The Legal Pluralism of Early Modern Papacy:The Tribunals of the Papal Nuncios in the Portugal Empire and in the Republic of Venice (1650-1750)

该研究项目旨在通过对大使法庭的微观历史分析，调查教皇管辖权所发挥的跨文化功能。通过这种方式，它打算重新考虑教皇作为一个政治机构在早期现代世界中所扮演的角色。一方面，该项目将表明，直到十八世纪开明的改革，教皇在刑事和民事事务中行使世界性的司法职能。与15世纪和16世纪教皇放弃其政治特权给欧洲君主制的观点相反，该项目旨在证明，使节法院继续在欧洲以及天主教国家的非欧洲殖民地主张和执行教皇管辖权。另一方面，它的目标是表明教皇的司法权依赖于与世俗当局和天主教会本身的不同组成部分（宗教团体，主教等）的分层法律安排，以及不同社会行动者的参与。在这种观点下，该项目将揭示，在近代早期的过程中，教皇是极少数在世界不同地区行使其管辖权的机构之一。为了对整个教皇制度得出广泛的结论，本研究项目将集中在两个背景下：里斯本大使的法庭和威尼斯大使的法庭。这一比较研究的核心是两个考虑。首先，对这两个法院的分析将使我们有可能看到教皇在世界各地进行实际的管辖活动，从巴西到欧洲不同地区再到印度。其次，它将表明，在这样做的过程中，大使法院反映了一种强烈的权力分散结构。教皇使臣的法庭不仅大多由从当地法律从业人员中挑选出来的当地法官主持，而且只在请愿者的直接请求下作为上诉法院。因此，教皇使节的法庭也是社会和政治谈判的场所，在那里，地方行动者可以内化和操纵教会的规范。通过这种方式，该研究项目将最终展示这些教皇法庭如何为当地非欧洲人口提供正义。

The research project aims to investigate the cross-cultural functions performed by the papal jurisdiction through a microhistorical analysis of the tribunals of the Nuncios. In this way, it intends to reconsider the role that the Papacy played as a political institution in the early modern world.On the one hand, the project will show that, until the enlightened reforms of the eighteenth century, the Papacy performed worldwide jurisdictional functions both in criminal and civil matters. Contrary to the opinion that the Papacy gave up its political prerogatives to the European monarchies during the 15th and 16th centuries, the project intends to demonstrate that the courts of the Nuncios continued to assert and enforce papal jurisdiction in Europe as well as in the non-European colonies of the Catholic state. On the other hand, it has the goal of showing that the jurisdictional power of the Papacy relied on layered legal arrangements with secular authorities and different components of the Catholic Church itself (religious orders, bishops, etc.), as well as on the participation of different social actors. In this view, the project will reveal that the Papacy was one of the very few institutions that exerted its jurisdictional power in different parts of the world in the course of the early modern period.In order to reach broad conclusions on the Papacy as a whole, this research project will focus on two contexts: that of the tribunal of the Nuncio in Lisbon and that of the Nuncio in Venice. Two considerations lay at the core of this comparative research. Firstly, the analysis of these two courts will make possible to see that the Papacy performed actual jurisdictional activities all over the world, from Brasil through different European regions to India. In the second place, it will show that, in doing so, the courts of the nuncios reflected a strongly decentralized structure of power. The courts of the papal nuncios were not only mostly presided over by local judges, chosen among local legal practitioners, but also acted only as appeal courts under the direct request of the petitioners. As a result, the courts of papal nuncios were also places of social and political negotiation, where local actors could internalize and manipulate Church norms.In this way, the research project will finally show how these papal tribunals provided justice to local, non-European populations.