A digital approach to the Early Modern inquisition in Portugal

Sometimes a word evokes almost automatically an association with a distinct historical period. The word inquisition is first and foremost linked with medieval Europe. On this blog and website I explain why speaking about the inquisition is misleading. In Early Modern Europe the Spanish and Italian inquisition received most attention from historians, but in Italy you have to distinguish between Rome and Venice. Recently the project TraPrInq started for the transcription and study of records of the inquisition in Portugal between 1536 and 1821. The project is accompanied by the blog e-Inquisition hosted by the international Hypotheses network. In this post I will look at the plans of the project team and its importance for studying both Portuguese and Brazilian history.

Records from four centuries

The blog for TraPrInq itself show nicely how much this project is in a starting phase. While preparing this post its layout changed. At the blog a concise presentation of the project is offered in French, Portuguese and English. The core of the current team is the Centro de Humanidades (CHAM) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Alas I could not find any information about this project running in 2022 and 2023 at the website of the CHAM. However, it is stated TraPrInq is connected with an earlier CHAM project on censorship and the Portuguese inquisition. One of the main objectives is to create transcriptions of court records using the Transkribus technology, discussed here earlier in a post about Early Modern court records and legal consultations in Germany. In fact Hervé Baudry, the blog editor, is responsible for the Transkribus model for Latin-Portuguese print from the seventeenth century. By the way, this and other models are also present for free use without registration at the recently launched platform Transkribus AI.

As for now 140 records have been transcribed, good for some 190,000 words, a fair base for a HTR (Handwritten Text Recogniition) model in Transkribus. I was somewhat mystified by the utter absence of information about the actual location of the records to be transcribed and studied. The clue for a unmistakable identification is the fact the records stem from a tribunal with jurisdiction both in Portugal and Brazil. The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) in Lisbon is the holding institution. It is not a bad idea to start with one of its four virtual exhibitions concerning the inquisition in Portugal. preferably with Inquisição da Lisboa online telling you about the nearly 20,000 registers for which 2,3 million digital images have been put online. The ANTT has within the archive of the Tribunal de Santo Oficio (TSO) records of the Inquisição de Lisboa (IL). The scope note and inventory in Portuguese of this archival subfonds is available online at the :Portuguese Digitarq portal. Series 028 contains the processos. Digital images of documents are directly linked to numerous items.

Perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with the Portuguese inquisition I tried to look a bit wider for information about its archival traces. The wiki of FamilySearch brings you only to records for a few years digitized earlier and available at SephardicGen. The online inventory of the ANTT is mentioned by Family Search, but not its inclusion of digitized records. It is a nice exercise to compare versions of the relevant Wikipedia articles in English, Portuguese and Spanish, in particular for their bibliographies and linguistic preferences. Luckily I found a special of the Brazilian journal Politeia: Historie e Sociedade 20/1 (2021) with a Dossiê Temático Tribunal do Santo Ofício Português, 200 anos após extinção: História e Historiografia opening with a contribution by Grayce Mayre Bonfim Souza about the archive of the Tribunal do Santo Oficio.

Let me not forget to note here the CHAM has created an online index of the fonds Manuscritos do Brasil held at the ANTT. The e-Inquisition blog contains currently apart from the brief introduction five articles,four in Portuguese and one in English touching a wide variety of themes, The recent brief article in English brings you an overview of the palaeographers and historians in the project team. Baudry wrote for example about censorship in the books of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa and (in French) about the famous trial of Manuel Maria de Barbosa du Bocage, with images and transcriptions of four documents. Baudry’s article about Pedro Lupina Freire brings a seventeenth-century notary into the spotlights who became an agent for the tribunal. A most fascinating article is concerned with the double use of asterisks by censors, both to hide information and to highlight matters.

No doubt more information about the TraPrInq project will soon appear at the e-Inquisition blog and at the website of the CHAM, in particular concerning the progress at Transkribus of the creation of the new HTR model for Portuguese Early Modern script, and the location where transcriptions will become available online for the wider scholarly community. Thanks to this transcription project the records of the Inquisição de Lisboa will surely show more of their rich content touching many parts of the Early Modern world, not just Jewish and colonial history. The combination of a detailed inventory, digitized images and digital transcriptions will make it possible to ask different questions. This project shows at least the very real need for trained palaeographers, but I am sure the knowledge of legal historians, too, will be necessary to tap this wealth of information.

An addendum

In Spring 2022 the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal held the exposition Bibliotecas limpas. Censura dos livros impressos nos séculos XV a XIX curated by Hervé Baudry. The virtual exposition Bocage 1735-1805 created by the BN brings you to the life and works of this poet; the chronology mentions his trial in 1802.

Censorship by the Portuguese inquisition is the subject of the portal Inquisition in Action launched on June 20, 2022 by the CIUHCT, also in Lisbon.

A dictionary for the Spanish colonial empire and canon law

This year I follow my tradition of starting the new year with a post featuring either the law of an empire or an empire, and this year I offer the former. A constitutive element of the international project based at Mainz for the School of Salamanca is a political-legal dictionary. In an earlier post I mentioned the dictionary only briefly, because at tha time it did not yet exist. However, things have changed since 2017, and it is certainly interesting to look now in more detail at the form, contents and progress of the Diccionario Histórico de Derecho Canónico en Hispanoamérica y Filipinas, Siglos XVI-XVIII. Using the simple abbreviation DCH has particular consequences for finding this online dictionary. Anyway, the DCH is not the first dictionary appearing at my blog.

Studying Spanish colonial law

Research into Spanish legal history and colonial laws and legislation in the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America is in particular associated with the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (MPILHLT) in Frankfurt am Main. Last year its name changed a lot by adding a third department for legal theory to the two departments for legal history, and by removing the word European from its name. Speaking of names, nowadays the term School of Salamanca is no longer linked exclusively to sixteenth-century thinkers teaching at this Spanish university, nor is it confined to law or theology.

The core of the project of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz for the School of Salamanca is a digital collection with 116 works mainly published in the sixteenth century. At the website you can also consult the series of working papers published by the research team. The project website describes as an objective a dictionary for juridical-political languages with eventually some 200 entries, taking their cues from both Spanish and Latin words. Entries will appear from 2020 onwards, but no entries are visible at the project website. This dictionary is a separate aim, not to be confused with the DCH, as Ana Arango kindly pointed out to me.

At this point you must be aware absolutely of the role of the MPILHLT within this project. At its website the information has been placed on a number of web pages. There is a general page for this cooperation with the Akademie in Mainz, but you will have to navigate also to the web page for the School of Salamanca. This page alerts you to the blog of the Mainz website, where the blog is found under the heading News. The Frankfurt page for the Salamanca project does not mention its own page for the Historical Dictionary of Canon Law in Hispanic America and the Philippines 16th-18th century (DCH). On that page you will find the actual entries now available halfway at the heading Blog, not the one and only spot where you would indeed expect it to appear.

Let’s not hide the fact I had noticed the abbreviation DCH at the Frankfurt website earlier on, especially among the new releases, but somehow the direct link with this project was not clear for me. In a way it is just a small revenge of using too much abbreviations… At the third Salamanca page in Frankfurt, the one for Salamanca Publications in the publications section, the DCH is yet absent. Actually the series of published entries for the DCH can be found also at the SSRN page of the MPHLHT where they appear in the chronological sequence of publication.

To be honest, this situation is only temporary, but it is a nice example of a dilemma between providing information about final results and preliminary publications. In a town with much attention to system theory this should make you smile! The two institutions should not hesitate to give the new temporary form of the DCH at the Hypotheses network simply its due as a perfectly sensible solution for the time being. No doubt plans for the definitive form of publication are being contemplated right now.

The DCH as work in progress

There was a time when great dictionaries were published only in print, often at a slow pace. Decades after the start the final volume would appear at last, and decades afterwards some supplement could be printed. This simple picture does not exist anymore. Many dictionaries have been digitized or their new edition appears both online and in print.

At the DCH blog – also present at Twitter, @DiccionarioDCH – you should not jump immediately to the published entries. It is wiser to look first at the explanation about its structure (Estructura). The entries – 120 is their number mentioned here, elsewhere a total of 200 or 300 entries is stated – will be organized according to the order of the five books in the Decreatles Gregorii IX, the Liber Extra published in 1234 on behalf of pope Gregory IX. The decretals in this official papal collection were divided into five books headed Iudex, Iudicium, Clerus, Connubia and Crimen. Church councils in the Spanish New World used this division also, as did the major European handbooks for canon law in the Early Modern period. There is a table showing this division and the entries currently available under each heading. Four general entries on canon law, moral theology, the Patronato Real and historiography will function as introductions.

The nature and form of this dictionary can best be tasted in the most recent published entries which all mention immediately the DCH blog. I restrict myself to two entries, Vicarios under the heading Iudex and Sentencia under Iudicium; the links here are to the introductions on the DCH blog.

Susana Frias gives a crisp and clear summary of her article Vicario. She looks at the various positions of the vicario, in particular at his role as a judge delegated by a bishop, but she mentions other types of vicars as well. She gives examples of the context, for example the tension between religious orders and bishops, ad the growing influence of the Spanish crown on ecclesiastical institutions. This summary helps a reader much. Her contribution, downloadable from SSRN, has 23 pages, with abstracts at SSRN in Spanish and English. Frias’ article has ten sections. After a few lines about the pope as the Vicar of Christ she deals with the vicar-general of a bishop, the vicario capitular functioning during a sede vacante in a diocese. The vicario foraneo is a judicial official representing episcopal jurisdiction in a district. A vicario coadjutor is the figure closest to a parish vicar, an assistant to the curate. With the vicario apostolico we encounter another familiar figure in canon law, the administrator of a region without diocesan organization. The function of the vicario castrense was created in the seventeenth century as an army chaplain. The last vicars in this article are the vicarios within religious orders, the officials representing the provincial, sometimes for visitations as a visitador. In the last section (pp. 17-23) Frias offers a concise historiographic conclusion and a substantial list of primary sources and secondary literature used for this contribution. With ample references to the sources in each section this is clearly the kind of dictionary article which can both help you quickly to gain basic knowledge and offer you also the necessary background information.

