Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs 2 / 2016, pp. 281-300, 2016/10/11
Gerichtsvielfalt in Wien
Forschungen zum modernen Gerichtsbegriff
The Catholic Church held jurisdiction in matrimonial matters in the Habsburg Monarchy until 1783. The vast majority of the parishes of Austria below the Enns were subordinated either to the consistory of Passau or the consistory of Vienna. The article examines how these two ecclesiastical courts dealt with complaints of quarreling husbands and wives. As the minutes of the proceedings are not preserved, the cases have to be reconstructed from the protocol books of the consistories, which register the activities day by day. The author depicts the rules of procedure based on entries of approximately 2,000 marriage litigations, which have been transcribed and analyzed within the FWF funded project ‘Matrimony before the Court’. The knowledge of the procedural rules is not only useful for legal historians, but an indispensable prerequisite for the understanding of the entries in the protocol books on the one hand, and for the analysis of the strategies of plaintiffs and defendants and their lawyers, respectively, on the other hand.
Keywords: Austria below the Enns - consistory of Passau - consistory of Vienna - Catholic Church divorce - Lower Austria - marriage disputes - marriage law - matrimony
