Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries

From the late eighteenth century, more and more men and women wished to marry their cousins or in-laws. This aim was primarily linked to changes in marriage concepts, which were increasingly based on familiarity. Wealthy as well as economically precarious households counted on related marriage partners. Such unions, however, faced centuries-old marriage impediments. Bridal couples had to apply for a papal dispensation. This meant a hurdled, lengthy and also expensive procedure.

This book shows that applicants in four dioceses – Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trent – took very different paths through the thicket of bureaucracy to achieve their goal. How did they argue their marriage projects? How did they succeed and why did so many fail? Tenacity often proved decisive in the end.

Margareth Lanzinger, Ph.D. (1999), is Professor of Economic and Social History from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on kinship, family and marriage, property and wealth, inheritance practices and marital property regimes, cultural history of administration as well as the construction of heroes and heroines and historiographic topics.

"Le livre de Margareth Lanzinger, qui met en lumière comment la parenté incarne une catégorie centrale dans l'Europe moderne et joue un rôle crucial dans la structuration des relations entre les genres et les générations, s'avère un livre indispensable à l'histoire du genre et de la famille. Cet ouvrage constitue une somme de travail qui allie le détail de l'archive et la contextualisation européenne, dont nous recommandons vivement la lecture et l'étude par les étudiant∙es et chercheur∙es désireux∙ses de s'instruire non seulement sur le dossier tout à fait singulier qui forme ici le corpus, mais également sur l'abondante historiographie de la parenté dans les quatre langues (allemand, anglais, français et italien) que lit Margareth Lanzinger." - Anne Verjus, in: Genre & Histoire 34 (2024) [online, DOI: doi.org/10.4000/12ykb]