Faustino Martinez divides in his abstract his contribution Sentencia on verdicts into two sections, a general section on the place of verdicts within a trial, and a section focusing on developments and characteristics of verdicts within the Spanish empire. This is exactly also the abstract in Spanish and English at SSRN. I had expected to find at the beginning of his article with 48 pages a visual overview the headings of the subsections, but he lists in fact the nine sections in the last lines of his introduction. An indication of their respective importance would be welcome. After ten pages it is clear the section Elementos y modos de la sentencia is such part of his contribution (pp. 7-17). All other sections are rather short but densely packed with information. I would single out the sections on nullity of sentences and on abuse of justice by starting a process based on invalid claims. They put things really into relief. The section on typical developments in the Spanish colonial empire, too, is relatively short (pp. 32-38), as is the historiographic balance which points out a substantial number of matters to be investigated. There is much space at the end for the primary sources and scholarly literature. On balance the subject deserves indeed a long and intricate contribution with relatively short sections. On purpose I have not tried to summarize every section, because this would not tell you how much Martinez has to offer here, both on Spanish and colonial legal history.

The DCH in context

How should one judge this scholarly project? At some point during writing my mind turned to the project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. This dictionary has a similar long and telling title, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vol., Stuttgart 1972-2007), edited by Reinhard Koselleck, Werner Conze and Otto Brunner. GG contains in 9000 pages some 120 articles on a number of key concepts for German history, politics and society. This example must surely at some moments have crossed the minds of the Salamanca team, too. I suppose we should applaud the fact we can consult online in open access the entries of the DCH! The DCH is an international project dealing with a much wider part of the world forthe Early Modern period.

My two choices for first impressions of the DCH happen to deal in particular with institutional history. The strong point of the DCH and the Salamanca project at Frankfurt am Main and Mainz is its aim of putting things at their right place within wider contexts, and thus institutions get their due. For me the veil from the abbreviation DCH has been lifted! You can learn a lot from the entries that have already appeared, starting with the bibliographical sections, but I am sure you will encounter much else that is interesting for your own research and general knowledge of the vast Spanish colonial empire and its impact on Latin America’s history and society.

As for the sources used you can bet the MPILHLT at Frankfurt am Main has several editions or even several copies of the main works used by the team. It is sensible to look beyond the works digitized for this purpose. Apart from the portal for the School of Salamanca you can look also at De Indiarum iure. My earlier post does point to some other projects elsewhere as well, but it told you less about some digital resources now available. For copies of works held by libraries and archives in Latin America you might want to look also at my web page for digital libraries. In particular in Mexico there is a large number of digital libraries. For tracing Early Modern works you can benefit from the Catálogo Colectivo de Impresos Latinoamericanos hasta 1851 (University of California at Riverside), a union catalog for Latin American imprints, and a number of bibliographical projects and works for and from Mexico. My remarks about the visibility of the DCH blog will no doubt soon be superfluous, because curious readers surely will find the DCH quickly. Our thanks should go to the international team making such a project feasible. Bringing canon law into view as a major element of the Spanish transatlantic empire and its legal history is just one of its qualities.

A postscript

On January 19, 2022 the first of the four general introductory chapters was published. Faustino Martinez contributed an article on procedure in canon law. I should like also to alert you to the series of colorful videos created by the research team for the DCH blog.

For those interested in the development of the Spanish language in their colonial empire it is useful to mention here the Corpus Electrónico del Español Colonial Mexicano (COREECOM), a project of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Ana Arango kindly pointed me to the fact the dictionary for political-juridical thought of the School of Salamanca project in Mainz is a different project. Hopefully this difference can be indicated at the crucial points of the websites for both dictionaries.

It can do no harm to mention here the digital collection of Spanish legal documents (15th-19th centuries) created by the Library of Congress. 106 documents were labeled Canon law. At its crowdsourcing platform By The People the Library of Congress runs a campaign for transcribing these records, Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents.

I would like to point here also to the digital versions in open access of the volume The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production, edited by Thomas Duve, José Luis Egio and Christiane Birr (Leiden-Boston 2021; Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds, vol. 2; online, (PDF, 50 MB)), and to Conceptos, autores, instituciones. Revisión crítica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008-19) y bibliografía multidisciplinar, Celia Alejandra Ramirez Santos and José Luis Egio (eds.) (Madrid, 2020; online (PDF, 1,8 MB)).

At the passing away of Peter Landau

Every year the death of scholars in the field of legal history makes you reflect about the very different paths scholars pursue in their research. Over the years I try here not to look only at their scholarly achievements, but also at the way they lived, their human qualities and attitude. Sometimes it is challenging to give a complete picture of someone in view of his many activities. With Peter Landau not only a scholar of medieval canon law has passed away. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte announced his passing on Thursday May 23, 2019. Here I will look briefly at his scholarly career and publications, and I will tell about my personal experience with him in Munich.

From Berlin to Munich

Berlin was the place of birth of Peter Landau (February 26, 1935), but you must mention a lot of other towns in Germany and abroad when you want to do him justice. You will find the main dates of his life in the curriculum vitae on the website of the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute for Medieval Canon Law. Landau studied from 1953 onwards law, philosophy and history in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau and Bonn. In 1956 he got support from the Studienstifitung des deutschen Volkes. He stood his first federal juridical examination (Erstes Juristisches Staatsexam) in Cologne in 1958. In 1960 he became an assistant at the university of Bonn. Guided by Hermann Conrad he defended in 1964 his dissertation on the canonical concept of infamy, published as Die Entstehung des kanonischen Infamiebegriffs von Gratian bis zur Glossa ordinaria (Cologne-Vienna 1966). His PhD thesis brought him in 1965 to Yale University where he worked with Stephan Kuttner, not only for the preparation of his second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift), but also as a lecturer on canon law. In 1968 he defended his study on the role of church patrons in medieval canon law, published seven years later [Ius Patronatus. Studien zur Entwicklung des Patronats im Dekretalenrecht und der Kanonistik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Cologne-Vienna 1975)].

Peter Landau hold his first tenure as a law professor from 1968 to 1987 at the very new university of Regensburg, founded in 1962 and really starting in 1967. In these years he was twice a guest lecturer in the United States, at Berkeley in 1977 and in Chicago in 1984. He declined the call in 1983 to succeed Helmut Coing at the university of Frankfurt am Main. It will not do mentioning here all academic honors bestowed on Peter Landau. His membership of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences led him in 1986 as their representative to the board of directors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), a role he had until 2014. In 1987 he became a professor of law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in the surroundings of the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte. His major role in the field of research concerning medieval canon law is clear from his presidency of the Society for Medieval Canon Law (1988-2000) and his presidency of the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law since 1991.

In Munich

When you look at the list of Peter Landau’s publications, even when only updated until December 2014, the years in Munich gave him the space and time for many publications despite a growing number of other tasks and duties. In July 1992 Landau hosted the quadriennial International Congress of Medieval Canon Law. By chance I had planned to work in Munich for my own thesis in June 1992. Even during the weeks of preparation for this congress other things continued as well. I attended the seminar Landau held on Anglo-American legal philosophy. I remember helping the staff with sending out by post the final congress mailing. The congress was a great event, not just a chance to meet people, but also a gathering of scholars from different disciplines all bringing their light on medieval canon law.

Rather unexpectedly the Institute of Medieval Canon Law had to move from Berkeley, and in 1995 Munich was chosen as its new home. At a meeting in May 1995 with Peter Landau he asked me whether I would like to help with the new start of this research institute, and in particular with creating again a functioning library with the scholarly collection of Stephan Kuttner. Early 1997 I came to Munich to start with this task. Imagine yourself surrounded by hundreds of large boxes, many of them containing books, others offprints, letters and microfilms! Peter Landau set the direction of the things to do and just as important, he showed his confidence in me. His connection to the MGH helped to get quickly support from its library staff in creating an electronic catalogue. He urged me to attend also a seminar of his colleagues in the Abteilung A of the Wenger Institute, by any account Germany’s focus of research into Roman law. One of the most amazing things about Peter Landau was his absolutely marvellous ability to change focus and to go straight to the matters at hand, be they the very heart or important details. He smiled when his secretary Hille Sachtler gave him his daily map with letters to sign. Details about conciliar canons and papal decretals were literally within his reach in his large office lined with walls of files concerning legal collections and about ongoing research projects he was involved in.

Creating critical editions of important texts in the field of medieval canon law is one of the most urgent needs in this field, but also an often daunting task, even for the experts of the Kuttner-Institute. Peter Landau edited with the late Rudolf Weigand and Waltraud Kozur a late twelfth-century summa, Magistri Honorii Summa ‘De iure canonico tractaturus’ (3 vol., Città del Vaticano 2004-2010). He saw the completion of another summa edition, again with Weigand, Kozur, Martin Petzolt and Karin Miethaner-Vent and others, of the Summa ‘Omnis qui iuste iudicat’ sive Lipsiensis (5 vol., Città del Vaticano 2007-2018). The presence of these editions is among the most important developments in the field of ongoing research into medieval canon law.

