Si in evidentem utilitatem

The Congregation of the Council, Religious Orders and the Alienation of Temporal Goods in the Papal States (Marche, 17th Century)

Francesco Giuliani

Global Perspectives on Legal History 30
Frankfurt am Main: Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie 2026. XVI, 306 S.
Online version: Open Access (PDF-Download, Lizenz: Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 International)
Print version: 23,45 € (Print on Demand bei ePubli)

ISSN 2196-9752
ISBN 978-3-944773-58-2
eISBN 978-3-944773-59-9

Quotation link of the online version: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh30

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The decree De rebus regularium non alienandis (1624), promulgated by the Congregation of the Council to safeguard the temporal patrimony of religious orders, represented a normative measure of general scope and an expression of the Roman Church’s drive toward administrative centralisation. While the Congregation reserved for itself the authority to grant licences for the alienation of ecclesiastical goods, the decree generated a complex procedure of voluntary jurisdiction – the iter si in evidentem – involving multiple institutional levels, decision-making stages, and ecclesiastical actors.

The analysis of the si in evidentem procedure proves to be a methodologically effective tool for understanding how the Congregation of the Council, a dicastery whose history has yet to be fully explored, interacted with local and central ecclesiastical institutions in the context of dispensation practices. In particular, this work focuses on the relationship between the Roman congregations, religious orders, and diocesan institutions; from a legal-historical perspective, it examines the interplay between the ius proprium of religious orders, the law enacted by the Roman congregations, and the case law of diocesan courts, thereby shedding light on the institutional and legal dynamics that governed the administration of ecclesiastical property.

To understand the complex internal practices of ecclesiastical institutions, this book makes extensive use of judicial and administrative sources, drawn from both “central” Roman as well as local archives, such as diocesan and monastic ones. This volume considers several religious families in parallel (monastic and mendicant orders, clerics regular), taking into account their respective institutional and constitutional characteristics. The historical-geographical context that forms the backdrop to this work is the territory of the Marche in the 17th century. This province of the Papal States, characterised by a particular administrative and ecclesiastical fragmentation, provides a perspective that has not yet been fully explored by historians, particularly with regard to the centre-periphery dynamics of ecclesiastical institutions.

Contents

XIII    Acknowledgements

XV     Acronyms (archives and sources)

XVI    Abbreviations

1        Introduction

9        Chapter 1: The Congregation of the Council and the Marche Region (16th–17th century):
           A Preliminary Survey.

61      Chapter 2: The De rebus regularium non alienandis:
          A Post-Conciliar General Degree

107    Chapter 3: The Iter si in evidentem: A Voluntary Jurisdiction Procedure

189    Chapter 4: The Diocesan Stage

241    Overall Conclusions

247    Appendix

255    Documentary Annex

263    Sources and Bibliography

307    About the Author