'Ghost of the Empire': Church, Law, and the Public Sphere, 1350-1650

This dissertation examines how lawyers wrote about the Church as a legal and political actor intheir commentaries on the Spanish Siete Partidas, the feudal law, canon law, Roman civil law, and city statutes. I show that lawyers strategically rejected the vocabulary of ‘statehood’ and ‘sovereignty’ for the Church, but equally allowed it to claim many of the rights and powers of ‘states’ or ‘sovereigns’. The project argues that the Church occupied a middle political space between temporal and ecclesiastical authorities, in which they could take advantage of their influence and exercise power and jurisdiction without the responsibilities of temporal sovereignty. However, this project also argues that the current frameworks for analyzing this peculiar role of the Church—one that approaches the Church from the standpoint of the State and the secular—is insufficient. While acting, administrating, litigating, and even governing, the Church (and jurists) created models for arguments and institutions which would be adapted, adopted, and implemented by other corporate bodies, including the “Modern State”. It was the Church itself which often developed the bureaucratic machinery which would be adopted and copied by late renaissance and early modern states. There is, in other words, a latent medievalism within Early Modern thought and the development of democracy: ghosts abound. Only by returning to the Church and its legal self-understanding of its actions can we hope to understand both medieval and modern politics