Page 109 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

4

ADynasty of MayorsandaMember

of Parliament: Godfatherhood as a Measure
of Social Prestige in a Peasant Community

(Tomaj, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Century)

Aleksander Panjek
University of Primorska, Slovenia

Miha Zobec
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
and University of Primorska, Slovenia
© 2025 Aleksander Panjek and Miha Zobec
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-486-6.107-150

Introduction
This study addresses the long-run historical parable of a peasant elite fam-
ily, focusing on the attractiveness of its members as godfathers at bap-
tism as a measure of popularity within the village community. In recent
decades, the history of the family in Europe has progressed methodologi-
cally and branched out thematically, moving from an initial prevailing in-
terest in the demographic aspects of the family to focusing on relations
between family members, relatives and their social networks (Lanzinger
2016, 96–9). In Slovenia, historical studies on the family barely followed
the European trends after a brief surge at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury (Verginella 1990; 1996; Studen 1995; Hudales 1997). These, as well as
later studies (Gomiršek 2010; 2015), mostly concentrate on the nineteenth
century, leaving earlier centuries nearly unexplored, with the important
exceptions of marriage contracts within the nobility in the eighteenth cen-
tury (Štuhec 2009) and the predominantly cultural aspects of marriage,
married life and sexuality reaching back to the Middle Ages, albeit mostly
focusing on the nobility (Kos 2015; 2016). Consequently, ‘the state of the
art of family and kinship history research in early modern rural Slovenia
does not offer a sufficiently solid basis to support an analysis oriented on
kinship networks and relations or on household organization,’ meaning

Panjek,A.,ed.2025. Upland Families, Elites and Communities: Long-Run Micro
Perspectives on Persistence and Change. University of Primorska Press.