Law

In the Middle Age and in the early modern period, in Europe, multiple overlapping normative orders existed. Secular courts (forum externum) were governed by the jurists and aimed to ensure social order: these courts operated in parallel with the so-called courts of conscience (forum internum), where theologians ruled in matters of the soul. Canon law, civil law and moral theology shaped a complex regime of normativity, where the individual responded to intersecting demands from religious and secular powers. Legal knowledge circulated in a variety of literature including collections of laws, collections of decretals, legal treatises, handbooks, sermons, biblical commentaries, ethical treatises, manuals for confessors, manuals of moral theology and collection of cases of conscience. In this context, legal actors were not only the civil jurists, but also the canonists and the theologians.

The first phase of PRIVACY investigated the thresholds that theologians and jurists shaped between public and private in a broad sense. It focused on four research fields such as marriage and household, property, contract and business, power and jurisdiction, and law and religion. The outcomes revealed novel insights in the notions of clandestinity, secrecy, public and private conscience, public and private office, public and private religious convictions, public and private jurisdiction, and negotiations of public and private power. The second phase of PRIVACY will expand in four new research fields: honor and reputation, conscience and thought, private negotiation, and vengeance and rebellion. Research will aim at describing processes, transformations, and migrations of norms and concepts from different normative orders and their impact in the articulation of normativity throughout the early modern era. The underlying objective is to shed some light on the factors that promoted the development of privacy and the private sphere.

Astorri, P., Nørgaard, L.C., A little Republic. The Conceptualization of the Household according to Henning Arnisaeus, in Reformation and Everyday Life (eds) B. Holm, N. Koefoed, Göttingen, Vandehoeck & Ruprecht 2023, 195-219.

Astorri, P., The Redefinition of Clandestine Marriage by Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians and Jurists, in Law and History Review, Vol. 41 issue 1 (2023), 65-92, doi:10.1017/S073824802300010X

Astorri, P.,  Braun, H., De Bom, E., (eds), A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics, A Companion to the Christian Tradition, vol. 102, Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2022, XVI + 644pp.

Astorri, P., Los primeros teólogos luteranos modernos y el censo redimible: hacia una reformulación de la prohibición del interés / Early Modern Lutheran Theologians and the Redeemable Census: Towards a Reformulation of the Interest Prohibition, in Studia Historica-Historia Moderna, Vol. 44 Núm. 1 (2022): Discursos teológicos y cuestiones económicas: siglos XVI-XVII, 53-76, 23p.

Astorri, P., Jensen S.F., Heinrich Hahn (1605-1668), A Portrait of a Lutheran Jurist at the University of Helmstedt, in Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung, vol. 108 (2022), 204-242, 39p.

Astorri, P., Nørgaard, L.C., Publicus – Privatus. The Divine Foundations of Authority in Dietrich Reinking, in Journal of Early Modern Christianity, vol. 9/1 (2022), 93-119, 27p.

Astorri, P., Can a Judge Rely on his Private Knowledge? Early Modern Lutherans and Catholics Compared in Comparative Legal History, vol. 9:1, 2021, 56-88, 33p.

Astorri, P., Grotius’s Contract Theory in the Works of His German Commentators: First Explorations in Grotiana n. 41/2020, 88-107, 19p.

• La définition du mariage clandestin durant la Réforme luthérienne, Journées internationales de la Société d’histoire du droit, Lausanne, 02 June 2023.

• El derecho contractual de William Ames (1576-1633): entre la reforma protestante y la escolástica española, IV Jornada sobre la Escuela Española de Pensamiento: Salvación, política y economía. El comercio de ideas entre España y Gran Bretaña en los siglos XVII y XVIII, Madrid, 19 December 2022, invited speaker.

• Parental Authority and Clandestine Marriage in Reformation Germany, INTERACTIONS, EXCHANGES, AND TRANSFORMATIONS European Legal Traditions and their Impact on the Construction of Gender in a Global Context, Vancouver BC, 18-19 November 2022.

• Lutheran Theologians on Insolvency and Debt, Debt or Sin? The Moral Roots of Economic and Legal Thought, Louvain la Nueve, 27-28 October 2022, invited speaker.

• with Lars Cyril Nørgaard, The Limits of “potestas”: Church and state in Henning Arnisaeus (1576-1636), Dietrich Reinking (1590-1664), and Hans Wandal (1624-1675), Police, Law and Religion in the Nordic Countries after the Reformation – New Perspectives, University of Oslo, Faculty of Law, 15-16 September 2022.

• Clandestine Marriage Redefined: Canon Law in the works of the Lutheran Reformers, the 16th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in St. Louis (Missouri), 17-23 July 2022.

• Judging according to Evidence or according to Personal Knowledge? Conrad Hornejus (1590-1649) and Heinrich Hahn (1605-1668) on the Duties of the Judges, at the 6th Biennial Conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 22-24 June 2022.

• Roundtable panel at the RSA Annual Conference Dublin 2022: Quo vadimus? Current and Future Research on Early Modern Spanish Scholastic Thought, along with Harald E. Braun (University of Liverpool). Speakers: Prof. Ian W. S. Campbell (Queen’s University Belfast), Prof. Nicole D. Legnani (Princeton University), Prof. Jean-Pascal Gay (Université catholique de Louvain), Prof. Joerg Alejandro Tellkamp (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa); Dr. José Luis Egio Garcia (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory); Prof. Laura Beck Varela (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). The last two speakers were not able to travel to attend the roundtableBusiness Regulation in Sixteenth-Century Spain and Germany: Catholic and Lutheran Teachings on the Five Percent Contract Law, Theology, and the Moral Regulation of ‘Economy’ in the Early Modern Atlantic World, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, 25 March 2022.

• The Public Authority according to Oldendorp, Vigelius and Treutler Humanismus, Jurisprudenz und Konfessionalisierung in Hessen, ca. 1500–1560, Marburg, 11-12 March 2022.

• The use of the “ius commune” in Lutheran theologians’ doctrine of contract law  INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF IUS COMMUNE, 40th Course: Ius commune and Western Society, Erice/online, 13-15 December 2021.

• with Lars Cyril Nørgaard, The Lutheran Household as a Private Jurisdiction, Nordic Variations of Protestant Governance. A series of NOS-HS workshops: Uppsala – Aarhus – Oslo. HOUSEHOLD. Workshop in Aarhus / online, 2 December 2021.

• Common Good and Private Rights in the First German Treatises on Public Law, the Venice World Multidisciplinary Conference on Republics and Republicanism, Venice/online, June 13, 2021.

• Parental Authority, Privacy, and the Reformation of Marriage, Reformation and Everyday Life, Aarhus/online, June 1, 2021.

• Parental Authority, Privacy, and the Reformation of Marriage, REFORC Annual Conference, Budapest/online, May 6, 2021.

• Privacy Regulation between Law and Moral Theology, Annual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America, Philadelphia/online, April 21, 2021.

• Public Debt in Early Modern Lutheran Germany, Aux origines de la dette publique en Europe (XIIIe-XVIIe), Lyon/online, November 12-14, 2020, invited speaker.

• Normative Knowledge in the Making: The Case of the Consultationes constitutionum saxonicarum (1599-1601), Practices of Privacy Online Symposium, April 24- May 31, 2020.