the Corporatist conception of society and THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE
From the 80s on, the political and constitutional historiography of early modern Southern Europe (namely, Italian and Iberian historiography) has experienced a dramatic and quite general turn in describing the paradigm of polities before the mid 18th century.
Categories like state, centralization, absolute power and, more recently, empire lost their centrality in the description of the architecture of political units, even of the great European monarchies of the late Middle Ages and early modern period. In Italy, a new wave of early modern historians - paradoxically based both on Marxist and ultra-conservative theoretical frameworks1 - highlighted the alternative contents of many of the political concepts and images still in use, stressing the need for a proper (i. e., properly historicized) understanding of their early modern occurrences.2 In Spain, a similar methodological turn framed an important renewal of historiography of the Ancien Regime. Scholars like Bartolome Clavero and Pablo Fernandez Albaladejo challenged the established vision of Spain as an early centralized monarchy by unveiling ethical, doctrinal, institutional, and logistic limitations to royal power. While Clavero emphasized the plurality and endurance of lower jurisdictions as a distinctive feature of early modern polities (Clavero 1981), Albaladejo stressed the role played by ideological and institutional frameworks in the constraining of princely free will (arbitrium) (Albaladejo 1993). These themes were eventually repeated in the much broader revision of traditional historical topoi carried out by other scholars as well.3In Portugal, my book As Vesperas do Leviathan4 questioned an array of pervasive ideas regarding the constitution of the Portuguese early modern monarchy, disclosing the unsuspected weight of lower powers (namely, those of city councils [camaras] and seigniorial and corporate jurisdictions), besides the overwhelming presence of Church courts, officials and institutions, which curtailed and weakened royal power.
It also disclosed how, from the 12th century onwards,jurists - informed by legal pluralism, traditionalism, and casuism - elaborated legal doctrines that on the whole favored peripheral powers to the powers of the monarch. Additional research - carried on by a younger generation of historians5 - applied this model to specific monographic themes. The results were basically consistent with my initial points.6The accumulated outcome was a new conceptualization of the monarchy, valid at least until the mid-18th century, when another political model - Polizeistaat, Etat de Police - began to develop. This monarchy was now characterized as a corporative monarchy (monarquia corporativa) whose distinctive features were:
• Royal power shared the political space with both inferior (families, counties, corporations [corpora] and universities [universitates]) and superior (Church) powers;
• Statute law was limited and was framed both by European common legal doctrine (ius commune) and by local usages and judicial practices (consuetudines, usus, styli), besides religion and ethics;
• Political and even legal duties ceded before moral duties (grace, piety, mercy, gratitude) or before affections (love - taken in a rather broader sense than today’s - and friendship), embodied in visible relationships like households, networks of friends, patrons and clients, creating duties that lawyers called antidoral (from the Greek antidora, or moral obligation).
• Royal officials enjoyed a wide and effective protection of their rights and attributions (jurisdictio), and were allowed to protect these even against royal orders.
Although this turn was noticed by some American scholars - among whom were Julius Kirchner, Tamar Herzog, Stuart Schwarz, and J. Russel-Wood, who made explicit references to the southern European historiography - the most extensive exposition of this new conception of the European early modern State was done by Jack P.
Greene in his book Negotiated authorities. Essays in colonial political andwhere the turn begun and eventually developed in an extensive array of perspectives and results. More detailed overviews: Benedictis, 1990; Schaub 1993, 1995, 1996.
4 Recent reappraisal: Hespanha 2012a.
5 Nuno Monteiro, Jose Manuel Subtil, Mafalda Soares da Cunha, Maria Fernanda Olival, Pedro Cardim, Angela Xavier, Cristina Nogueira da Silva.
6 A different question is the intensification of central/curial power, consisting in: centralizing the bureaucratic apparatus of royal court and officialdom, in the efforts to implement royal statutes, in the policy of subduing society to a royal “discipline” (a key word after the mid 18th century). However, the permanence of traditional political dispositives corroded, for decades along, the success of such efforts. On this policy of promoting royal power, after the Portuguese early 18th century, see Monteiro 2008.
constitutional history, 1994. Notwithstanding the fact that Greene’s major reference was apparently a book edited by Mark Greengrass (Conquest and coalescence. The shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, 1991) - a book which was only very indirectly influenced by the new move of Latin European historians of Early Modern polities - Greene adhered to the most important conclusions on European modern states and applied them to a colonial context. The result was the adoption in North American colonial historiography of a new interpretation of the colonial bond, now presented as much less centralized and coercive, and a new stress on the multi-level negotiations embedded in the colonial situation. This line of argumentation was already clearly visible in the work of historians like Stuart Schwartz or John Russell-Wood - or even John Elliott in his masterpieces on Spanish politics in the 17th century[414] - but it gained with J. P. Greene’s book a handy, compact exposition orientated to North American readers of history.
2.