• Vita

     

  • Research Project

    Governing by Exception. Transnational Regimes of Grace wielded by the Papacy and Legal Plurality in the Early Modern World

    In medieval and early modern European polities, rulers were traditionally addressed as the source of all grace and justice. Alongside the incremental involvement of the law and of princely tribunals as a platform for conflict settlement and negotiation, much of the day to day business of governing consisted in the receiving, vetting, probing, granting, shelving (or simply ignoring) of vast numbers of petitions for case-to-case authoritative interventions that bypassed or even contradicted increasingly sophisticated legal settlements. “Governing by exception” allowed rulers and subjects alike to inhabit seemingly timeless and rigid normative orderings without forfeiting their function as loci of legitimacy and authority. Because medieval and early modern Europeans “did” grace in a highly bureaucratic, formalized and regulated manner, however, justice and grace could become deeply intertwined. This stands in sharp contrast with the findings of recent anthropological studies that, while putting grace in the limelight as an analytical category to study human collectives, embark on a dyadic, even dialectical relationship between grace and justice/tradition or between charisma and law/institution. The early modern papacy, wielding vast and largely overlooked empires of grace over souls as much as subjects, ranging from the sacramental absolution of particularly hideous sins down to the licensing of transactions involving church property, is a case in point. This project focuses on the global governance and the local dynamics involving the Roman Dataria Apostolica, the papacy’s central machinery of grace belching out dozens of thousands graceful acts on a yearly basis. More specifically, it seeks to understand the circulation of apostolic authority and the bureaucratic intervention of the papacy in local recruitment procedures for lower and middling church offices or benefices (parishes, canonships, altars) on a level that was unthinkable in the “papalist” 19th and 20th centuries and in favor of thousands of petitioners hailing from a broad social spectrum. Benefice law itself proved a from a historicist point of view strikingly successful toolkit to organize church resources across four continents and eight centuries. Oscillating between administrative and property law, the “benefice system” of legal and administrative practices was capable of absorbing, among others through papal and other regimes of grace, a wide range of stakes and interests that conversely warranted its baffling longevity. Papal regimes of grace involving benefices in particular reveal the eminently local dynamics and ditto normative orderings that fueled thousands of petitions for Roman bureaucratic interventions in the field and that, by consequence, continued to enact transnational regimes of grace previously thought to have been in decline in the age of Absolutism and emerging early modern states.

  • Selected Publications