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Sociologists define power as one party's capacity to influence another's action. Thus, power is a relational property of interpersonal interaction. However, its dynamics embed within institutions such as the church and the state. This paper explores power dynamics using a case study of the conflict between an Old Order Amish church and the civil law of Ohio. The church excommunicated a member for violating community rules. The member countered by suing the church in state court. We trace power within and across these spheres of influence, showing how each party defined the situation according to institutional vectors of power. While one might expect the state to possess greater power in this situation, we demonstrate that ultimately neither party had total power, and both lost to some extent. This case study identifies the importance of viewing power as interactional, dynamic, and contextual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental indissolubility of valid and consummated Catholic marriage anticipated the contemporary professional (canon law) and lay view of Catholic or even mixed marriages. The author concentrated on the late medieval Hungarian or Slovak realities, which she looked at in her study through the selected case of the Huber couple from Pressburg, heard at all levels of the Hungarian ecclesiastical courts, beginning with the Metropolitan Court of the Archdiocese of Esztergom, located in Trnava at the beginning of the 19th century. It provided her with a (micro)probe method to present a more realistic picture of the emergence, resolution, gradation or, on the contrary, hibernation of marital conflicts, controversies and the very coexistence in the marital couple cohabitation of a man and a woman than the contemporary professional and scientific canonical and civilistic writings of the late modern period would have postulated in a somewhat idealistic canonical manner. However, the study begins by noting the post-Tridentine (post-Conciliar) legal basis for the separation of the spouses, which made it possible to address both the marital cause in question and its other legal and social implications (especially the property status of the separated spouses). The author has decided to bring the topic of matrimonial disputes into the scientific discourse by way of legal-historical research only to one of the institutes of the matrimonial personal law of the Catholic Church -- separation or also called separation from the table and bed, which, although it did not dissolve the marriage, but which allowed the spouses to separate temporarily or even permanently and to find a new modus vivendi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista de Historía da Sociedade e da Cultura is the property of Revista de Historia da Sociedade e da Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this book, G. R. Evans, professor emeritus of medieval theology and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, explores the semi-confessional state in nineteenth-century England and its complex, multifaceted union of church and state. The King-in-Parliament was the supreme temporal governor of the established Church of England, while in spiritual matters, the Church was governed by its bishops. Early nineteenth-century England was a semi-confessional Protestant state in which subjects were expected to conform to the doctrines, worship, and discipline of the Church by law established, but in which there was almost full toleration for those who chose not to conform. [Extracted from the article]

A case from the court of Canterbury involved a seventy-year-old witness, who affirmed that his father had been present at the marriage of his neighbours. While women were less prominent in such litigation, their testimony was in demand for matrimonial cases and their evidence was pivotal in cases concerning pregnancy, childbirth and abusive marriages. Evidence delivered before the ecclesiastical courts constitutes an invaluable source of information for students of medieval life. [Extracted from the article]

The introduction discusses a selection of the existing literature on star chamber, and suggests that older debates regarding the "popularity" of the court are a dead end - a point well taken, although it could arguably be sidestepped by asking not whether the court was popular, but whether it was busy. Parliamentary historians have long been interested in the court of star chamber, not least because it was at one point deemed the proper venue for challenging the election of MPs. Nowadays, secretive tribunals are sometimes pejoratively described as "Star Chamber" affairs; this chapter shows that in reality star chamber proceedings actually attracted audiences, who sometimes paid for seats. [Extracted from the article]

Summary: The implementation of canon law in the medieval ecclesiastical courts is an enigmatic issue. This article focuses on the types of defense arguments made by people accused of failing to observe holy days, as well as how courts judged such excuses. Even though failing to properly observe holy days – nonobservance – was a minor crime, the courts set a high standard when evaluating justifiable excuses for failing to observe holy days. The courts tended to reject most defense arguments. Despite the overall decline of the ecclesiastical courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there was no decline in the high standards demanded by the courts in nonobservance cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the secular and ecclesiastical justice in Late Anglo-Saxon England, highlighting the understanding homilist and legislator Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Topics include objectives behind judicial punishment, secular and ecclesiastical justice and episcopal participation in lawmaking.