You will soon be aware of the sheer width of Landau’s scholarly interest when you look at the different subjects and periods he addressed in his publications. The number of journals he contributed to is impressive in itself. It is a surpise to note his article on ‘Karl Marx und die Rechtsgeschichte’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 41 (1973) 361-371. A number of his articles concerning canon law have been reprinted with updates in the volume Kanones und Dekretalen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Quellen des kanonischen Rechts (Goldbach 1997). You can find his contributions on many more themes in the volume Europäische Rechtsgeschichte und kanonisches Recht im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1967 bis 2006 (Badenweiler 2013). Last year a volume appeared with 40 articles showing also his interest in German law of the two last centuries [Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte im Kontext Europas (Badenweiler 2018)]. He was the editor and co-editor of a number of volumes with articles on a variety of themes. His book on the foundations and history of Protestant church law shows another theme of his publications, Grundlagen und Geschichte des evangelischen Kirchenrechts und des Staatskirchenrechts (Tübingen 2010). Catholic Bavaria proved to be a most welcome and respectful home for the Protestant Landau.

Peter Landau showed his interests in many ways. His time was precious indeed. Very often he succeeded in asking immediately the right questions. It is reassuring to know he readily made time free for a beer in a nearby Biergarten when guests left Munich after a research visit. While reading my musings I noticed that I left out some very personal memories of Peter Landau which I really like to keep private, but I can assure you they show him at his most helpful. Let’s remember Peter Landau for his energy, his vision for the study of medieval canon law, his legacy as a teacher and a prolific author. In him we have lost a man of many qualities.

 

Clairvaux, a monastery and a prison

Every now and then you across projects which attract immediately your curiosity. In Autumn 2018 the blog L’agenda du médiéviste alerted to an online documentary with the title Le cloître et le prison. Les espaces de l’enfermement, “The monastery and the prison. Places of confinement”. The website of this project was launched on September 26, 2018. The documentary is the fruit of the Enfermements project in which several French institutions work together. Not only the abbey of Clairvaux did function as a prison, other locations have a similar history. In this post I will look both at the documentary and the project website.

Between walls

The medieval abbey of Clairvaux occupies a special place in the Enfermements project. The abbey was founded in 1115. In 1808 it became a prison which functioned until 1971. The official closure is announced for 2022. 900 years of Clairvaux’s history were celebrated in 2015. The medieval manuscripts of Clairvaux are held at the Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes and can be viewed online. Alas the special portal Bibliothèque virtuelle de l ‘abbaye de Clairvaux for these manuscripts does not function currently. You can find the medieval cartularies of Clairvaux using CartulR, a resource of the IRHT/CNRS. Archival records of this abbey are also held in Troyes by the Archives départementales de l’Aube. Among its digitized collections the AD de l’Aube presents fifteen late medieval registres de l’officialité de Troyes, registers of the official, the ecclesiastical judge of the bishop.

The website of Le cloître et le prison has six main sections. The Avant-propos explains the goals and background. The glossaire is a glossary with not just terms from the monastic and incarcerated life in France. Even the Rasphuis and Spinhuis in Amsterdam are mentioned. You had best navigate this glossary using the icon on the rather small top bar of your screen. A chronology of Clairvaux helps you to see developments in their succession. In the bibliography you will find information about archival documents and images, printed sources and scholarly publications.

The section with videos, Visite vidéo, takes most space in the exhibition, and equally in the helpful sitemap. Jean-François Leroux, already forty years president of the association to save the cultural heritage of Clairvaux, acts as a guide in the videos. There is no question about the quality of his calm explanations, but sometimes he seems somewhat tired, but in comparison with other more enthusiastic reporters this might well be a pleasant change. At a number of turns the team of this portal does not hesitate to use materials from other prisons, even from outside France.

The tour of the premises starts with the location nowadays called Le Petit Clairvaux, the site of the first monastery, sometimes nicknamed by medievalists Clairvaux I. The nine following sections deal with the main site, starting with the cloister walls. For each items a short motto has been chosen, often with verbs opposing each other. For the eight section, Quartier punitive, the verbs Surveiller – punir, survey and punish, are a choice clearly referring to the study by Michel Foucault. Apart from the videos each section has an accompanying text, photos and at least one archival document. There are also some interviews with experts of the team. The navigation of the website is stylish, with a key and lock for the main menu, and in the video section a quill pen to go to the menu with the ten sections of Clairvaux. It was possible to follow the preparations for project at Twitter (@enfermements), but it has been very quiet after August 2018.

If you look at the screen print of the chronology you can gather already two elements from the long history of Clairvaux, the ongoing construction, demolition and reconstruction of the buildings and its place in French history. The chronology mentions under the year 1834 the incarceration of political prisoners, but with examples from the late nineteenth century, Auguste Blanqui between 1872 and 1879, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in the years 1883-1886, and even Philip of Orléans in 1890, albeit in his case lodged away from other prisoners.

In this virtual exhibit the most interesting element, the comparison of monasteries and prisons, is the central element. I feel hard pressed to focus here on one particular aspect. It is exactly the variety of aspects which is brought here into view. When you remember the title of the study by Uwe Kai Jacobs, Die Regula Benedicti als Rechtsbuch: Eine rechtshistorische und rechtstheologische Untersuchung [The Rule of St. Benedict as a book of law. A study in legal history and legal theology] (Cologne, etc., 1987) it is less surprising to look at monks and nuns as persons living under a strict regime with punishments for transgressions on premises clearly designed to make such things possible. You might want to read also the study by Elisabeth Lusset, Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (Turnhout 2017). The strength of the virtual exhibit is the combination of videos showing the present locations at Clairvaux with explanations about both periods as an abbey and as a prison and proper use of historical document and images. The intuition that places with a common dining room or canteen are an institution or a company is not new!

Looking behind and beyond walls

The abbey of Clairvaux is not the only famous building in France which at a certain point was turned into a prison. In Paris the Conciergerie first was a palace, the Palais de la Cité which for centuries housed the Parlement de Paris, with only a number of prison cells. During the French Revolution it became a full-scale prison. The abbey of Port-Royal in Paris served as a prison between 1790 and 1795. Between 1793 and 1863 the abbey at the Mont-Saint Michel was home to a prison. The abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontevraud, once the royal abbey of the Plantagenets, was used as a prison between 1812 and 1963. You might try to find more examples at the website of the Centre des Monuments nationaux, but somehow the search function did not work correctly.

At this point one should by all means invoke the various services of the bilingual Criminocorpus platform (CNRS), strangely absent in the production of this audiovisual project. At this portal you can read both as a PDF and in a browsable version the Guide des archives judiciaires et pénitentaires en France (1800-1958) by Jean-Luc Farcy. He puts these monasteries converted into prisons in a group of prisons for those having to serve long terms, typically in old castles, fortresses and some abbeys. Clairvaux served in this quality for several French départements. Criminocorpus has virtual exhibits on Fontevraud and on Paris prisons after the fall of the Bastille.

It is really interesting to explore this virtual exhibit around the abbey of Clairvaux. The partnership of organizations for cultural heritage, archival institutions, research groups and communication design offices succeeds in telling an intricate history in a way earlier generations would not have thought feasible or sensible. Let Le cloître et le prison be one of your guides to the wealth of stories about this famous monument!

An empire of laws and books

Empires come and go in different forms. The Spanish colonial empire came into existence and made its mark on people not only by physical conquest, but also by the power of words in print. The sixteenth century was witness to the success of the printing press. Governments used books in many ways. In this post I would like to introduce a new digital collection concerning colonial law in Latin America created by the library of the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, In recent years global and transnational legal history has become a major focus in the various programs of this institute. At the start of a new academic year and at many other moments it is always sensible for legal historians to have a look at the developments of this great research institute.

The laws of the Indies

The new digital collection has a Latin name, De Indiarum iure, “On the law of the Indies”. As for now there are 33 titles in this collection. Instead of deploring the low number of books you had better appreciate the presence of works on canon law and the Christian faith. This mixture of subjects shows in a nutshell the all-encompassing impact of the books the Spanish published, mainly in Mexico and sometimes elsewhere in Latin America. The work that gives its name to the collection, Juan de Solórzano y Pereira’s De Indiarum Iure, has not yet been digitized within this digital library. You can consult online a copy of the first edition (Madrid 1629) in the Internet Archive (copy Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). There is a reprint of this edition (Frankfurt am Main, 2006). A modern critical edition of this text has been published in the series Corpus Hispanorum de poce by C. Baciero (3 vol., Madrid 1994-2001).

More to the point is perhaps the question of the relation of this new collection to the project of this Max-Planck-Institute around the legal history of the School of Salamanca. The term School of Salamanca refers to Early Modern authors who taught at Salamanca in the fields of law, theology and philosophy. A fair number of them were either Dominicans or Jesuits, and their background was another factor in making the debates more interesting and complicated. In fact there is a web page of the institute for cooperation with a second project in Germany concerning this Spanish university, The School of Salamanca (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz). Thomas Duve, one of the two directors of the MPI in Frankfurt in Main, leads also this project in Mainz. The Mainz project will eventually also present a digital library of relevant resources. Thoughtfully one has already provided a list of works to be digitized. The website of the Salamanca project at Mainz points to a number of relevant links and even a mailing list for those interested in the project. These webpages can be viewed in German, English and Spanish.

