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Abstract
The period around 1800 was characterised by a remarkable intensification of horizontally organised relationships and horizontally structured interactions such as sibling relations and cousin marriages. At the same time, in-laws stepped onto the historical stage. The aim of this contribution is to shed light on the importance of affinal relatives – above all that of deceased wives’ sisters as preferred spouses – and to reconstruct the difficulties that widowers had to cope with in terms of domestic organisation.
As nineteenth-century marriage dispensation records reveal, the number of marriage applications by widowers and their sisters-in-law was particularly high in the German-speaking world. And though research has already been carried out on the broad-based societal and political debate in Great Britain touched off by the “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” of 1835, this same constellation within the Catholic context has so far received relatively little attention. Very often, the death of a wife caused the entire household to slide into a situation of crisis, especially if small children were present. In a large number of the cases in which this happened, the wife’s sister ended up moving into the widower’s household. She took care of the household and the children and also took on agricultural and/or business-related responsibilities.
In many cases, it was an obvious next step for widowers and their sisters-in-law to plan their marriage. During the 1830s and 1840s, however, it was very difficult for such bridal couples to obtain the necessary papal dispensation. Therefore, the extensive source material from this period provides revealing insights into the domestic organisation of widowers’ households. It also highlights a close intertwining of social, economic and emotional aspects – for which reason the legally mandated separation of the couple in the case of a rejected dispensation application could become a dramatic matter indeed.
Notes
1. In comparison, Martine Segalen reveals a very low rate of marriages between blood relations, mainly in the more distant degrees, in her area of research in France. There was, however, a large number of marriages between in-laws in this area. This was a highly mobile rural society without property or inheritance claims to land worked by the people (Segalen, Citation1986, Citation2007, pp. 114–123).
2. Decretum Tametsi, Sessio 24, Caput 5.
3. Unequal degrees arise due to generational shifts.
4. Diözesanarchiv Brixen (DIÖAB), Dispensationes matrimoniales anno 1774 usque ad annum 1794 (all years included) and DIÖAB, Dispensationes matrimoniales anno 1795 usque ad annum 1829 (all years included), under the applicable years.
5. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1847, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 20; see also Kutschker (Citation1857, pp. 82–83).
6. Similar findings are shown by the study on Vienna and Lower Austria by Saurer (Citation1997, p. 363).
7. Earlier versions of this contribution were presented and discussed at the German Studies Association (GSA) Conference in 2013 (Denver) and at the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) in 2014 (Vienna).
8. The diocese of Brixen includes Vorarlberg and a large part of historic Tirol (present-day Austrian North Tirol and Italian South Tirol), excluding the areas belonging to the dioceses of Trento and Salzburg. According to the ecclesiastic ‘census of souls’, the Brixen diocese was home to between 355,000 inhabitants in 1829 (Catalogus, Citation1831, p. 352) and 400,000 inhabitants towards the end of the nineteenth century (Schematismus, Citation1892, p. 230). The diocese was divided into 26, later on 28, deaneries. These were the units of administration by the church, each under the leadership of a dean.
9. Owing to the completeness and the chronological order in the archives of the diocese of Brixen, in contrast to the other archives used, it was possible to create a database and systematically analyse all of the papal dispensation requests preserved there. For the entire study, this material is complemented by samples taken from the neighbouring dioceses of Chur, Salzburg and Trento (Lanzinger, Citation2015).
10. Corupus Thomisticum sancti Thomae de Aquino, Scriptum super Sententiis, lib. 4 d. 41 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 4 ad 2, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/snp4037.html (March 2016).
11. In the medieval notion of substances, the idea of ‘flesh’ was not limited to ‘a model of matrimonial union’, as Anita Guerreau-Jalabert has emphasised. ‘The choice of the term caro primarily reflected a relationship between the spiritual and the carnal. [...] In effect, the model referred to a fundamental idea in Christian society, that of unity, of which it was but one expression’ (Guerreau-Jalabert, Citation2013, p. 71).
