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Ecclesiastical institutions and actors were essential for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. The present volume focuses on New Spain (16th-19th centuries).

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Ecclesiastical institutions and actors were essential for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. However, both legal historiography, due to its strong legalistic, state-centred imprint, and general historiography on colonial times, more inclined towards secular law, have only rarely discussed the contribution of ecclesiastical normativity to the formation of that normative texture which, in the historiographical tradition, has been called ´derecho indiano´.
In light of this situation, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has organised a series of seminars in different Latin American cities in order to offer an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to the research of ´ecclesiastical normativities and institutions in Ibero-America´ between the 16th and 19th centuries. The present volume is the first in a series of publications that document the results of this cycle of seminars celebrated in Mexico City, Lima, Bogotá and SÆo Paulo.
The book, focusing on New Spain, is divided into five thematic parts. The editors´ purpose has been to present approaches that explore the relationship between different types of normativities, their local adaptations, the ties with global debates, the forms of solving conflicts, as well as the role of jurists, theologians and other actors. The topics discussed by the authors represented in this volume - who cultivate the disciplines of history, legal history, church history, ethnohistory, art history and the history of music - contribute to a better understanding of the normative religious universe in Spanish America.

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Aguirre, Rodolfo
Rodolfo Aguirre is Researcher at the Institute for Research and Education at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, Ciudad de México). He conducts seminars at the Graduate School of History and Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the same university. Since 2001, he is a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI-CONACYT). His research interests include the social and political history of the Church in New Spain and the history of the Royal University of Mexico. Currently, he is responsible for the research project The Church and the socio-political formation of New Spain: parish networks, church hierarchies and social actors.

Duve, Thomas
Thomas Duve is the Managing Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for
European Legal History and Professor for Comparative Legal History at the
Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on the legal history of the
early Modern Age and the Modern Era with particular interest

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in Ibero-
American legal history and the history of legal scholarship in the 20th
Century.

Albani, Benedetta
Benedetta Albani is Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main) and since 2014 Director of the Max Planck Research Group Governance of the Universal Church after the Council of Trent. Her research focuses on the history of the post-Tridentine Church and on di erent aspects of the translation and adaptation of Tridentine reforms in America within the framework of the relations between the Holy See and the New World during the early modern era.

Danwerth, Otto
Otto Danwerth is Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main). His main research areas are early modern Spain and Ibero-America until the eighteenth century, with a focus on the Andean region from Inca times onward. He is particularly interested in legal and cultural history, ethno-history and the history of death.

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