At a separate website, The School of Salamanca, with indeed a very sensible use of the extension .school in its URL, you may want consult the digital collection created for the project at Mainz which now contains 118 works. On closer inspection you will find currently only 21 works, with links to the online catalogue of the university library at Salamanca, but no actual links to digitized works. However, in the digital library of the Universidad de Salamanca you will find a number of the works announced at Mainz. Where possible links to digitized works at Salamanca could be added swiftly. The website with the digital library will also contain a legal-political dictionary. Both projects seem promising, but at this moment they both do not yet bring you completely what you would expect. The MPI website does not yet give you the URL of the joint digital collection. By all means one can wonder about the launch of two related digital collections which seem to cry out for an integral approach following the lines of the new projects at the MPI which cross borders effortlessly. Both projects do look beyond more traditional ways of inquiry. The blog of the Mainz project is one of the places to look for various aspects of modern research into Spanish authors, as does the general page of the MPI on the School of Salamanca and legal history.

A third project, Scholastica Colonialis, is worth some attention here, too. Scholars from six countries do research on the history of Spanish and colonial philosophy in the Early Modern period. This project will not contain a digital collection.

On purpose I mentioned the absence of a special digital collection at Scholastica Colonialis. In view of the variety of digital libraries in Latin America and those in Spain and Portugal concerning the Americas it is justifiable to question the need for a new digital collection. The MPI wisely chooses at De Indiarum iure mostly works not commonly associated with legal history. The project at Mainz has not yet completely implemented its choice for works digitized at Salamanca, but its aim and the argumentation behind this choice seem clear. To get an idea of the number of digital libraries for both North and South America you might want to look at the links collection I created at my own legal history website. For perfectly understandable reasons the MPI at Frankfurt am Main does not maintain a portal for legal history with extensive links collections, otherwise I probably would not have started my own pages with links to digital libraries, archives and image collections. To mention a few examples of the very extent of such libraries, the international Biblioteca Digital de Patrimonio Iberoamericano now even has a section for incunabula. Primeros Libros de las Americas is a second international project which brings you books printed in the Americas before 1601. This is the place to mention also the online Catálogo Colectivo de Impresos Latinoamericanos hasta 1851 for Latin American editions, and you might want to use the Catálogo Colectivo del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español.

My first impression of the De Indiarum iure digital collection at Frankfurt am Main is mixed. Perhaps it is best to see it as a kind of preview. When eventually more titles have been added to it, the collection will certainly be a further asset to the digital library of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte. No doubt the word “European” will one day disappear from its name! The digital collection at Mainz strangely lacks links to digitized books, but this omission can easily be repaired. A second thing to keep in mind is that whatever the qualities of both digital collections might be, they form elements for projects that will massively enrich our knowledge, understanding and views of the School of Salamanca as a factor in Spanish and Latin American history with a fascinating interplay between scholastic thought, legislation and Early Modern debates on many aspects of law and society.

A postscript

In Spring 2018 it is possible to access 21 digitized books in the digital corner of the School of Salamanca; they can be viewed using the IIIF Mirador viewer.

Publishing laws in Early Modern Italy

This month I could add a number of digital resources for legal history to my website Rechtshistorie, but with summertime approaching I could not help asking myself during some fleeting moments whether scholars actually use these resources. However, when I encountered in a collection held at Het Utrechts Archief, the municipal and provincial archives of the city and province Utrecht, a seventeenth-century piece of printed ecclesiastical legislation from Italy I was only too happy to be able to use these online resources. In this post I offer a small tour of projects concerning legislation in Italy during the Early Modern Period.

What’s in a name?

My curiosity was evoked by a notice in an inventory about a publication in print of a condemnation by pope Innocent XI in 1679 of sixty-five theses concerning probabilism, an approach of Christian beliefs building on the works of some Jesuit theologians in the seventeenth century. Being a medievalist my first reaction was to look at the formal aspects of this publication: Is it a papal bull, a decree, a letter, a motu proprio or something else? Each of this forms has its own characteristics which can be used in particular to determine its age and nature, whether it is truly a papal publication, a forgery or something else.

The condemnation of probabilism by pope Innocent XI, 1679 – Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, Per.est 18_14.313

Let’s look at the document I encountered, and I use here an image from an Italian database for Early Modern ecclesiastical legislation. Within the Scaffali digitali, the digital library of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, the series of nearly 1,100 editti e bandi pontifici take pride of place. The Scaffali digitali can be viewed in Italian and English. In fact this collection can be accessed also using the portal site Internet Culturale. The first thing to notice in this digital collection is the presence of two editions of this text both issued on March 2, 1679. The edition I found is almost a poster, and described at the Casanatense as a manifesto. The other edition (shelfmark Per.est. 18_14.311) is a quire in folio format, a small booklet. The identical title of both documents, Feria 5. die 2. Martij 1679. In generali Congregatione sanctae Romanae, & vniuersalis Inquisitionis habita in Palatio Apostolico Vaticano coram sanctissimo D.N.D. Innocentio diuina prouidentia papa 11. (…), mentions in both cases clearly the congregation for the inquisition, the Congregazione dell’Inquisizione. The Latin text states clearly that pope Innocent was at a meeting of this congregation to promulgate his condemnation. From this I would conclude this condemnation is a decree published by the Roman inquisition of a papal condemnation. The description in the inventory at Utrecht will have to be adjusted to do justice to the nature of this document.

As for its theological and doctrinal continent it might be wise to add a note to the well-known standard editions of texts concerning doctrines of faith, the Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum edited by Heinrich Denzinger. The only trick is to indicate clearly the edition you used because in modern editions the numbering has been reshuffled (2101-2167 against 1151-1216). There are translations of Denzinger in several languages. In at least one online version Denzinger gives as the title for the sixty-five condemned propositions Propositiones LXV condemnatae in Decreto Sancti Officii.

At the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Rome is yet another collection with digitized ecclesiastical legislation, Bandi e bolli pontificie del XVI secolo, accessible at Internet Culturale, the digital portal of a number of Italian libraries with a multilingual interface, but this collection is limited to the sixteenth century. It is a reminder to look not only in the several constituent parts of the Corpus Iuris Canonici for canon law as it was brought together since the sixteenth century, but also in the material sources of law which sometimes did touch the whole Church as much as this main set of canonical collections. The position of the papal states and the Vatican within the borders of Italy inevitably make it necessary to look for its legal history not just at legislation for the Catholic Church, but also at sources elsewhere in Italy. I would almost forget to underline that reading the original publication adds a dimension to studying theological developments in the seventeenth century.

Old Italian laws at your screen

So far I have already mentioned editti, edicts, bolle, bulls, and bandi, an almost untranslatable word, and more terms will follow. Yet bandi with the singular bando is the word most used for publications of single laws and decrees. The entry Bando in the online version of the Enciclopedia Treccani interestingly links the word bando and banno with the German word Bann. The word bandit stems from bandito, someone banned, i.e. expelled by formal proclamation. The Fondazione Querini Stampalia has created at Internet Culturale the digital collection Vox Venetica: Bandi della Repubblica Venezia di secoli 16-17 with more than three thousand legal proclamations from Venice. Even if this is not actually a digital collection, it is useful to point to the project Ecclesiae Venetae of the Venetian Archivio di Stato and other partner institutions with online inventories of the archives of ecclesiastical institutions, with special attention to Italian archives concerning the inquisition. The Archivio di Stato di Venezia has started digitizing thirteenth-century charters in volgare in the project Chartae Vulgares Antiquiores. Bologna is in the Early Modern period a case of a city under the aegis of the papal state. The cardinal-legate reigning Bologna issued many thousands municipal ordinances and decrees for which the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio has made La Raccolta dei Bandi Merlani, a digital collection with publications printed between 1601 and 1796. Nearly 23,000 of some 75,000 items have been digitized. It is perhaps wise to point to the online introduction Il governo di Bologna. Amministratizione comunale dal 1141 al 1945.

In Milan we encounter different terms, gridi and gridari. The Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica, part of the Italian national science foundation Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, has created the collection for Le gride e gli editi dello Stato di Milano (1560-1796). One has to register before you can use these digitized sources. A part of the same ground is covered by the project I gridari del ducato di Milano nel XVIII secolo of the Università degli Studi di Milano. A third project brings you to Gride e Gridari Seicenteschi del Ducato di Milano (1600-1700) with 47 digitized gridari, accessible at the portal Lombardia Beni Culturali, a cultural heritage portal for the region Lombardy. This portal has also a section with nineteenth-century legislation in the field of public law in Lombardy, the Archivio lombardo della legislazione storica (1749-1859). Lombardia Beni Culturali is home to more projects with connections to legal history, for example the Codice diplomatico della Lombardia medievale and registers from the chancery of Francesco I Sforza (1450-1466), but here we leave the field of Early Modern legislation.

On my webpage with digital libraries I have put together a lot of commented links for Italy. I cannot vouch for its completeness, but it would be excessive to repeat here verbatim everything you can find there. The new portal BibVio, Biblioteche virtuali online of the main Italian research libraries, including 46 Italian biblioteche pubbliche statali, deserves mentioning here, however it does not bring an easy overview of their digital presence. I would have loved to write here about Florence, but I can provide you here at least the links to Archivi Storici Toscani, a portal focusing on municipal archives in Tuscany, and the portal Archivi in Toscana, and for archives in Italy the portal of the Direzione generale per gli archivi. A recent digital publication in its digital library using materials pertaining also to Florentine legal history is the volume l carteggio della Signoria fiorentina all’epoca del cancellierato di Carlo Marsuppini (1444-1453) edited by Raffaela Maria Zaccaria (2015) (online, PDF, 4,7 MB). This digital library contains more publications which touch upon both legal and ecclesiastical history. The Archivio di Stato in Florence and its veritable portal to the history of Florence should be both online and in real life a fine starting point to find and use more. Seeing the decree of Innocent XI and the collections digitized in Rome brought me happy memories of my visits to the Biblioteca Casanatense.

