"Solum Deum ante Oculos" - Chriminal Justice at the Court of the Patriarch of Venice (1451-1545)

• Applicant: Nicolas Gillen
• Subject Area: Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251487222

This book presents the results of the examination of all extant criminal law records from the Historical Archive of the Patriarch of Venice from the century before the Council of Trent. This examination made it possible to re-construct how canon criminal law trials worked in practice.The study is breaking new ground for two reasons: Firstly, the studied court records have not yet been the object of other historical treatises. Secondly, there is very few literature on the practice of ecclesiastical criminal jurisdiction in Early Modern Europe. Accordingly, I took a broad institutional approach and tried to identify all features and common problems of the analyzed records.The examination is not limited to legal aspects of court practice which are compared with their canon law sources. It also comprises some practical aspects which are usually not treated by legal historians such as the seizure of criminals, their prisons, the way they were tortured or the payment of lawyers and court notaries.One focus is on the conflict of competence with secular jurisdiction which is common to almost all trial records. Until now, this problem was mostly treated in the context of the external relations between Venice and the Holy See. My research on the ecclesiastical as well as secular court records of the same time made a more differentiated, multi-faceted view of the problem possible. The central arguments regarding this issue are summarized in the last chapter of the book.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants