Abstract
This article uses a combination of sources, ranging from statistical material calculated from parish records, through oral history interviews and autobiographies, to letters sent by parish priests to their bishop, to illuminate the spaces between law, marriage and the church in the Gurk valley of southern Austria. It argues that local patterns and trends of illegitimacy were tolerated by the Catholic clergy, and that the relationships concerned were understood both as marriage without ceremonialization, and as stable unions where marriage was impeded by poverty. These attitudes hardened in the state legal practices that formed part of Nazi family policy and reduced rural illegitimacy.
Highlights
This article uses a combination of sources, ranging from statistical material calculated from parish records, through oral history interviews and autobiographies, to letters sent by parish priests to their bishop, to illuminate the spaces between law, marriage and the church in the Gurk valley of southern Austria
Beginning in the period immediately after 1868, when the Ehekonsens[3] laws were abolished in Austria, and ending in 1945 after the demise of Nazi family policy relating to marriage and illegitimacy, this article explores the connections between marriage as a religious institution, marriage as an important and significant legal state, and the existence of large numbers of illegitimate births in parts of Austria
Illegitimacy and the Catholic Church coexisted in a pattern of toleration and local adaptation seen in communities across Europe
Summary
This article uses a combination of sources, ranging from statistical material calculated from parish records, through oral history interviews and autobiographies, to letters sent by parish priests to their bishop, to illuminate the spaces between law, marriage and the church in the Gurk valley of southern Austria. Province to Carinthia.[29] The Gurk valley, in its experience of illegitimacy in the period between 1868 and 1945, demonstrates that local practice remained persistent in the face of occasional moral concern from the church and more severe intervention from the Nazi state at the end of the period It highlights the ways in which local understandings, sometimes articulated by the attitude of the Catholic clergy of the valley towards marriage and fertility, describe a more resilient socio-economic system than we might infer from nineteenth-century changes in the law surrounding marriage and sanction against single motherhood in the 1930s and 1940s.30. Oral history interviews conducted in the Gurk valley in 2007 and 2008, and the autobiographical publications from the Memoiren Verlag Bauschke, which works with local elderly residents, offer some insight into how individual lives intersected with and experienced these different framings of their courtship behaviours in the mid-twentieth century
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