Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg, Das älteste Taufbuch in Oesterreich (1895)

This short historical-statistical article establishes the antiquity of Pirano’s baptismal register and tests its value for late-medieval population history. Its movement from archival verification through manuscript criticism to numerical analysis makes the central point: an exceptionally early register can yield demographic evidence, but only after its gaps and recording practices have been examined.

Inama-Sternegg begins with the Austrian statistical Central Commission’s 1887 survey of surviving parish registers. Three claims to unusually early records proved erroneous; Pirano’s reported starting date of 1454 came close to surviving scrutiny.

Die ältesten Eintragungen desselben betreffen die Jahre 1457 und 1458, und vom Jahre 1459 an ist dasselbe regelmässig geführt.

English translation: Its oldest entries concern the years 1457 and 1458, and from the year 1459 onward it has been kept regularly.

This correction grounds his identification of the manuscript as Austria’s oldest baptismal register and a rare medieval civil-status source. He then describes the paper folio, covering 1457–1514. Its entries generally identify the officiating priest, baptismal date, child’s name and sex, parents, and godparents; occupations and residences appear only rarely. Irregular chronology, batches of boys followed by girls, and later additions suggest that entries were transcribed from preliminary notes rather than recorded immediately. Changes of priest also brought changes in diligence, while damaged leaves and neglected registration compromised the later decades.

An annual table makes these uneven records available for inspection. Rather than treating every low total as demographic decline, Inama-Sternegg excludes manifestly incomplete years and questions others whose totals fall substantially below the preceding decade’s average. His defensible statistical core is therefore narrower than the manuscript’s chronological span:

Es bleibt demnach eine ununterbrochene Reihe von 1459—1490 oder von 32 Jahren, für welche die Eintragungen unserer Quelle eine nähere Betrachtung verdienen.

English translation: There thus remains an unbroken series from 1459 to 1490, or of 32 years, for which the entries of our source deserve closer consideration.

These years contain 2,032 baptisms, averaging 63.5 annually. Applying contemporary standards, he tentatively suggests a parish population of 1,600–1,800. The 1,094 male and 938 female entries yield a male share of 53.8 percent, appreciably above Pirano’s 50.9 percent in 1894. Yet the striking ratio does not authorize a straightforward claim about medieval births:

Es lässt sich leider nicht mit voller Sicherheit sagen, ob es sich hier um eine, gewiss merkwürdige, Verschiebung der Sexualproportion handelt, oder ob etwa doch eine Auslassung von Eintragungen von Mädchengeburten dabei im Spiele ist.

English translation: Unfortunately it cannot be said with full certainty whether what is involved here is a shift, certainly a remarkable one, in the sex ratio, or whether after all an omission of entries of girls' births is at play in the matter.

The distinction between population characteristics and documentary selection is the article’s crucial methodological move. A comparison with Bleicher’s findings for seventeenth-century Frankfurt makes a historically higher male proportion plausible without resolving whether girls were under-recorded in Pirano.

The final analysis considers monthly baptism totals for 1476–1490: January and February show the highest frequency, April through July the lowest. Inama-Sternegg explicitly limits their significance because baptismal months do not necessarily coincide with birth months. He closes by balancing evidentiary scarcity against the dangers of extrapolation:

Weitergehende Schlüsse können aus diesen kleinen Zahlen natürlich nicht gezogen werden; als ein Beitrag zu der noch so ausserordentlich dürftigen Bevölkerungsstatistik des ausgehenden Mittelalters verdienen sie immerhin einiges Interesse.

English translation: Further-reaching conclusions cannot, of course, be drawn from these small figures; as a contribution to the still so extraordinarily scanty population statistics of the closing Middle Ages they nevertheless merit some interest.

The article’s contribution is thus both documentary and methodological: it authenticates an unusually early source, extracts a qualified statistical series, and keeps the resulting observations distinct from demographic conclusions the surviving evidence cannot securely sustain.