The study of church courts in Europe is a research field from which historians harvest rich perspectives and possibilities. In Belgium and the Netherlands, thanks to the efforts of archivists, new catalogues of early modern church court documents have recently been published, and the path to further research is now opened up. This article intends to provide a general view of the courts' activities in the church province of Mechelen through quantitative analyses, using registers of sentences. The volume of the cases brought before them, the proportion of office and instance cases, and the profiles of parties are examined. The analysis confirms the general declining trend in the courts' activity, and this decline seems to have had more to do with the decline in office matters. It is also confirmed that the majority of the parties were women, which provides a good chance to exploit these records for studies in women's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La reorganización de los organismos de justicia en la diócesis de Coimbra durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI culminó con la publicación de una Reglamentación del Tribunal Episcopal (Audiencia), ordenada por el obispo de Coimbra D. João Soares en 1547. Las prescripciones del Concilio de Trento, destinadas a reforzar la vigilancia y regular el comportamiento cristiano de los prelados, también dio lugar a una reforma del sistema judicial eclesiástico. Fue en este contexto que D. Afonso de Castelo Branco ordenó un nuevo Regimiento del Tribunal Episcopal que fue publicado el 3 de marzo de 1592. Este corpus normativo fue central para el funcionamiento de la diócesis, la racionalización de sus procedimientos administrativos y la praxis del gobierno cotidiano, y es una valiosa fuente para el estudio de los tribunales episcopales. Al analizar los perfiles, competencias y funciones de los distintos agentes judiciales eclesiásticos, se da cuenta de la organización y de la estructura interna del Tribunal de Coimbra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapprochement of several areas of humanities to a spatial orientation in the formulation of its objects and research problems is on the front of most recent academic production. From the analysis of maps, gold discoveries chronicles and expansion of the church chapel´s influence in a primary region of colonization, this paper provides the historical and geographical formation of a region that were in the principal route to the hinterlands of eastern lands in the Captaincy. Finally this research demonstrates how the ecclesiastical apparatus legitimated domination and gave exploratory senses to the colonial efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek in this paper to show the inquiry about the implementation in 2016 of the Motu proprio Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus of Pope Francis at the end of the year 2015 and what are his immediate prospects, in the ecclesiastical court of Zipaquirá (Colombia). For this we have resorted to framing this study in the theology of the Pope and his life cycle, to expose the norms of the Motu proprio mentioned and its change with respect to the replaced norms of the Code of Canon Law, as well as to transcribe the questions that we have formulated to the Court Ecclesiastic of Zipaquirá and their respective answers, to finally make our comments. In them it is to emphasize that the Court of Zipaquirá has been created based on the Motu Proprio, that the brief process has not been used until now, that the double sentence as it is shown somehow successful in the measure in which the failures produced have not been appealed, that real pastoralism is gaining ground in our view of an excess of legality, lacking a greater disclosure of the Motu Proprio, as well as the future that the facilities and staff of the Tribunal promise to attend in the year 2017, almost triple the number of cases examined and sentenced in 2016, that parish priests will gradually become more involved in the preparation of cases of nullity, and that judicial decongestion and greater acceptance of those in need of the nullity process will be a reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge of the church judiciary's functioning in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary shows that previous historical publications contain only general, summarizing opinion when analyzing its issues. Therefore, the authors of the paper decided to examine the activities of episcopal courts in Hungary by means of a new, as yet untried method of a probe: by evaluation of activities of a single judicial vicar. This person is Matteo di Vicedomini of Piacenza (+1428) who for more than three decades lived in Hungary and in the first third of the 15th century served as a judicial vicar of the archbishop of Esztergom (in 1399-1403, 1411-1423, 1425-1428). Since he served at the highest church court of the country for a long time we can assume that he dealt with various types of cases. In this paper the authors deal with what they found in the sources. Thus, they also focus on those aspects which in the prior examinations - just due to the general character of scholarly literature - remained in the background or were absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examine the laws related to vetitum that is a prohibition, in the form of a precept, imposed by an ecclesiastical authority in Canon Law. Topics discussed include Catholic marriage tribunals, prohibitions on particular marriages by diocesan bishops, and development in ecclesiastical jurisprudence.

The article offers information on the decree of establishment of ecclesiastical tribunals of second instance in Australia and New Zealand. It states that the national tribunal of second instance created by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is suppressed by the same Conference. It notes that the current first instance regional tribunals in Australia and New Zealand will act as tribunals of second instance.

The article discusses the poverty and labour in the early modern England, and explores on the language of self-description by men and women. It is said that there were contemporary guides to church court practice to examine the sayings of witnesses, combined with the issue of how witnesses made a living in the socio-occupational descriptors. The article also presents the statements of several witnesses representing the modern English society, documented in response to the question of their worth between 1550 and 1728.

The church courts in England traditionally had jurisdiction over testaments and the litigation arising from testaments. In the fifteenth century, however, Chancery also took jurisdiction over testamentary cases. This article surveys the testamentary litigation in fifteenth-century English Chancery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim of this article is to determine the origin and the history of the local ecclesiastic judges in the archbishoprics of Mexico. The rise of this institution should be understood as part of the process of consolidation of episcopal authority, which reached its apex during the first half of the eighteenth century and preceded the secularization of doctrines that began in 1749. The institution of the local ecclesiastic judge was a relatively late one in the parish world. While local political offices (mayors, priests, Indian chiefs and councils) began to arise in the sixteenth century, space did not start to open for another local office until the second half of the seventeenth century, and it was not until the first hall of the eighteenth century that it was fully consolidated, judges played a central role in the subordination of Church teachings to the authority of the archbishop. When Ferdinand VI ordered the secularization of the doctrines in Mexico in 1749, vice royal authorities and the archbishops found the lay clergy greatly diminished and already accustomed to regulating its actions based on diocesan norms and subject to the vigilante of ecclesiastic judges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the judicial dimensions of matrimony in accordance with Pope Benedict XVI. During a 2006 speech at the Sacra Roma Romana, the appellate tribunal of the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI discussed the necessity to search for the truth in regards to the marriage process and pastoral service. During his 2007 speech, he analyzed the legal dimensions of marriage. The article explores the issues that arise from the Pope's position on truth in marriage, considering that it loses all meaning when looked at in a cultural context.

Examines the records of four divorce trials from the ecclesiastical file of the Concepción archbishopric, concerning all of which the ecclesiastical tribunal arrived at a definitive resolution, centering on the analysis of the speeches that the women made concerning the demand for divorce. Analyzes the stories of the four families from the point of view of their behaviors and attitudes, their sensibilities and realities, to understand the causes or circumstances that made them end as unfinished unions.

Attempts to test the assertions made in a novel of Manuel I Komnenos about the church's role in cases of killing by bringing together the imperial legislation of the tenth and 12th centuries with surviving case histories from civil and ecclesiastical courts. Church's right to grant asylum or refuge to all orthodox Christians feeling the threat of imprisonment; Comparison of the punishments stipulated by Constantine's novel for the murderer who obtained asylum with those which Roman law inflicted.

Discusses evidence relating to the subject of usury found in the surviving records of the English church courts. Comparison between canon law theory and practice; Nature of the cases involving; Procedure and proof in usury cases.