BOOK: Margareth LANZINGER, Administrating Kinship: Marriage Impediments and Dispensation Policies in the 18th and 19th Centuries [Legal History Library, eds. Remco VAN RHEE, Dirk HEIRBAUT & Matthew C. MIROW] (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff/Brill, 2023), 420 p. ISBN 9789004431072 (OPEN ACCESS)

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

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.

On the author:

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.

Read the whole book for free: DOI 10.1163/9789004539877