Knowledge of the Pragmatici: Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern Ibero-America

By Thomas Duve

Knowledge of the pragmatici sheds new light on pragmatic normative literature (mainly from the religious sphere), a genre crucial for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. Long underrated by legal historical scholarship, these media - manuals for confessors, catechisms, and moral theological literature - selected and localised normative knowledge for the colonial worlds and thus shaped the language of normativity.

The eleven chapters of this book explore the circulation and the uses of pragmatic normative texts in the Iberian peninsula, in New Spain, Peru, New Granada and Brazil. The book reveals the functions and intellectual achievements of pragmatic literature, which condensed normative knowledge, drawing on medieval scholarly practices of 'epitomisation', and links the genre with early modern legal culture.

Contributors are: Manuela Bragagnolo, Agust?n Casagrande, Otto Danwerth, Thomas Duve, Jos? Luis Eg?o, Renzo Honores, Gustavo C?sar Machado Cabral, Pilar Mej?a, Christoph H. F. Meyer, Osvaldo Moutin, and David Rex Galindo.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004421629
• ISBN13: 9789004421622
• Release Date: April 2020
• Publisher: Brill Nijhoff
• Length: 396 Pages