The struggle of Slovene boys and girls for freedom

The intertwining and clashing of patriarchal constraint with love and the consensual marital principle in Slovenia in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

After the formal triumph of the consensual principle in the ecclesiastical teachings of the Church in the 12th century, the verification at the Council of Trent in 1563 and its successful social implementation, the more determined young men were able to assert their wishes and particularly love in their quest for a spouse. However, with the rise of the absolutist state in the 17th and 18th centuries, intergenerational tensions increased. This eroded not only the materialist essence of matrimony, which was usually negotiated between the bride and the bridegroom’s parents, but also the essence of the absolutist state with the emperor as the patriarch. This resulted in an apparent paradox: the Church supported the young people, while the state supported the parents. Support, however, was not always solid. A testimony to this is the selfwilled engagement and the intended marriage of Marija Dizma Count Barbo-Waxenstein from 1760-1764, who together with his beloved Ivana Nepomuška Baroness Billichgratz withstood social demands as embodied in his father Jošt Vajkard. However, the favourable end of the affair for the couple came so late that the previously loudly extolled love emotions among aristocratic circles had already begun the retreat to intimacy. In Carinthia, a system of religious-moral rigorism was being implemented. Love and marriage, even though the latter was formally free, could not be outlived past the standard material (preservation of property) and moral demands, i.e. respect of but not also absolute subordination to parents.