CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Pataki, Katalin |
|---|---|
| Title | Resources, Records, Reforms: The Implementation of Monastic Policies in the Kingdom of Hungary under Maria Theresa and Joseph II |
| Summary | My dissertation examines the question how the personnel of monasteries was surveyed and managed by secular authorities in the Habsburg realms, and particularly in the Hungarian Kingdom during the reign of Maria Theresa and Joseph II between 1750 and 1790. By focusing on the formation of administrative practices that enabled more and more detailed and comprehensive record keeping about the capacities of individual monks and nuns, I investigate the impact of Maria Theresa’s and Joseph II’s church policies both on the Habsburg imperial and the Catholic ecclesiastical governmental structures. I explore how they succeeded in or fell short of creating a “rank and file” personnel of the church that could (have been) able to put into practice their vision of a “well-ordered” state and church, and, ultimately, of a well-governed society. Instead of marking the starting point of imperial uniformity with largely identical legal texts issued on the same day or with minor delay in the central lands by Joseph II, I emphasize the synchronicity of developing bureaucratic structures in the various Habsburg domains from the 1750s, when both the blueprints of discursive patterns and administrative structures started taking shape on an imperial scale. I consider the church policies as a complex program consisting of various points to be achieved among which always the most feasible elements were put forward among the limits of the local legal framework, administrative infrastructure and economic basis. This perspective opens up new ways of considering the place of the Hungarian Kingdom among the Habsburg realms. It was the preparation of the law of amortization from 1750 – and the design of its later amendments – that first considered individuals as economic factors: while it intended to put a halt on the accumulation of mortmain properties, it also recognized the act of taking monastic vows as an occasion when a “dowry” or expected heritage was offered to the convent from which the expenses of the sustenance of the new member could be covered fully or partially for a lifetime. By the end of the 1760s, the costs and potential benefits of sustaining individual monks and nuns became the subject of extensive inquiries and both ecclesiastical and secular authorities were instructed to submit detailed reports according to predesigned questionnaires. Thus, the preconditions of preparing policies on the basis of previously gathered information were established and the main characteristics of the “monastic landscape” had been explored. They also revealed a specific feature of the of the Hungarian Kingdom: it was dominated by mendicant orders. Consequently, the “resource potential” of the monasteries lay not so much in their goods, but in their inhabitants whose utilization for pastoral care was a clearly explicated principle. By focusing the reports of a widening network of experts and officials, I demonstrate that the period after 1786 can be characterized rather with the intensification of the control over monasteries as new governmental and record keeping techniques made individuals visible for the state in great detail. |
| Supervisor | László Kontler |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/pataki_katalin.pdf |
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