Administration of the sacraments and bureaucratic order. Record Keeping Practices in Parish Registers from southern Germany (16th to early 17th Centuries)

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The parish register can be considered as an early modern administrative innovation. In the course of Reformation clerical administrators developed a new form and method of recording sacraments in written form. Every person in a parish could be and should be recorded in written form by the documentation of baptisms, marriages and burials in a register. The minimal information required by the church ordinances (Kirchenordnungen), mainly names and dates, left the actual record keeping to the local parishes. The act of writing was done by the local ministers and became part of the church administration and pastoral care. While genealogists, demographers and social historians have made use of these sources, they hardly ever considered parish register as forms and there has been no real interest in the writing practices. This project aims to examine the parish registers as bureaucratic and material texts and to analyze record keeping as a set of specific practices.The research project is guided by two questions. (1) The first focuses on the parish registers as material texts and the different writing practices. Which forms of record keeping were developed and used? (2) The second question is about categories and their intersections: What kind of categories, differences and classifications were developed and recorded to register people and make them recognizable over time? The corpus of sources comprises parish registers from southern Germany (16th to early 17th centuries), covering all major confessions of the time, Pre-Reformation, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic.