Posted on by Mark Movsesian

New Translation of Vidyasagar’s “Hindu Widow Marriage”

Brian A. Hatcher (Tufts) has published a new translation of Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage (Columbia University Press 2011), a nineteenth-century work arguing for the repeal of Hindu restrictions on widows’ remarriage. The publisher’s description follows.

Before the passage of the Hindu Widow’s Re-marriage Act of 1856, Hindu tradition required a woman to live as a virtual outcast after her husband’s death. Widows were expected to shave their heads, discard their jewelry, live in seclusion, and undergo regular acts of penance. Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar was the first Indian intellectual to successfully argue against these strictures. A Sanskrit scholar and passionate social reformer, Vidyasagar was a leading proponent of widow marriage in colonial India, urging his contemporaries to reject a ban that caused countless women to suffer needlessly.

Vidyasagar’s brilliant strategy paired a rereading of Hindu scripture with an emotional plea on behalf of the widow, resulting in an organic reimagining of Hindu law and custom. Vidyasagar made his case through the two-part publication Hindu Widow Marriage, a tour de force of logic, erudition, and Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Winship on the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Michael P. Winship (University of Georgia) has written a book on Puritan government in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Godly Republicanism (Harvard) (forthcoming 2012). The publisher’s description follows:

Puritans did not find a life free from tyranny in the new world—they created it there. Massachusetts emerged a republic as they hammered out a vision of popular participation and limited government in church and state, spurred by Plymouth pilgrims. Godly Republicanism underscores how pathbreaking yet rooted in puritanism’s history the project was.

Michael Winship takes us first to England, where he uncovers the roots of the puritans’ republican ideals in the aspirations and struggles of Elizabethan Presbyterians. Faced with the twin tyrannies of Catholicism and the crown, Presbyterians turned to the ancient New Testament churches for guidance. What they discovered there—whether it existed or not—was a republican structure that suggested better models for governing than monarchy.

The puritans took their ideals to Massachusetts, but they did not forge their godly republic alone. In this book, for the first time, the separatists’ contentious, creative interaction with the puritans is given its due. Winship looks at the emergence of separatism and puritanism from shared origins in Elizabethan England, considers their split, and narrates the story of their reunion in Massachusetts. Out of the encounter between the separatist Plymouth pilgrims and the puritans of Massachusetts Bay arose Massachusetts Congregationalism.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Classic Revisited: Witte, “God’s Joust, God’s Justice”

Today’s classic revisited is not so old, but it is already worthy of being designated a classic: John Witte’s God’s Joust, God’s Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Eerdmans 2006).  CLR Forum readers will greatly enjoy this learned historical treatment; indeed, I cannot think of a book more at the heart of the study of law and religion than Witte’s extraordinary book.  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

There are three things that people will die for — their faith, their freedom, and their family. This volume focuses on all three, including the interactions among them, in the Western tradition and today. Retrieving and reconstructing a wealth of material from the earliest Hebrew and Greek texts of the West to the latest machinations of the Supreme Court, John Witte explores the legal and theological foundations of authority and liberty, equality and dignity, rights and duties, marriage and family, crime and punishment, and similar topics. God’s Joust, God’s Justice is a lucid scholarly introduction to the burgeoning field of law and religion and a learned historical inquiry into the weightier matters of the law.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Fosi’s “Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500-1750”

Readers interested in the late history of ecclesiastical law may want to check out Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500-1750 (CUA Press 2011), by Irene Fosi (G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara) (translated by Thomas V. Cohen).  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

In early modern Europe, justice was always the key to public order and the state’s main pillar. The pope, though the head of the church, was also a prince like any other, but his justice, as machinery and moral model, displayed the double nature of his rule, targeting not only actions but also beliefs and consciences. Irene Fosi, the doyenne of scholars of papal justice, lays out the ambitious, complex, and sometimes baffled endeavors of the pope’s magistrates and through lively anecdotes gives the flavor of the encounter between the pope’s assorted magistrates, inquisitors, and others, and the men and women hauled before the law.

Originally published in Italian and widely acclaimed, Papal Justice has been translated into English by Thomas V. Cohen, professor of history at York University. With the English edition, this lively overview of the papal justice system reaches a transatlantic readership and makes available the fruit of Fosi’s decades-long research in unpublished archives in Rome and the Vatican.

The book examines the very motley shape of the pope’s territorial domain, the institutions found there, and the relationships between Rome and its outlying cities. Microhistories of how things worked form a clear picture of relations between the sovereign and his subjects.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 3 Comments

Classic Revisited: Berman’s “Law and Revolution”

“This book tells the following story: that once there was a civilization called ‘Western’; that it developed distinctive ‘legal’ institutions, values, and concepts; that these Western institutions, values, and concepts were consciously transmitted from generation to generation over centuries, and thus came to constitute a ‘tradition’; that the Western legal tradition was born of a ‘revolution’ and thereafter, during the course of many centuries, has been periodically interrupted and transformed by revolutions; and that in the twentieth century the Western legal tradition is in a crisis greater than any other in its history, one that some believe has brought it virtually to an end.”

So begins the late Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (HUP 1983), as important and learned a book in law and religion as has ever been written.  Berman traces the development of contemporary Western legal institutions from the medieval period to the present, emphasizing especially the importance of the Papal Revolution of Pope Gregory VII, which, he writes, “gave birth to the modern Western state — the first example of which, paradoxically, was the church itself.”  (113)  Berman’s monumental contribution is as powerful as it is fascinating; if anything deserves the rank of canonical in law and religion literature, it is this book.  — MOD