Ecclesiastical Institutions and Religious Normativity in Early Modern Mexico
What significance did religious institutions and their actors have for the formation of normative orders in Mexico (New Spain) of the 16th to the 19th centuries? The latest volume in the series Global Perspectives on Legal History, edited by Benedetta Albani, Otto Danwerth and Thomas Duve (MPIeR), takes up this little-researched question in the field of legal history. In fourteen Spanish-language, interdisciplinary papers, the authors examine the relationships between various types of religious normativity (such as canon law and moral theology), their local adaptations and links to global debates. They also deal with diocesan administration and sacramental dispensation, with indigenous and Afro-American actors in court, and with normative aspects of piety in cultural life until the 19th century. These research findings are relevant not only to legal history, but also to the history of the church and theology, social and cultural history, and ethnohistory.
The present volume is the first of four planned books dealing with the contribution of ecclesiastical institutions to normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. The following volumes will respectively focus on Peru, New Granada and Brazil.