From Commercial Guilds to Commercial Law. Spanish Companies Regulations, 1737-1848 (original) (raw)
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Cohabitation and Marriage in the Americas: Geo-historical Legacies and New Trends
Cohabitation and Marriage in the Americas: Geo-historical Legacies and New Trends, 2016
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HEIRESSES AND FAMILY TRANSMISSION PATTERNS IN EARLY MODERN CATALONIA
During the early modern ages, marriage continued to be a contract between men to facilitate the spread of women among the various families. The object of such spread was the agnatic distribution and allocation of descendants, which required the control of women's sexuality to ensure patrilineal fatherhood and succession 2. Marriage had an important economic function as the basic production, reproduction and consumption unit, and because of being an instrument for hereditary transmission. Catalan marriage contracts, the so-called marriage articles or matrimonial pacts, included important patrimonial agreements between both families. In the Catalan principality, marriage articles or pacts settled inheritances and instituted heirs. What mattered was to maintain the exploitation unit, whereby the family economic unit became a production community. From the ninth century onwards, the regime of separation of estates appears in Catalonia.This economic family system was to be observed as default, if no other pacts were agreed, as marriage articles could establish different economic arrangements. In this case, the pact had priority over the separation of estates, which became a supplementary system to be applied only if no other system of settlement was available, which was unusual. The system of separation of estates established that each spouse had ownership and the right to enjoy his/her own assets, both those owned before, and gained during marriage. Each spouse could bequeath his/her assets inter vivos or post mortem, that is, during life or after death, in a will. At the same time, a system of donations and counter-donations within the marriage is present. The separation of estates system was offset by the existence of dowries and dowry-related institutions, particularly the escreix, as a donation from the husband to the wife at marriage or propter nuptias donation. For this reason, Jesús Lalinde prefers to call it dotal system. Such a system, besides providing a certain security to married women, helped to create a community of interests around marriage 3 .
Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 27 (2019) 131-142, 2019
This paper deals with the use of matrimonial dispensations to marry relatives in prohibited degrees by Canon law, mainly among the indigenous peoples of Charcas (present Bolivia) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a source to understand social and religious practices, the dispensations provide a privileged place of observation, insofar as they constitute a gap between the norm and the social practice, and a space of interaction and agency, from the anthropological point of view, since the request for dispensations was part of the social and material reproduction strategies of indigenous groups. Even when, in this sense, the use of this legal recourse does not seem to differ much from what the population of European origin did, which secularly employed the same resource, this paper proposes that the reasoning behind the use of matrimonial dispensations, as well as the arguments employed varied in both socio-ethnic groups. From the vantage point of a global history of law which involves the Tridentine Church, expanded around the globe, dispensations are an example of the accommodation in terms of »time, place and circumstances«. Taking into account that the Council of Trent had extended matrimonial impediments, the granting of dispensations among the indigenous population serves as an example of the paradoxes of the Christianisation of marriage in colonial Hispanic American territories, which frequently forced the Church to dissimulate and make concessions rather than to restrict and discipline.
2016
Even a brief look into the historiography on Indian marriage in New Spain will reveal how infrequently scholars have devoted themselves to this topic. On the one hand, there are texts written from the perspective of canon law, such as those by Federico Aznar Gil, Paulino Castañeda, Daisy Rípodas Ardanaz, and Guillermo Floris Margadant, but these authors address canonical development in Spain as well as Spanish America and use mainly references from councils and synods, especially pastoral sources. On the other hand, there are anthropological studies, such as those of David Robichaux, Danièle Dehouve, Pierre Ragon, and Serge Gruzinski that compare pre-Hispanic marriage to Christian marriage.
Refashioning Matrimony in the Colonial Order
This paper is a preliminary study on two aspects of marriage as it was instituted in Spanish colonial Philippines. The first is freedom of the spouses in giving matrimonial consent, which is the constitutive act of marriage; and the second, unity of marriage, with its twin character of exclusivity and indissolubility. Spanish colonial government, secular and religious, had to grapple with Philippine indigenous customs considered incongruent with canonical marriage and its auxiliary values. This study examines some of the means by which colonial authorities sought to refashion the institution of matrimony according to Spanish, Catholic norms in the late seventeenth century up to the late eighteenth. Examples of institutional means were the visita a la tierra undertaken by magistrates of the Audiencia, the diocesan visitation by the bishop, both of which enabled colonial authorities to know the situation in provincial localities; and the beaterio for women. The critical role with regard to marriage that parish priests played is included in this study insofar as it is reflected in manuals meant for their use. Matrimonial cases give some indication of the extent to which canonical marriage was recognized by the lowland indigenous population and enforced by the Catholic Church. The cases presented are illustrative, even if sketchily, of social conditions and practices among indios and mestizos de sangley. Emerging as a central concern in relation to marriage and, through marriage, to social order, are women and feminine values.
CLUP, 2010
The constructivist approach of this volume underpins our desire to investigate what we have named 'layers of power' in Europe. By this we refer to the scales of social organisation that are present in all historical periods, regardless of the geographical, political, economic or cultural make-up of a specific society. The 'layer' of power that presents itself most self-evidently as the primary social unit in which human beings have coexisted, and which formulates the rules of that existence, is the family. It is in familial relations that "many of the most distinctive features of human life are most clearly and unambiguously illustrated" 1 . The family is sui generis a layer of power, as it contains mechanisms through which it influences intrapersonal and interpersonal concepts and activities. One of these mechanisms is marriage, an institution whose origins and early development cannot be pinned down conclusively, but whose omnipresence we experience daily. As a source of certain rights and duties within and outside the community, marriage, over time, has been converted into a matter of law. This chapter explores the development of marital law in Europe and compares different marriage laws which coexisted (and still do) in Jewish, western Christian and Islamic communities. Chronologically, it concentrates primarily on the medieval period as the crucial phase in the development of marriage law for all these religious groups, for it was then when these laws were refined from customary and ritual practice into codified legal acts. This, in turn, created the foundation for present-day marital legislation, thus contributing to a common European cultural heritage.