Preliminary Programme

Brothers and sisters in noble families spent a good part of their lives with half-siblings. The paper focuses on this specific relationship and looks not only at inheritance conflicts but also at court records of trials involving the recognition of paternity, fairy tales (e.g. the Italian version of Cinderella) and inventories showing both the household assets available and the division of rooms in Roman noble palaces.
Rome, as the seat of the papal monarchy, offers fruitful advantages for examining how sibling relationships were experienced and conceived. For this configuration opened up noble households to children born outside the sacred bond of marriage. Sometimes they behaved like a brother or sister and were thus more of a sibling than the 'real' sibling. (Show less)

The paper starts from the assumption, that wealth is the fundamental medium for constituting and maintaining kinship relations, whereby kinship is thought of relationally and socially. Emotions as representations are referred to in these kinship constellations in various source contexts in order to create and maintain family cohesion. Particularly with regard to sibling relationships, however, not only the much-invoked love and unity, affection and cohesion, become tangible in the sources, but also competition and conflicts.
This paper focuses on a sibling line of the Tyrolean nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries, which consisted of five marrying sons and two marrying daughters, as well as another ten siblings who died at a younger age. Of the five brothers, two were from first marriage, as were the marrying daughters, and three of the brothers were from second marriage. The five brothers lived on undivided estates for over 17 years after the death of their father in 1577, when the two youngest sons were still minors. The daughters renounced the family inheritance in return for receiving a marriage portion according to her rank.
In contracts, settlements, wills, but above all in letters, the complex interplay between property arrangements and emotions in this series of siblings is traced. Both the undivided inheritance between brothers and the gender-specific distribution of assets are reconstructed in detail with a special focus on the step constellation. (Show less)

Seventeenth-century state formation did not only change the nature of early modern rulers – more absolute, more exalted – but also created the need for a new sort of role for their younger siblings, for whom centralization meant a loss of autonomy and an end to shared inheritance. These "victims" of centralization had to navigate a new reality in which traditional princely roles became less acceptable. So, what to do with younger brothers for whom there was no place in the new constellation? This presentation focuses on Archduke Charles "the Posthumous" (1590-1624), thirteenth child, and fourth son of Archduke Charles II of Habsburg-Styria and Anna Maria of Bavaria. How did he navigate the waters of primogeniture and centralization? What impact did his status as runt of a large litter have on his socialization and role, both among his siblings and within the wider Habsburg dynastic network? Focusing on his mother's correspondence while he was still underage, this presentation aims to reconstruct the future that was envisioned for him in comparison with his brothers. (Show less)

If one searches the archives of noble families for letters between siblings, one often finds boxes filled with correspondences relating to the eldest son of a family, usually written by one of his brothers.
Letters from sisters, on the other hand, are much less frequently preserved. Those that have been kept are again mostly correspondences, between a sister and either her oldest brother or a brother with an important political function. This concentration on the eldest son of the family is reflected not only in the sources, but also in their study. For a long time, the primary attention paid to vertical family lines in the nobility ignored horizontal configurations that constituted and influenced noble power and family politics as well. Siblings played an essential role in this process – sisters as well as brothers. My paper aims to address the research desideratum that exists, especially for female protagonists in this interplay. While the various aspects that sisters dealt with in their letters form the basic framework of the analysis, the focus is on what the letters reveal to us about the relationships of the two correspondence partners. Which scopes for actions and possibilities for shaping can be observed – especially for the sisters – in the various configurations of sibling relationships?
How do they position and define themselves in relation to important family members? In answering these questions situational logics must also be taken into account, since they shape the actions and options for action of the participants and could also change suddenly. My paper will address all of this based on promising source material of correspondences form the 17th century of the two Austrian noble families Harrach and Lamberg. (Show less)