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1. Foundations of Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical lawThe ecclesiastical law of the early modern period is characterized by the loss of the religious unity that shaped the Middle Ages. In a revolutionary departure [2. 503] following the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, alongside the law of the Roman Catholic Church, summarized in the  Corpus Iuris Canonici, there now stood a different basic understanding of the role of law in the church. The recognition of Protestant teaching as having equal rights (in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, 1555) and the…

1. Introduction 1.1. Definition and backgroundEven today the term  office (German  Amt) still covers a broad semantic spectrum that preserves the manifold references and contexts of premodern administrative activity (Government). It extends from the exercise of a specific function through the designation of a territorial administrative district to a local authority or even a building in which lower-ranking administrative bodies are housed. As a result of developments at the beginning of the early modern period, this semantic richness can be documented, for example, in the  Deu…

1. Introduction The reciprocal but never symmetrical relationship between Church andState in early modern Europe was the result of a historical development that in some respects remained indebted to the political ethics of the New Testament (Rom 13; Rv 13), while in other respects confronting profound changes in both ecclesiastical and secular political institutions, specifically the emergence of the early modern territorial and nation state. At first, the underlying assumption was that the Europe…