Kinship Marriages and the Catholic Dispensation Practice

Marriage and kinship are forms of relations which, as social categories of order and orientation, struc-tured European society to a great extent in the past - and still do so to a certain degree. By focusing on kinship marriages, the project can contribute to understanding marriage and kinship as specific and basic forms of relations. As studies on different European regions and localities have shown, kinship marriages are a historical phenomenon which appeared conspicuously often between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries, that is, at a time that was characterized by deep changes affecting all of society. One of the project`s main questions will refer to the interaction of social changes and the utilization, the presence, and the importance of kinship and of kinship marriages. The manifold social processes of the time are not only reflected in the arguments that were used by couples and their witnesses in favour of a planned marriage, but also in the administrative steps of the dispensation procedures, which in Catholic regions or countries were very time and energy consuming. For that reason, kinship marriages and their frequency cannot be studied independently of the denomi-national context. This project will introduce the specificity of this context to the current discussions which have, so far, primarily relied on studies of 19th century Catholic dispensation practices in Romance countries. Additional tension was caused by the differences between canon law and civil law that were both in force in the regions under investigation at the time of the Hapsburg Monarchy. The ups and downs of kinship marriages and the social contexts in which they occur have, so far, been studied for Europe mainly from a local perspective. If larger areas were examined, the studies had a quantitative focus. The latter is primarily due to the fact that marital dispensation applications, the source material that is most important for large-area examinations, are in many places strongly stereo-typed and, as such, not very rewarding for qualitative interpretations. Thus, the project`s innovative character consists on the one hand in the examination of a larger region and, on the other, in the rich source material that allows not only quantitative but also qualitative approaches as well as a number of in-depth studies of questions that could otherwise hardly be formulated. The investigation will in terms of space focus on the diocese of Brixen, which in the 19th century comprised large parts of the historical Tyrol and Vorarlberg. For comparative purposes, the dispensation practices in the neighbouring dioceses of Chur in Switzerland, of Salzburg, and of Trent will also be examined. The main source material consists of dispensation applications for marriages in the close degrees of kinship and affinity which were administered by the papal offices in Rome, the Dataria Apostolica and the Holy Penitentiary. Only in exceptional cases were the applications sent to the Office of the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna.