Page 188 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Margareth Lanzinger

wealth counted for the inns and gave the women power to act. This is the
subject of the first section. Secondly, the question arises as to how social
advancement can be recognised: probably, upward social mobility can also
be expressed not only in terms of the type, price and number of houses
acquired, but also in the placement of children and the diversification of
their activities. Thirdly, the question arises as to which areas of innkeepers’
pluriactivity are visible in the source material. The first impression is that
we are dealing not only with a forgotten history of the importance of the
transit of goods on the information boards of historical inns, but also with
a history that was already partially concealed at the time. This is because
considerable parts of the innkeepers’ pluriannual activity, particularly the
wine trade – as we have already seen in the case of Martin Schenk – and the
forwarding of goods, tend to be omitted from important sources such as
parish registers and documents of civil and non-contentious jurisdiction,
contracts and inheritance negotiations. A hypothesis to be tested in a larg-
er project is that the marriage networks, and hence the kinship networks
of the innkeepers, and the transit routes overlapped spatially. Evidence in
this direction can be found at almost every turn in the marriage records of
innkeeper couples.

The Wealth of Women
Women played an important role in the social and economic position-
ing of innkeepers in local and supra-local contexts. They often came from
innkeeper families themselves, not infrequently from more distant vil-
lages. In addition to their status, the fact that they had been familiar with
running an inn since childhood was almost certainly an important factor
in connection with a marriage pattern of professional endogamy that has
yet to be verified (Heiss 2000). In many cases, the women who married
were wealthy. As already mentioned, Maria Felizitas Clammerin, the sec-
ond wife of the innkeeper and merchant Franz Peintner of the Golden Ea-
gle Inn, had brought a large marriage portion (Heiratsgut)intothe mar-
riage in 1743. Due to the separation of property between husband and wife,
which was common in the German-speaking Tyrol in the early modern pe-
riod, the property was transferred to the husband’s administration for the
duration of the marriage.¹¹ After Franz Peintner’s death in 1784, she was
again entitled to her marriage portion. She also had the right to any gifts
her husband might have made. In his will, Franz Peintner had stated that

¹¹ On the implications of the separation of marital property, see Lanzinger et al. (2015).

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