuous: that of the widower who desired to marry his sister-in-law (the sister of his de- ceased wife and simultaneously the childrens aunt), and that of first-degree cousins. The associated underlying expectations and ideals as well as familial and social contexts are ana- lysed in Chapters 4 and 5. The central question of this book aims to uncover the logics that were in play in dispensation proceedings logics that were discursive and conceptual, legal and political, administrative and bureaucratic, family- and household organisation-related, and sociocultural and socio- political. These were interwoven, leading from villages and local parishes all the way up to the Roman Curia, and from widowers households and municipal-level authorities to the Imperial Court Chancellery in Vienna. This focus on how the matter of kinship was adminis- trated simultaneously opens up an approach to processes by which the state and the church, as well as state and religion, were integrated during an era that, in this respect, would prove to be historically decisive.