BOOK: Benedetta ALBANI, Otto DANWERTH, and Thomas DUVE, eds., Normatividades e instituciones eclesiásticas en la Nueva España, siglos XVI–XIX (Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, 2018). ISBN 978-3-944773-04-9, 15,63 €

(Source: MPI for European Legal History)

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has published the first of four planned books dealing with the contribution of ecclesiastical institutions to normative orders in early modern Ibero-America.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ecclesiastical institutions and actors were essential for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. However, both legal historiography, due to its strong legalistic, state-centred imprint, and general historiography on colonial times, more inclined towards secular law, have only rarely discussed the contribution of ecclesiastical normativity to the formation of that normative texture which, in the historiographical tradition, has been called ‘derecho indiano’.

In light of this situation, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has organised a series of seminars in different Latin American cities in order to offer an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to the research of ‘ecclesiastical normativities and institutions in Ibero-America’ between the 16^th and 19^th centuries. The present volume is the first in a series of publications that document the results of this cycle of seminars celebrated in Mexico City, Lima, Bogotá and São Paulo.

The book, focusing on New Spain, is divided into five thematic parts. The first section presents investigations on canon law and moral theology that deal with characteristic aspects of multinormativity and the teaching of those disciplines in early modern times. The second section examines diocesan governance and ecclesiastical power in Mexico City and Puebla via statutes of the cathedral chapter, members of the ‘curia arzobispal’ and pertinent legal opinions. In the third section, the contributors reflect on the normativity and administration of sacraments, drawing on conciliar norms, treatises, pragmatic literature but as well on registers of baptisms and confessions. The fourth section deals with ethnic groups in courts of justice, both civil and ecclesiastic ones: indigenous people accused of ‘hechicería’ in a tribunal of Tlaxcala and Afro-Mexicans who started litigation in the archiepiscopal court of Mexico. The articles of the fifth section cover the topics of beatification, devotion and cultural expressions (music, images) from a normative perspective and extend the period of investigation to the 19^th century.

The articles on ecclesiastical institutions and normativities in New Spain collected in this volume propose new research fields for legal history and the history of the Church, which at the same time are relevant for social and cultural history. The editors’ purpose has been to present approaches that explore the relationship between different types of normativities, their local adaptations, the ties with global debates, the forms of solving conflicts, as well as the role of jurists, theologians and other actors. The topics discussed by the authors represented in this volume – who cultivate the disciplines of history, legal history, church history, ethnohistory, art history and the history of music – contribute to a better understanding of the normative religious universe in Spanish America.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1          Benedetta Albani, Otto Danwerth, Thomas Duve

Presentación

Derecho canónico y teología moral

15        Lara Semboloni

Una aproximación jurídico-teológica, siglo XVI.

Principios, leyes y política para la cuestión de la tierra en Nueva España

37        Víctor Zorrilla

Consideraciones sobre la doctrina del derecho de guerra de José de Acosta

51        Jesús Joel Peña Espinosa

Fuentes, autoridades y normas para la enseñanza del derecho canónico en el seminario de Puebla durante la época novohispana

Gobierno diocesano y poder eclesiástico

71        Jesús Vidal Gil

Los estatutos del cabildo de la catedral de México elaborados en el Tercer Concilio Provincial Mexicano (1585)

89        Rodolfo Aguirre

Un poder eclesiástico criollo: los miembros de la curia arzobispal de México (1682–1747)

121      Sergio Francisco Rosas Salas

Costumbre, necesidad sacramental y facultades sólitas en Puebla.

Un dictamen de fray Mateo Estrada, O. P. (1783)

Normatividad y administración de los sacramentos

139      Juan Carlos Casas García

El derecho sacramental en el Tractado de fray Pedro de Agurto (México 1573) en defensa de la administración de la eucaristía y extremaunción a los indígenas de la Nueva España

155      Berenise Bravo Rubio

«La materia, la forma y el ministro».

El bautizo de párvulos y adultos en la parroquia del Sagrario metropolitano de México (1690–1728)

169      Claudia Ferreira Ascencio

Los padrones de confesión y comunión del Sagrario de México.

Una aproximación a la praxis sacramental en el orden canónico indiano (1676–1825)

Foros de justicia y grupos étnicos

197      Olivia Luzán Cervantes

Indios acusados de hechicería ante el foro de justicia civil de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (siglo XVIII)

217      María Leticia Vázquez Oropeza

La población de origen africano en Nueva España y su relación con la jurisdicción eclesiástica. El uso de la justicia en la audiencia del arzobispado de México (siglos XVII y XVIII)

Devoción y vida cultural

233      Doris Bieñko de Peralta

El impasse de una beatificación. El proceso de sor María de Jesús Tomellín (1597–1637), monja concepcionista poblana

257      Lourdes Turrent

Música, rito y arquitectura en la Iglesia novohispana: clero regular y secular

281      Gabriela Díaz Patiño

Inclusión de una nueva política de la imagen devocional en la arquidiócesis de México (1855–1896)

299      Contributors

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BOOK: Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World : Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York: NYU Press, 2018). ISBN 9781479807246, $30

(Source: NYU Press)

NYU Press has just published a new book on the interaction between settler and indigenous laws in the New World.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A historical and legal examination of the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World

As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other's legal ideas and conceptions of justice.

This ambitious volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  In so doing, indigenous people and settlers alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice.  Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right.  Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ each other’s law.  

Natives and settlers construed and misconstrued each other's legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground.  Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to natives, and vice versa?  To address this question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian New World empires.  Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples.  Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally intelligible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian P. Owensby is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Intimate Ironies: Making Middle-Class Lives in Modern Brazil (1999) and Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (2008).

Richard J. Ross is Professor of Law and History at the University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign) and Director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History. He is the editor, with Lauren Benton, of Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (2013).

The table of contents can be found here

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BOOK: Allan GREER, Property and Dispossession : Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America [Studies in North American Indian History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316613696, £ 22.99

(Source: CUP)

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press published a book on the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Provides a comparative approach to the colonization of North America, including a study of French, English, and Spanish colonies

Considers colonization in an indigenous America, contrary to the prevailing Eurocentrism of the history of early modern imperialism

Focuses on property formation as a central dimension of colonization

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Greer, McGill University, Montréal

Allan Greer is a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University, Montréal. He has published seven books, including Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2005) and La Nouvelle-France et le monde (2009).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: property and colonization

Part I. Three Zones Of Colonization:

2. Indigenous forms of property

3. Early contacts

4. New Spain

5. New France

6. New England

Part II. Aspects of Property Formation:

7. The colonial commons

8. Spaces of property

9. A survey of surveying

10. Empires and colonies

Part III. Conclusion and Epilogue:

11. Property and dispossession in an age of revolution.

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