12. In the Marriage Patent of 1783 as well as in the subsequent civil law codifications (Josephinisches Gesetzbuch (JGB) 1786 and Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (ABGB) 1811), marriage restrictions were reduced to the second degree – that is, to first cousin marriages, and state authorities got involved in the procedure of granting dispensations (Lanzinger, Citation2013). In the nineteenth-century practice of the diocese of Brixen, however, dispensation proceedings turned out to be common for consanguinity and affinity up to the fourth degree – despite the liberalisation of civil law. Furthermore, the civil authorities were less involved here in the administration of dispensations than the law intended them to be.
13. André Burguière, using French source material from the eighteenth century, notes that the arguments are primarily stereotypical and closely aligned with the predetermined official canonical grounds, therefore hardly allowing a qualitative evaluation or more far-reaching conclusions beyond a quantitative collection of aspects (Burguière, Citation1997, pp. 1346–1347). The same applies to the third- and fourth-degree dispensation requests of the diocese of Brixen.
14. In contrast to Vienna and Lower Austria (Saurer, Citation1997, p. 355), the diocese of Brixen saw lawyers and/or barrack-room lawyers employed only rarely. In the context of the administrative procedures, which were dominated here by the church, such helpers were viewed as representatives of the more liberal civil rights against the superiority of the church and stricter canon law in questions of marriages between relatives. So using a lawyer could easily become a disadvantage for the applicants.
15. See Tiroler Landesarchiv, Landesregierungsgesetzblatt 1849/50, no. 87, 151 (Mantl, Citation1997, pp. 9–10).
16. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1862, Fasz. 22a, Römische Dispensen, no. 20.
17. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1838, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 17. On their second attempt, they were successful.
18. As Margaret Morganroth Gullette writes, in this situation many ‘English people who could afford to go abroad were going to Germany or to Altona in Denmark or to infamous Gretna Green in Scotland to marry, without any intention of taking up residency but simply intending to return home with some country’s attestation of legality to their matrimony’ (Gullette, Citation1990, pp. 149–150).
19. ‘A certain unity of the blood’ existed for persons who were descended from the same ancestors in a direct line or in collateral lines, and the ‘sexual mixing’ (Vermischung) of man and woman would create ‘a unity of the flesh’. (Knopp, Citation1854, pp. 152, 202).
20. In a passage in the 1813 edition, he speaks of disadvantages for the state that had been part of this discussion since Joseph II. Furthermore, the prohibitions extended to the fourth degree would too greatly and unnecessarily restrict ‘the subjects’ innate freedom to marry according to their liking’; they were ‘without purpose and had no reasonable cause’, and would, to the state’s disadvantage, burden ‘marital alliances in smaller places where almost all the families tend to be related with each other to a closer or a more distant extent, particularly in remote valleys that have very little communication with the rest of the country and into which strangers only rarely like to marry’ (Dolliner, Citation1813, p. 188).
21. In Protestant countries, the rules varied from territory to territory and were generally less rigid. In Switzerland, the cantonal laws were only unified in 1874, when the more liberal regulations from the Zürich Code of Law were accepted: this code had already abolished the prohibition of marriages within the second degree of consanguinity (Mathieu, Citation2007, pp. 213–216). However, more liberal legislation could also imply that there was no possibility of invalidating the remaining impediments by dispensation (Head-König, Citation1993, pp. 455–456). In Prussia, the law prohibiting marriages of in-laws had already been abolished in 1740 (Jarzebowski, Citation2006, p. 113). Jürgen Schlumbohm, however, writes about rigid practices in the territory of Osnabrück (Schlumbohm, Citation1994, pp. 455–456).
22. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1859, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 5 (original emphasis).
23. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1836, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 20; DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1842, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 25.
24. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1833, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 9.
25. Hofkanzleidekret vom 9. Juli 1807 (Franz des Ersten, Citation1809, pp. 16–17, no. 6).
26. Vorarlberger Landesarchiv Bregenz, Kreisamt 1, box 48, Domäne, Ehe, Fond, no. 2.386.
27. DIÖAB, Konsistorialakten 1831, Fasz. 5a, Römische Dispensen, no. 6.
28. To Joanna de Groot, the nineteenth-century constructions of social, ethical, and gender differences were different aspects of one and the same process: contemporary social studies emphasised class differences, while the biological, anthropological, and medical theories of race and sex created differences on a physical basis in the sense of ‘unavoidable’ differences (de Groot, Citation1989, pp. 92–93).