Preliminary Programme

Families of the nobility along the middle reaches of the River Weser shall be used as examples to illustrate the role played by various forms of property which were associated with women, for the economy of the nobility and the way that noble families presented themselves to the outside world. The presentation will concentrate on women's marriage portion, the dowry and what was called their "personal money". These types of property were generally transferred at the time of the wedding.
A written marriage contract governed the goods bestowed on the bride by her own family, and detailed the gifts made by her husband in return and the provision he made for her should she become widowed. Marriage contracts stipulated what ?ought? to happen and as such are an excellent source of information for answering the question about property transfers that took place within individual families and also between different families in early modern Germany. However, marriage contracts must be seen in relation to receipts, wills and other pieces of writing which document actual transfer and use. The presentation encourages scholars to investigate women?s economic freedom and to examine how they were integrated into the economic structures of the groups that they had dealings with, turning more attention to the German Empire in the early modern period than has been the case to date.
Three theses will be put forward for discussion:
1. Amongst the lower nobility significant amounts of property were transferred at the time of marriage, including items both of monetary and of symbolic value. Property was transferred either directly to women, or passed on via them when certain property was bestowed on them which they themselves had no authority to dispose of.
2. After women married, they had powers of disposal over various forms of property, which made a substantial contribution to their social standing within the wider family. In many cases this property gave them economic freedom.
3. In addition, women's property was of great importance for the way in which noble families were seen by the outside world.
Women's involvement in the distribution and transfer of capital in noble families has to be viewed from a range of perspectives: on the one hand, under the rules governing family relationships requiring that in the interests of the family as much as possible of its assets should be "kept within the family," in order to safeguard the basic necessities of life for future generations. On the other hand, this question should be regarded from the point of view of necessity and the need to make provisions for daughters, sisters, wives and widows, appropriate to their estate, in the interests of the standing of the family. Within this area of tension between family-oriented thinking and the requirements of a particular estate, there were also individual demands which, for example, arose out of changes to the prevailing legal conditions; these demands represent a third factor which should be taken into consideration during investigations. (Show less)