Digitizing legal manuscripts at the Vatican Library

In this century several major research libraries and national libraries have started to digitize their manuscript collections. On my blog I have reported for instance about digitized legal manuscripts in the British Library. Legal manuscripts were included also in the project Europeana Regia for the reconstruction of the medieval royal libraries. One of my earliest posts concerned the Swiss project e-codices. More recently I wrote here about digitized manuscripts from Chartres and the Mont Saint-Michel. The digitized medieval and Renaissance legal manuscripts at the Collegio di Spagna in Bologna did not escape my attention, too. In 2013 the project at UCLA for the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts came to a halt because the two courageous scholars responsible for this project could not cope anymore with the tasks of creating a consistent and yet detailed catalogue. The question how to find out about the presence of digitized manuscripts is not easily answered.

For one particular massive project there is a way to stay informed. The current digitization project for the manuscripts of the Vatican Library has made considerable progress. Already some three thousand manuscripts can now be viewed online. However, this library did until this week not publish lists of recent additions. How can you stay informed about manuscripts which might interest you? In this contribution I will look at the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Piggin, a journalist and historian in New-Zealand, who since 2015 has patiently reported at his blog Macro-Typography about recently added digitized items. His service to scholars and the general public deserves our thanks and admiration. For your convenience I have put together a list of the legal manuscripts Piggin signalled until now. Piggin himself is interested in the history and use of diagrams, including those created by medieval lawyers, and this offers me a chance to write here about legal iconography, too. At Twitter you can find Piggin, too (@JBPIggin).

Thousands of manuscripts

The collections of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) in Vatican City are truly extraordinary. Not only their sheer number is immense, but also the presence of many remarkable manuscripts make this library an institution beyond repositories elsewhere. During its long existence the BAV was able to acquire entire manuscript collections. The Palatini came from the ducal library at Heidelberg, the Ottoboniani from cardinal Ottoboni, the Urbinati from Urbino, the Chigiani from the Chigi family, and these are just a few examples. Luckily there are even special bibliographies for the modern scholarly literature about these manuscripts. The BAV has created a separate online manuscript catalogue. The main digitization project of the BAV has several sister projects, for example for Syriac and Chinese manuscripts.

The most important accompanying project deals with the Palatini latini, some 2,000 Latin manuscripts originally kept at Heidelberg, and now digitized and only accessible online at the portal Bibliotheca Palatina digital of the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. With the advanced search mode of the Palatina Search you can directly search for particular manuscripts. For the subject Recht you will find some 220 digitized manuscripts, but alas it turns out this search does not yield the result you would expect, because not only legal texts show up. Using filters such as Pal. lat. does help somewhat, but in my view it is not correct when the filters Justiz and Kanonistik give almost completely identical search results. The fact you can find individual texts within a manuscript is not only welcome, but simply necessary. The overview of Palatini latini is organized in some twenty lists with each one hundred manuscripts. Arranging by year, author or title does help a bit. However, a check with the lists’ view at Heidelberg makes clear you can confine your search for legal manuscripts among the Palatini latini mainly to the shelfmarks Pal. lat 621 to 800. The university library at Heidelberg has a separate website for searching images in the Palatini manuscripts.

Having the Palatina Search at your disposal is really useful and important when you look at Piggin’s series of posts with digitized Palatini latini. It would be a herculean task to add for each manuscript in his lists a short or long description. For the Palatini Piggin often gives the author’s name and the title of a work. So far Piggin has counted some 3,200 digitized manuscripts from the BAV. In his early posts he did not include complete lists. Until now he mentioned on his blog some sixty Palatini latini with legal texts. By the way, at the end of each post Piggin asks for comments and additions from people who know more about newly digitized manuscripts.

Apart from the Palatini latini Piggin mentions I have now a list in front of me with 33 legal manuscripts. This number puzzles me a lot. Stephan Kuttner and Reinhard Elze published two volumes of their Catalogue of canon and Roman law manuscripts in the Vatican Library, I: Codices Vaticani latini 541-2299, II: Codices Vaticani Latini 2300-2746 (Città del Vaticano 1986-1987). These two volumes should have been followed by three consecutive volumes, but for various reasons this has not yet happened. Gero Dolezalek and Martin Bertram have put PDF’s with the draft galley proofs of the third volume online. They bring us to Vat. lat. 11527. A similar project for other manuscript collections at the BAV is one of the projects that will bear fruits in particular for the field of medieval canon law. The overviews created by Brendan McManus for medieval canon law texts, the Manuscripta Iuridica database at Frankfurt am Main for texts concerning Roman and feudal law, and the Initia operum iuris canonici medii aevi of Giovanna Murano are at many points much more concise for manuscripts held at the Vatican Library. With this information at our disposal I should really look again at the nearly fifty (!) posts Piggin published and check them against these combined resources. For my consolation I can only remark that you will have to perform a similar task when you want to know about for example medieval medical or mathematical manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

After all these preliminary remarks I had better give you simply these thirty-three manuscripts as presented by Jean-Baptiste Piggin, starting for your convenience with the Vaticani Latini:

• Vat.lat. 630 pt.1 – Isidorus Mercator, Decretalium collectio
• Vat.lat. 841, De Regimine Principum, a guide-book for princes, by Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus)
• Vat.lat. 1130, anonymous (John of Paris?) on papal authority
• Vat.lat. 3978, handbook for the Inquisition
• Vat.lat. 3740, about 60 texts on apostolic poverty made to advise Pope John XXII at the time of a controversy with the Franciscans 1322-23 on the issue
• Vat.lat. 3833, Collectio Canonum by Deusdedit, written between 1083 and 1087. This is the sole complete manuscript of this legal work. See Lotte Kéry. Notable for tabular material, but no diagrams. This is a palimpsest with four Vulgate gospels from the 7th or 8th century underneath (see Trismegistos)
• Vat.lat. 12723, manuscript records of the Inquisition

The presentation of these manuscripts differs from a short notice to a much fuller description for some of them. “Lotte Kéry” refers to her repertory Canonical collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140) : a bibliographical guide to the manuscripts and literature (Washington, D.C., 1999), partially digitized by The Company with the Search Engine. Trismegistos is a database for ancient papyri and inscriptions. I will expand later on Piggin’s interest in diagrams.

The descriptions for the other manuscripts I took from Piggin’s blog follow here in alphabetical order of their shelfmarks. Behind the arrows I expand or correct his notes:

• Barb.lat. 1396, a consilium of Baldus de Ubaldis >> numerous consilia by Baldus and other authors
• Borgh. 7, Pope Boniface, Decretales
• Borgh. 12, Works of Godefridus Tranensis
• Borgh. 26, 13th-century legal text, Apparatus Decretorum
• Borgh. 95,14th century, legal, Arnoldus de Augusta
• Borgh. 154, Tancredus, 1185-1236, Opera, 13th-14th century
• Borgh. 214, Opera quaedam de re iuridica, 14th century,
• Borgh. 226, Novels of Justinian
• Borgh. 230, Iohannes de Lignano, 1320-1383 Lectura super decretales
• Borgh. 231, Abbas Antiquus
• Borgh. 248, Rottfried: civil law, canon law >> Roffredus Beneventanus, Libellus de ordine iudiciorum
• Borgh. 262, Decretales of Pope Gregory IX, glossed by Bernardus Parmensis (also known as Bernard of Parma, Bernard Botone, Bernard Bottoni), seems similar to Ms. 1 at Syracuse University
• Borgh. 290, Bottoni, Bernardo, Summa super titulis decretalium
• Borgh. 348, collection of opinions written in 1320 for Pope John XXII before 14th-century decision to extend inquisition to practitioners of “black magic” in southern France. Notes >> a reference to Annelies Maier, Ausgehendes Mittelalter III (Rome 1977) 208.
• Borgh. 372, Glossa on Justinian >> Codex Justinianus with the standard Accursian gloss
• Borgh. 374: A 13th-century text of the Emperor Justinian’s legal codifications including the Institutions, annotated by medieval lawyers. Justinian was emperor at Constantinople 527-565. >> Institutiones, Novellae, Libri Feudorum and Tres Libri (Codex 10-12).
• Ott.gr. 64, legal synopsis
• Ott.lat.15, legal texts, compiled by Capuchins
• Reg.lat. 189, papal register
• Reg.lat. 1024, the Liber Judiciorum, an early-8th-century code of Visigothic law (probably) copied in Urgell, Spain
• Ross. 555, a beautiful Hebrew codex with four fine Italian miniatures. From Evelyn Cohen I read that this is Jacob ben Asher’s legal treatise, the Arba’ah Turim, and that the images depict a synagogue scene, animals being slaughtered according to Jewish ritual, a wedding and a courtroom scene.
• Urb.lat. 157, Innocent IV, decretals
• Urb.lat. 158, Azo of Bologna, decretals >> Azo, Summa Codicis and other works
• Urb.lat. 159, finely illuminated law text by Bernardo Bottoni on Gregory’s Decretals, with a 14th-century arbor consanguinitatis where the tree is held in a planter by the law-giver (discussed by Hermann Schadt, Arbores, at p 259 ff.)
• Urb.lat. 160, Johannes Andreae, Boniface VIII, decretals dealing with marriage and other legal issues >> mainly the Liber Sextus of pope Boniface VIII
• Urb.lat. 1057, bound book of papal records

Piggin very sensible enlivens his lists with small format images of often remarkable illuminations, but to keep it here within sensible length I have excised the images and his remarks, except for those concerning legal trees such as the arbor consanguinitatis. In a post about digitized manuscripts in Bologna I have looked at the Mosaico project and its section about the Arbor actionum, the “Tree of actions”, a tool designed for determining which legal action(s) you should choose. Among legal diagrams Piggin looks in particular at the arbores consanguinitatis et affinitatis, and he proposes some substantial revisions of the views expressed by Hermann Schadt in his classic study Die Darstellungen der Arbores Consanguinitatis und der Arbores Affinitatis : Bildschemata in juristischen Handschriften (Tübingen 1982). Piggin published a post about legal arbores, and he has even has written an accompanying guide, The Missing Manual: Schadt’s Arbores. The virtual exhibition Illuminating the Law of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge shows some examples of these arbores. Piggin questions the very use of the word tree and invites scholars to look more closely and use terms carefully.

