The Catholic Historical Review

While most historians and lay readers are acquainted with the Inquisition, few know well the tribunals of the episcopal churches. Known as audiencias, they were part of each bishopric and were the bishops' working tools in their effort to exercise their roles as arbiters of personal faith and social customs. The audiencia of the Archbishopric of Mexico, capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, receives full attention from Jorge Traslosheros in the period between its inception and mid-seventeenth century, when it reached full possession of its jurisdiction. Like other audiencias, the one presiding the vast central area of New Spain reviewed legal cases on chantries, wills, and pious deeds. It exercised justice as applied to the clergy, and reviewed all contested cases related to personal sins, divorce, and contested marriages. Under its charge were also cases of transgression against the faith by the indigenous people who, officially, were not under the Inquisition's purview. The audiencias were not controlled by the Council of the Indies or the Inquisition, although they complemented the work of the latter.

According to Traslosheros the philosophical and religious frame supporting the existence of these tribunals was the emergence of a missionary monarchy in Spain in the sixteenth-century whose goal was to establish a confessional society oriented toward eternal salvation. Bishops and archbishops were entrusted with the task of overseeing the moral and religious life of that society. The audiencias were one of three tools at the bishops' disposal to exercise their task, with sacramental confession and the episcopal visitations to their dioceses being the other two. Traslosheros argues that without fully understanding the essence of law and justice in the period under review we could fail to understand the reasons behind the audiencias' procedures and verdicts. Perhaps the most important feature of the concept of law in those days was its corporative character. Each sector of society received punishment differently, and the aim of the executor of justice was to set an example for the individual as well as for the rest of society that could, in the long run, facilitate the reconciliation of the person's soul to the Church's doctrine.

In New Spain the early ecclesiastic tribunals were weak until the last decades of the sixteenth century, given the powerful opposition to their jurisdiction by the regular orders. However, after the Third Mexican Council (1585), and thanks to the forceful intervention of Archbishop Moya de Contreras, the ecclesiastic audiencia began to gain in power and coherence, to reach its zenith in the seventeenth century. Traslosheros devotes special attention to explaining the structure of the tribunal and its functions and uses numerous cases, civil and religious, to illustrate how it worked on the defense of its episcopal jurisdiction through active jurisprudence and the legal philosophy behind it. The most fascinating cases are those concerning sins of the flesh and the regulation of marriage life, but the examples on how the Church punished its own members are just as important. Also of great interest is the chapter on the jurisdiction of the tribunal over the Indians. The tribunal reviewed litigations between them and their pastors, their personal moral behavior, and cases of internal church discipline [End Page 196] if it involved Indians. Any transgression against the faith by the Indians, however, was reviewed by the bishop or archbishop himself.

Fully supported by archival research, this work provides many important views of daily life in the mid-colonial period, as well as giving a meticulous and precise explanation of the tenets of ecclesiastical justice and its philosophy. It also helps one to understand the fine tuning regulating civil and ecclesiastic tribunals. The author argues that with few exceptions, there was no real conflict between church and state in New Spain (other opinions notwithstanding) because the Spanish monarch had the temporal and spiritual jurisdiction...