Delivering justice on a transnational scale in Europe. The Roman Rota and the enforcement of a legal culture of negotiation (c. 1560-1700).

ROTAROM17 aims to understand the Roman Rota as one of the essential tools of the Catholic Churchs transnational governance in early modern Europe.

How did this Rome-based court of appeal, which judged in the popes name important civil disputes involving the clergy and members of the social elites, succeed in having its authority respected outside the pontifical state?

Why did men and women from Spain, Portugal, or Poland expect to find in Rome a better justice, in spite of the long, cautious and costly Rotal procedure? On which grounds did challenges and criticisms of Rotas jurisdiction have political significance?

Our aim is to study this institution which remains poorly known for this period, but also to see law in action in the settling of disputes, as well as the way in which the courts jurisprudence, used as a reference by legal experts and disseminated in libraries, contributed to the making of a legal culture founded on negotiation.

The projects second objective is to open a new research field on Europes oldest still-active tribunal and facilitate access to its massive and under-used documentation by producing essential research tolls and reference works, thus laying strong foundations for future developments of scholarship.

ROTAROM17 brings together an international and multidisciplinary team (social, diplomatic, cultural and intellectual history, legal history) and foregrounds primary research, connecting the Rotas archival funds with a large set of archival funds and libraries in Europe.

By renewing approaches to the Roman Rota, its environment, personal, litigants, and jurisprudence, and by opening up access to hitherto untapped documentation, ROTAROM17 will make a major and original contribution to rethinking the structuring role of the law in European culture and offer new opportunities for historians to explore their local or national fields of research from multiple perspectives in a large set of countries.