In Piggin’s notes the sheer variety of manuscripts faithfully mirrors the wealth of the manuscript collections at the BAV. For the field of legal history I have included also some items concerning the papal inquisition (Borgh. lat. 348, Vat. lat. 3978 and 12732) and some papal records (Reg. lat. 189 and Urb. lat. 1057). The manuscript Vat. lat. 3740 with questions concerning apostolic poverty reminded me of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and this subject as a bone of contention figuring in his novel. DigiVatLib does in many cases include at least some bibliographical information with which you can start further exploration of a manuscript.

Apart from his interest in legal iconography Piggin explores the origin of the use of diagrams with stemmata. I can only admire his tenacious approach and the way he blogs about his research in ancient and medieval history. The main results of his research appear at his own website. One of his latest blog posts concerns the text of a medieval commentary on biblical arbores humani generis, a kind of genealogical schemes showing the genealogy of Christ. The text seems to have been overlooked because it only filled gaps in drawings. It seems the kind of discovery only made by those who look at things supposedly well-known with an ever open mind.

While finishing this post the staff of DigiVatLib is busy transferring digitized manuscripts and incunabula to a new platform with enhanced interoperability. There have been complaints about the presence of large watermarks on the digitized images. It is also remarkable to see an interface for English, Italian and Japanese. There is now an advanced search mode with even fuzzy filters (“partial match”). You can tick a field for non-digitized items and choose to search only manuscripts. The galleries with selected manuscripts and the twenty latest digitized items wet your appetite for more. Twice every month you can get at Piggin’s blog a preview of newly digitized manuscripts. Even if it is possible to correct and expand his notes on legal manuscripts, you must admit that creating commented lists does at least provide useful orientation. Perhaps some legal historian might take up the challenge of providing a regular list of updates for digitized legal manuscripts at the BAV with sufficient information to start benefiting truly from this massive digitization project.

A postscript

Since the death of Jean-Baptiste Piggin in 2019 Aaron Marks has has taken over his service of weekly overviews of newly digitized – or updated versions of – manuscripts held at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana at Recently digitized manuscripts from the BAV. Scholars are indebted indeed to the services of both men!

Order in a new church: Behind the headlines of the Reformation

Within any organization there is a constant tension between the original inspiration and its structure, and this is the case, too, within the various Christian churches. Auguste Sabatier (1839-1901) minted the phrases religion de l’Esprit against religion de la Lettre. When sixteenth-century reformers started to create their own church, the support many people gave them fueled their own enthusiasm about their views, but fairly quickly the need for proper structures arose. Luther famously burned the books of canon law in Wittenberg on December 10, 1520, but laws and regulations nevertheless rapidly did find a place in the Protestant churches.

At the new Reformationsportal Mitteldeutschland, nicely abbreviated as DigiRef, you will find digitized archival records from four German archives and libraries bringing you documents which tell the story of these young churches in their daily business of getting things organized, dealing with problems and meeting all kinds of people. The portal has three main sections, Visitationsakten, records of official visitations, Schaufenster, “showcases”, sets of records and images arranged around a number of themes, and last but not least Recherche, an interactive map of Europe where you can search and select information for particular regions and locations. The visitation records and church regulations at this portal prompted me to write here about this project, because these have clear connections with legal history. In Germany preparations for the Luther year 2017 have indeed already started, and it can do no harm to look in time at some of the accompanying projects.

Three archives and a library

DigiRef has been created by three German archives, the Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, the Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg and the Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, joined by a library, the Thüringische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. This library organized in 2014 a two-day conference Reformation vor Ort. Zum Quellenwert von Visitationsprotokollen about the value of visitation records; Dagmar Blaha and Christopher Spehr will edit the papers of this conference (Leipzig 2016). Let’s look first at the actual records of church visitations in this project. The visitations aimed at reviewing systematically the situation of a particular church and its vicar(s). Apart from him whenever possible deacons, schoolmasters, sacristans and other officials, too, were interviewed. The visitation committees also looked at the moral behaviour of the parish and at its revenues, possessions and special funds. In this project not only the official reports of these visitations, the Protokolle, come into view, but also the Beiakten, the less conspicuous documents around the official reports, ranging from travel expenses to notes from interviews, come into the limelight.

Visitation at Wittenberg, 1528 – Weimar, LASA, A 29b, II Nr. 63, fol. 1v

The 118 archival records digitized for this project stem also from archives outside the four main DigiRef institutions. It is interesting to note monasteries, too, were visited. The aim was to present here the first visitations in the Reformation period. At Weimar four instructions have been preserved. The committees often indited people to come to a city from nearby villages or from lesser cities to a major town. As an example I have chosen the first ordinance for Wittenberg [Weimar, LASA, A 29b, II Nr. 63]. Wittenberg is dealt with in connection with the Amt surrounding this town and other towns and their surrounding territories. The register covers the years 1528-1529 and 1533-1534, it has 352 folia, and fol. 1r-34v contain an ordinance for the city of Wittenberg. Fol. 37r to 127r contain visitations for other locations in the Amt Wittenberg and two other towns in the Amt Wittenberg, Kernberg and Schmiedeberg.

The records can be shown in different ways: just the document, document and transcription or an image, transcription and modern German translation, and you can even add a column for a commentary (Historische Einordnung). Alas this service is not available for every item, and some items have been provided only partially with it. I list these possibilities in particular to show the value of this presentation next to earlier editions of a number of these protocols. The DigiRef portal does point to these editions and to relevant scholarly literature. When I looked at the 1525 visitation of the Allerheiligenstift at Wittenberg (Dresden, HStA, 10024, Loc. 8980/19) I did not find a transcription, translation or commentary. At Weimar a short list with questions in Latin from 1533 written by Justus Jonas from Wittenberg for visitation in Sachsen has been preserved (Weimar, ThHStAW, EGA, Reg. Ii 574), with at the website only images of this pivotal document for conducting a visitation. The portal promises you for some records a translation into English.

Admittedly you will have to become versatile in deciphering Early Modern German handwriting, and sixteenth-century handwriting can be notoriously challenging to read. When searching for online guidance you might start looking at the materials of the Ad fontes team in Zürich. Their website contains comprehensive information, examples of different scripts and exercises, references to literature, and since two years there is even an app. The Staatliche Archive Bayerns offer a lot of online examples of German writing in archival records from the eighth to the twentieth century, with transcriptions and brief introductions.

Showcasing the Reformation

The second approach to the digitized records is using the showcases. With 18 themes and 17 historic persons – including popes and princes – you are sure to find something that might interest you. You can choose to look first at the metadata concerning a record, view it immediately or to look at ist geographic origin. Taking again the Kirchenvisitationen you get now six documents in this showcase. I found in particular the printed ordinance about the visitations from 1528 by Kurfurst Johann von Sachsen interesting (Gotha, Thüringisches Staatsarchiv, Geheimes Archiv, KK2, vol. 1) . This document shows to a large extent the matters to be reviewed during the visitations, and it makes clear how important the backing of secular authorities was for the emerging new churches. Indeed the secular authorities proved to be decisive for their success or lack of success in particular towns, regions and countries.

It is tempting to single out here other archival records worthy of your attention, because I am sure you will find something in such sections as Reichstage (Imperial Diets), Universitäten, Kirchenordnungen, Bündnisse (contacts and leagues), and Kirchliche Neuordnung, ecclesiastical reform. In this last section you will find for example a letter by Luther from 1526 urging earl Johann von Sachsen to support church visitations for all his lands, not just for one or more Ämter. Founding new universities became another important matter.

A geographical approach

At first I was rather surprised the tab Recherche of DigiRef leads to an interactive map showing a large part of Europe instead of only a simple search form with a button leading me to an advanced search mode. At the top of the screen you can use a time bar to narrow you search, open an index of persons or a filter for locations, and there is a simple search field as well. It turns out to be really important to use these filters, because searching directly on the map can appear to be cumbersome and confusing. Not by clicking on a location with search results, but by clicking on an icon at the right side of the screen you arrive finally at a list of results for this location. The map does show locations with documents in its initial position, thus inviting you to go to particular places., but you will notice quickly some towns which do have results do not come into view immediately when you zoom in. In comparison with the interactive historical-geographical maps discussed here lately this operation mode is not quite what you would currently expect. The interactive map does save your latest choice for filtering. Instead of clicking a button you have to remove your choices from the red filter bar at the top of the screen. The filter for locations is also helpful to find locations mentioned in a visitation.

