1st Edition

Canon Law, the Expansion of Europe, and World Order

By James Muldoon Copyright 1998
    319 Pages
    by Routledge

    The articles in this volume trace the development of the theory that humanity forms a single world community and that there exists a body of law governing the relations among the members of that community. These ideas first appeared in the writings of the medieval canon lawyers and received their fullest development in the writings of early modern Spanish intellectuals. Conflict and contact with ’the infidel’ provided a stimulus for the elaboration of these ideas in the later Middle Ages, but major impetus was given by the English subjugation of Ireland, and by the discovery of the Americas. This body of work paved the way for the modern notions of an international legal order and universal norms of behavior usually associated with the publication of Hugo Grotius’s work in the seventeenth century.

    Contents: Canon Law and Expansion: Extra ecclesiam non est imperium: the canonists and the legitimacy of secular power; A canonistic contribution to the formation of international law; The contribution of the medieval canon lawyers to the formation of international law; Papal responsibility for the infidel: another look at Alexander VI’s Inter ceatera; The Avignon papacy and the frontiers of Christendom: the evidence of Vatican register 62; John Wyclif and the rights of the infidels: the requerimiento re-examined; The development of group rights. World Order: Solórzano’s De Indiarum iure: applying a medieval theory of world order in the 17th century; The conquest of the Americas: the Spanish search for global order. Ireland and America: Spiritual conquests compared: Laudabiliter and the conquest of the Americas;The remonstrance of the Irish princes and the canon law tradition of the just war; The Indian as Irishman; Index.

    Biography

    James Muldoon is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, and Invited Research Scholar at The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, USA

    '...an important distillation of scholarship...of interest to all historians of canon law and international law.' Studia Canonica , Vol. 33, No. 2 ’ Muldoon has done historical scholarship a service by exploring numerous works of canon law bearing on European expansion and seeking to understand the legal dimension of that process in all its complexity.’ Sixteenth-Century Journal, vol XXXI/3