The Vrhnika Judge’s Woman

Portrait of an inappropriate love affair in the early bourgeois era

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of relationships and the forms of love in the late 18th and early 19th century in Slovenian territory between people of different social background and age who had no noble rank. At its focus is an analysis of the relationship between the Vrhnika market town judge Janez Nepomuk Jurkovič and his three-decades-younger protege and foster daughter Uršula Cerer between 1799-1803. Jurkovič found his pregnant mistress an apartment in Ljubljana, where she had to defend herself because of suspected prostitution before the Mayor of Ljubljana in 1801 and 1803. However, Uršula’s life differed from that of morally downfallen women because she had a home and support for herself and the child; at the same time, it differed from the lives of others involved in concubinage and brief adulteries. More is known about Uršula’s and Jurkovič’s actions and emotions than about other similar relationships because five letters that Jurkovič sent between 1802-1803 to the otherwise illiterate Uršula have survived. Their content and the minutes of the hearings reveal not only the technicalities of the love affair but also their care for the child and a typical Biedermeier love that was completely unlike the late Baroque one.