I cannot hide here my mixed feelings about the navigation of the DigiRef map, but in the end one thing is more important than only noticing the pros and cons of the navigation. The map makes it very clear that archival records in the three archives and the library at Jena do focus on Sachsen and Thüringen. Other regions figure mainly when there are clear relations with them within some document. Among the persons covered in the records I missed Erasmus.

Casting your nets wider

In my view the Reformationsportal Mitteldeutschland can be welcomed as a most useful resource to create a much more detailed image of the early Reformation. The archival records bring you a lot of things not found in contemporary books and treatises, and thus they help you to connect the issues at stake with actual people and places instead of staying content with a more abstract vision of the discussions, confusion and turmoil. Nevertheless it is of course necessary to use these records as elements of a much wider history, a decisive period in European history. Although the navigation of the interactive map is not as comfortable as you encounter elsewhere, this feature does not hamper completely access to digitized sources. In the last section of this post I will look at some other online resources for studying the history and impact of the Reformation, starting with the institutions behind DigiRef.

The Landesarchiv Hessen has created a relatively large number of online resources, but the Reformation is only seldom touched upon. At the Digitales Archiv Marburg a new online exhibition on Luther and Europa is currently being prepared. The Digitales Archiv Hessen-Darmstadt has a small section on the Reformation. It is good to remember here also the HISGIS system for Hessen, the Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS), without a section on religion, but you might like to consult the Hessische Bibliographie.

The Thüringische Staatsarchive do offer a general website for searching and accessing digitized archival records at the various offices, with for religious history for example the Oberkonsistorium Gotha and the Konsistorium Sondershausen, and they also have important digital resources for legal historians. Its Themis portal has been created together with the ThULB at Jena, and brings you digitized legislation nicely ordered along the several old territorial units of Thüringen. Thüringen Legislativ & Exekutiv is another project of these two partners, now for digitized official gazettes publishing laws and regulations for roughly the same set of territories. There is a separate portal to inform you about all archives in Thüringen.

For the third archive, the Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, I can point to a general search engine for archival records, but apart from their content at DigiRef there is no other project specifically dealing with the Reformation. Among its other projects the digital archive for the Friedliche Revolution 1989/90 [Friendly Revolution 1989-1990] deserves a mention.

With the Thüringische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena we do reach a very important partner for the DigiRef project. Without its earlier projects touching upon the history of sixteen-century Germany, and the actual use of its servers for the digitized items, the three archives might still be struggling to work together. The ThULB can boast among its digital projects at the UrMEL server the Bibliotheca Electoralis with books stemming from the library of Kurfürst Friedrich der Weise, 800 of the so-called Lutherflugschriften, pamphlets kept at the Wartburg castle in Eisenach, and the Sammlung Georg Rörer. Rörer (1492-1557) worked closely with Martin Luther and was responsable for the Jenaer Lutherausgabe, one of the first complete editions of Luther’s prolific production. Rörer was probably responsable for creating Luther’s most famous but apocryphal words: “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise”, and he made the long neglected contemporary note about Luther proposing his theses at Wittenberg in 1517. Earlier on the ThULB helped creating the portal Digitales Thüringen with a search interface in German and English.

Instead of offering here as a bonus a nutshell guide to research on the Reformation I will mention just a few more general online resources concerning German history, some specific websites, and a good online guide and introduction for delving deeper into the Reformation. For some years you could benefit from the BAM portal for quickly accessing materials in German libraries, archives and museums, but this portal has recently been closed, with a notice that a number of its services are now part of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. For finding German archives you can use the Archivportal, a related project of this digital library. At the portal Kulturerbe Digital you can use the search interface – switchable to German, English or French – to find digital projects for a particular subject. For search terms such as the Reformation or Luther you will find easily projects, including those at the ThULB described here above. Museums in Sachsen-Anhalt have their own portal. The website of the Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt can only be viewed in German. In this respect the multilingual portal Luther 2017 does its job properly. For those convinced of the very power Luther gave to the German language going to the fine introduction and guide Reformation Digital at Historicum.net brings you much you will need to know, and in fact even a model to be followed. Historicum.net offers an impressing range of introductions, web guides and bibliographies for several historical subjects. Portals such as the Post-Reformation Digital Library and the Universal Short Title-Catalogue will help you to trace digital versions of many sixteenth-century books. At the blog Zwingli Redivivus: Flagellum Dei by Jim West you can find much about current research on early Protestant theology. His blog roll ends with a nice list of online editions of the works of the major reformers.

Looking at all these resources can help to shake yourself free from the temptation to view the Reformation as just a clash of theological views, an unfortunate mixture of events and persons leading sometimes to an outright war between religions. Matters were actually much more complicated. Theological questions and problems touched a raw nerve for many people in sixteenth-century Europe. How to lead a good life? How to be a Christian, and to form or reform a church actively committing itself to people and the Christian message? The need for structures or reform of structures connects the internal affairs of churches to matters pertaining also to legal history. The Reformation is one of these movements that changed Europe’s history and culture forever, and it can do no harm to be aware of its history and impact which reached far beyond the imagination of even such a creative mind as Luther himself.

A postscript

Soon after finishing this post I started thinking about adding at least a note that Luther was not the only major theologian of the new churches. His colleagues and adversaries are also present at DigiRef. It seemed this contribution yet lacked a Dutch touch. In April 2014 the Digital Humanities Lab of Utrecht University announced the inclusion of Luther’s own annotated bible at Annotated Books Online, more precisely his copy of Erasmus’ edition of the Novum Testamentum and Erasmus’ Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, both in the edition Basel 1527, from the holdings of the University Library at Groningen (HS 494).

For all those thirsting to know more about Martin Luther and legal matters I can point to the open access version of Christopher Spehr’s article on Luther in the second edition of the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte III (Berlin 2013) col. 1100-1107. Christoph Strohm edited the volume Reformation und Recht : Ein Beitrag zur Kontroverse um die Kulturwirkungen der Reformation (Tübingen 2017) available online in open access at OAPEN.

An early detective? Jan van Scorel and a supposed papal murder case

Pope Adrian VI – painting by Jan van Scorel, 1523 – Utrecht, Centraal Museum

If you had told me in 2013 I would one day write about legal history and graphic novels I would have severely doubted the truth of such a statement, but suddenly this combination became a reality when I heard about an exposition at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, my home town. The focuses of the exhibition are a sixteenth-century Dutch painter, Jan van Scorel (1495-1562), and contemporary artist Paul Teng. Together with writer Jan Paul Schutten Teng has created a graphic novel on Van Scorel and his investigation of a mysterious death in Rome. Pope Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope, reigned the Catholic Church for only one year. His death on September 14, 1523, came rather suddenly. Jan Paul Schutten and Paul Teng created a story using historical facts to create a fictional account of a murder investigation started by Van Scorel who suspected that his compatriot might have been murdered. Jan van Scorel, Sede Vacante 1523 is the title of both the graphic novel and the exhibition. The 80 page book has also appeared in an English version.

In this post I would like to look at the creative process of two contemporary artists working with historical facts and their own imagination. Rumours that Adrian VI’s death was caused by poison have never been conclusively confirmed nor rejected as utter fantasy. The pope died after an illness of a month. An anecdote states that the Roman people thanked the physician who had taken care of the ailing pope. For the preparation of the graphic novel Teng and Schutten used historical sources. They looked carefully at the history of art in the early sixteenth century, helped by the collections of the Centraal Museum with several paintings by Van Scorel.

Setting the scene

 

Some of the final pages in black and white

Drawings by Teng of Rome and sixteenth-century images

Scenes set at the building site of the Vatican around 1520

The first page of the graphic novel with the “Dormisne?” scene

Paul Teng took much care to make the historical surroundings of his novel as realistic and reliable as possible. He used early sixteenth-century paintings, drawings and engravings to ensure that locations in Rome and elsewhere are depicted faithfully. This means for instance that the basilica of St. Peter’s and the Vatican itself are shown as building sites. In the gallery with some photographs I took at the exhibition you can see other aspects of the creative process as well. From a story board with dialogues written by Schutten Teng took his lead to make sketches of the story. The exhibition shows the full sequence of the book in black and white. Some scenes are shown in their final coloured version. People are invited to draw themselves a page of a graphic novel on a chosen theme,

Accumulating functions and wealth

Pope Adrian VI (1459-1523) was born at Utrecht as Adriaen Floriszoon Boeyens. He studied theology at the university of Louvain, and he became a professor of theology at this university in 1489. In 1507 the Habsburg emperor Maximilian asked him to become one of the teachers of the future emperor Charles V. In 1516 he became the bishop of Tortosa in Spain. A year later he was created a cardinal. Charles V made him 1518 inquisitor-general of Castile and Aragón. Adrian became even the regent of Spain. During the minority of Charles V he had already been co-regent of Spain together with cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros.

Until 1522 Adrian got a large part of his income from prebends at several collegiate churches in the Low Countries and Spain. The very number of prebends pope Julius II allowed him to have in 1512 was restricted to four. Adrian finally became a canon of four collegiate churches in Utrecht: he was a canon at St. Peter’s and at Utrecht Cathedral (St. Martin’s) , treasurer of St. Mary’s and provost of St. Salvator’s (Oudmunster). However, the actual number of prebends he held was larger, and two prebends were shrewdly changed into annuities. His canonry at St. Peter’s in Utrecht enabled him to designate premises within the immunity of St. Peter’s as the site of a large house, a palace really, where he would have liked to live in Utrecht in good time. Adrian never saw the palace still called Paushuize, “The Pope’s House”. Interestingly, a statue in the facade shows Christ Saviour as a reminder he was the provost of the Salvator collegiate church. R.R. Post unravelled the history of these prebends in a fine article published in 1961 [‘Studiën over Adriaan VI. De beneficies van Adriaan VI’, Archief voor de Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland 3 (1961) 341-351; online at the Trajecta portal for the ecclesiastical history of the Low Countries, with digital versions of five scientific journals in this field].

