Presentation:
Innkeeper Families in Eighteenth-Century Southern Tyrol
Innkeepers are an occupational group that has been widely neglected in the social and economic history of the early modern period. This is all the more surprising since they often belonged to the local elite, held administrative and political functions and offices, and were involved in various economic activities: as butchers, bakers, merchants, freight forwarders, but also as creditors. Of particular interest are innkeepers in today’s South Tyrol, whose inns were located on (trans-)alpine trade and transit routes. Their inns usually included large farms, the provision of food and overnight accommodation for travellers, carters and merchants, shelter and feeding of horses, and often transportation and storage facilities. It can be assumed that innkeepers were particularly pluriactive. However, inns as businesses cannot be analysed without also examining partner choice, marriage patterns and kinship relations, as these aspects played a significant role in the material foundations essential for social standing and in the division of labour processes necessary for everyday operation – and thus ultimately for the prosperity of the inns. The paper reconstructs and analyses these connections and interrelations of innkeepers’ families in the eighteenth century.
Link to presetation: https://event.esshc2025.exordo.com/presentation/1888/innkeeper-families-in-eighteenth-century-southern-tyrol
The Presentation takes place in the Panel
“Regimes and Responsibilities in the House. Gender-Specific Practices in Various Social Contexts. Part II”
Organised by
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Siglinde ClementiConvenor, Panel ChairCenter for reginal History, Bressanone/Brixen
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Margareth LanzingerConvenorUniversität Wien
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Christof JeggleConvenor, DiscussantUniversity of Vienna
Recently, the »house« as a key category of social and economic history has received increasing attention, and quite rightly so. In the context of historical family and kinship research, which has been booming for decades, newer concepts of historical house research need to be more widely discussed and established. This applies in particular to approaches and topics that are not primarily concerned with the house as a theoretical concept but rather with lived practice in the house and with the house as a material, social and economic unit. In terms of social practice, the open and permeable house has recently been placed at the centre of attention (Simone Derix, Joachim Eibach, Inken Schmidt-Voges, Raffaella Sarti, Margareth Lanzinger). This deserves to be further historicized, discussed and expanded along its individual aspects and central themes for the various social milieus.
This is the starting point of the proposed panels, which will focus on gender-specific spheres of action in different domestic contexts: what activities, responsibilities, competences, positions did women and men, especially wives/housemothers and husbands/fathers, assume in the home? How was the interaction between the sexes and generations organized? The house is understood as a site of production, reproduction and representation, as a material unit and as a microcosm of social and economic relations, as a family living and economic community consisting of the father and mother of the house, children, possibly other family members such as (grand)parents or siblings/aunts/uncles and servants. The repertoires of women’s and men’s actions are examined for houses of different social milieus, in rural and urban, peasant, bourgeois and aristocratic contexts. The perspective is both intersectional and trans-epochal.
- Janine Maegraith/Matthias Donabaum, The house as site of social and medical provisions. Negotiating care work and responsibilities in eighteenth-century town and countryside
- Margareth Lanzinger, Inkeeper couples: economic power and gender relations in the eighteenth century
- Charlotte Zweynert, Gender Economies: The House and the Transformation around 1800
- Emilia Schijman, Paris (to be confirmed)
Topics