There is a clear paradox between Adrian VI’s reputation as a pope who wanted the Church to live humbly, without unnecessary adornments and wealth, and his personal history in which he combined a large number of offices and accompanying revenues. In one of the scenes in which Teng depicts a meeting between pope Adrian and Jan van Scorel they discuss the plan to select art treasures from the Vatican’s holdings in order to sell them off to get money for the empty papal treasury.

The graphic novel opens with a scene showing a ritual which was long said to exist, the formal test done by the camerlengo to ascertain a pope’s death, by calling out thrice his baptismal name, “Adriane, dormisne” (Adrian, are you sleeping?), and giving a slight blow on his head with a special hammer. It is hard to find any real evidence for this custom, which if it really existed at all already ceased to happen in the seventeenth century. Today the camerlengo still has the task to certify the death of a pope. However, it is certainly followed by the immediate destruction of the papal ring, an element Teng and Schutten correctly added immediately after the scene with the probing camerlengo.

Here I will not spoil the joy of anyone wanting to enjoy and read the book by Teng and Schutten by giving away the plot or pronouncing verdicts on the historical veracity or plausibility of the facts they describe. They admit to have added some minor figures to ensure the story can run as it does. Giving Van Scorel a servant is just a time-honoured homage to the practice of detective novels with an investigator and his faithful assistant. The story told by Teng and Schutten can serve as an invitation to look anew at the stories historians like to tell. They can learn from the skillful way Teng shows a sequence of scenes, using for example close-ups to focus on details or general scenes to set the background of events. The funeral of pope Adrian VI in the basilica of St. Peter’s which for a large part still lacked a roof, is shown in true detail.

Adrian’s burial at St. Peter’s was followed by a translatio of his body in 1533 to the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. By the way, this church started its life as a hospice for pilgrims founded in 1350 by Jan Peters, a rich baker from Dordrecht. The German project REQUIEM on the tombs and monuments of opes and cardinals in Rome between 1500 and 1800 has an extended entry on this monument. At his tomb in St. Peter’s the inscription said Adrian had considered his duty to reign as the most unhappy part of his life. The inscription on his large-scale monument within the Santa Maria dell’Anima reads in translation: “O how much does the time matter in which the virtue of even the best man happens”. These words seem to have inspired the title of the latest biography of pope Adrian VI by Michiel Verweij, Adrianus VI (1459-1523) : de tragische paus uit de Nederlanden (Utrecht 2011). At Deutsche Inschriften Online you will find the book by Eberhard J. Nikitsch on the inscriptions of this church, Die Inschriften der “Deutschen Nationalkirche” Santa Maria dell’Anima, I: Vom Mittelalter bis 1559 (Rome 2012). The essays in the exhibition catalogue De paus uit de Lage Landen Adrianus VI, 1459-1523 (Louvain 2009) help to put Adrian’s life into perspective.

Jan van Scorel came back to the Low Countries imbued with Renaissance ideas which he promptly used in his paintings. The great German art historian Max Friedländer once said Van Scorel had a role for Dutch painting in the sixteenth century similar to that of Peter Paul Rubens for Flemish painting in the next century. In particular his group portraits were an important innovation. In 1528 Van Scorel got a canonry at St. Mary’s in Utrecht, thus giving him a part of the financial background which had helped Adriaen Boeyens during his long ecclesiastical career. Last year I wrote a post about the project Medieval Memoria Online. Jan van Scorel is connected to several memorial objects. A part of the floor slab of his grave from the collegiate church of St. Mary’s  is now kept at the Museum Het Catharijneconvent in Utrecht (MeMo no. 3006). His group portraits of members of the Jerusalem confraternities in Haarlem and Utrecht are also described in the MeMo database (MeMo nos. 669, 671, 672, 716 and 746).

History, historians and images

Let’s close this post with a number of questions: can historians still create stories mainly using words? Is it not necessary nowadays to be at least very much aware of the imagery created by visual media? The creators of blogs are familiar with these questions and try to provide their own answers. Especially when a story does not unfold itself in the standard way movies and televisions series like to show them it is important to be aware of the (visual) expectations of your public. If people ask you for telling images, they are absolutely right to ask this from you! It will be your duty to come with reliable images or to tell what illusions, allusions and deviations images might contain. Professional pictorial research is most certainly one of the historian’s duties. You will need both your imagination and sound knowledge, helped by historical images, to create images in the mind of your readers which help both you and them to get to the core of historical events and persons. Misgivings about historical inaccuracies that occur in the choice or the use of images should not be the final aim of any criticism, but an outright challenge to produce yourself history which benefits substantially from the proper use of images and imagery.

– Jan van Scorel, Sede Vacante 1523 – exhibition Utrecht, Centraal Museum, October 19, 2013 – January 19, 2014
– Jan van Scorel, Sede Vacante 1523, drawings by Paul Teng, scenario by Jan Paul Schutten, colours Dina Kathelyn Tourneur (Eindhoven: Lecturis, 2013; 80 p.; ISBN 978-94-6226020-7)

The first papal abdication since six centuries

Yesterday’s news about the abdication of pope Benedict XVI made headlines all over the world. Surprisingly among all comments is the publication on January 3, 2013 of a post with the title ‘Can a pope ever resign?’ on the blog of Cathy Caridi, a contemporary canon lawyer from the United States living in Rome, who wrote weeks ahead of the news already a very well-informed article. She deals not only with the contemporary canon law of the Code of Canon Law promulgated in 1983, but also with one of the medieval precedents, the abdication of pope Celestin V in 1294. For canonical aspects of the current abdication Caridi’s article is a must.

Today Anders Winroth (Yale University) alerted on Facebook to the digital version of an article by Martin Bertram, ‘Die Abdankung Papst Cölestins V. (1294) und die Kanonisten’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 56 (1970) 1-101. The online version of this article is only accessible at institutions subscribing to the services of DigiZeitschriften, a German portal for the digitization of scholarly journals. Bertram wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Berlin about pope Celestin V. In the same issue of this journal Horst Hermann wrote another article concerning question about papal abdication and canon law, ‘Fragen zum einem päpstlichen Amtsverzicht’ (pp. 102-141). Scholars in the field of medieval canon law have not dedicated many books or articles to the subject of papal abdication. Peter Herde contributed the paper ‘Election and abdication of the pope: Practice and doctrine in the thirteenth century’ to the Proceedings of the sixth international congress on medieval canon law, Berkeley, 28 July-2 August 1980, Kenneth Pennington and Stephan Kuttner (eds.) (Città del Vaticano 1985) pp. 411-435. In a volume with a collection of articles by Walter Ullmann, Law and jurisdiction in the Middle Ages (London 1988) is an article ‘Medieval views concerning papal abdication’, originally published in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record 71 (1949) 125-133. John R. Eastman wrote a book about the subject, Papal abdication in later medieval thought (Lewiston, NY, 1990). Abdications by monarchs, including the pope, are the subject of a German volume with learned essays, Thronverzicht. Die Abdankung in Monarchien vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, Susan Richter and Dirk Dirbach (eds.) (Cologne-Vienna 2010). In this volume stemming from a series of lectures at the university of Heidelberg Thomas Wetzstein writes about ‘Renuntiatio – resignatio. Zum Amtsverzicht in der Kirche des hohen und späten Mittelalters’ (pp. 30-61).

After pope Celestin V in 1294 only pope Gregory XII formally abdicated, on July 4, 1415. Caridi did not mention this case in the fine article on her blog Canon Law Made Easy. Gregory XII stepped down at the Council of Constance which aimed at ending the Great Schism, the period in the history of the Catholic Church from 1378 onwards, with two popes, one at Rome and the other at Avignon. Earlier in 1415 the Council of Constance had deposited the so-called antipope John XXIII. In view of the modern regulations for a papal abdication one thinks immediately about the voluntary character necessary according to the Code of Canon Law for a valid abdication.

When searching for studies concerning papal abdication I saw also several studies about the abdication of kings. This theme might well return here in another post. In fact readers of this blog may well be surprised why I have not yet written anything about the announcement of the abdication of Queen Beatrix on January 29, 2013. This year she will formally abdicate on April 30. I guess the very time span between the announcement and the celebrations on April 30 against the rapid coming of a conclave in March pleads in favour of writing about it now. Normally I would have delved deeper into such matters, but right now I face other tasks. A quick scan of the Liber Extra, the collection of papal decretals published in 1234 on behalf of pope Gregory IX, did not bring me any result about papal renunciations, but a section of the Liber Extra, De renuntiatione (X 1.9) was devoted to bishops resigning from their office. For quick reference I used the text-only version of the IntraText Digital Library. Here I simply wanted to present some information about the background of a truly historical step. I am sure others will soon publish more detailed accounts about the abdications of 1294 and 1415. As for Facebook and medieval canon law, Anders Winroth has created a Facebook group on this subject.

A postscript

Mike Widener published on February 18 a post on the Rare Books Blog of the Yale Law Library with a nice late medieval woodcut of pope Celestine V, accompanied by further references. The Early Books blog of Yale’s Beinecke Lbrary posted on February 27 a post on a medieval images of pope Celestine V in a manuscript of the Vaticinia Pontificum, a medieval text with prophecies concerning the papacy..