| LOCATION | Vaticano, BAV, Vat. |
| MANUSCRIPT | Vaticano, BAV, Vat. lat. 14094 |
| ITEM No. 15 | Informatio iuris |
Informatio iuris : in causa matrimonii Henrici VIII regis et Catharinae de Aragón
Author(s):
Incipit:
Informatio iuris: in causa matrimonii Henrici VIII regis (1509-1547) et Catharinae de Aragón.
King Henry VIII had married Catherine of Aragón in 1509. Official annulment proceedings started in 1527, then went to Rome, and failed there in 1529. Catharia was the widow of Henry’s deceased brother Arthur. Pope Julius II had thus been requested to dispense from the impediment of affinity and had granted such dispensation. Henry’s jurists had argued that God had commanded by strict dive law, written in the Bible, and even stronger: by law of nature, that no man can validly marry the widow of his deceased brother, and the pope’s dispensation could not make this prohibited marriage valid. Catharine’s jurists tried to make her case even stronger by alleging that she had never become a validly married wife of Arthur because he had died before the two had ever had sexual relations with each other. Fol. 116r-v enumerates quotations where theologians stated that the Bible (in Leviticus and Deuteronomy) only prohibits marrying a brother’s widow if that deceased brother had left living offspring (which was not the case with Arthur - he had no offspring).
The annulment proceedings were discussed by Edward Louis Surtz, Henry VIII's Great Matter in Italy: an Introduction to Representative Italians in the King's Divorce, mainly 1527-1535. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1974 – a voluminous work. Furthermore V. Murphy, The Literature and Propaganda of Henry VIII’s First Divorce, in The Reign of Henry VIII. Politics, Policy and Piety, ed. by D. McCulloch, Basingstoke and London 1995, pp. 135 ss. And an article by Domenico e Paola Maffei, Enrico VIII d’Inghilterra, Caterina d’Aragona e un consilium di Giulio Ferretti, in "Ins Wasser geworfen und Ozeane durchquert.” Festschrift für Knut Wolfgang Nörr, edd. Mario Ascheri etc., Köln Weimar Wien: Böhlau Verlag 2003, pp. 505-522 [Consilium transmitted in Vat. lat. 5830 and in Napoli, BOratoriana, Sala M, S.XXVIII, P1, N.46].
Fol. 116r-v enumerates quotations where theologians stated that the Bible (in Leviticus and Deuteronomy) only prohibits marrying a brother’s widow if that deceased brother had left living children.
The present fascicle is loose because the bookbinder's thread did not hold.
Author(s): Johannes Loysius Aragona advocatus
No. of pages: Fol. 107r-v, 115v-r, 114r-v, 116r-v
Rubric: Decisio declarans quo iure si(t) irritum et prohibitum ducere relictam fratris absque liberis defuncti
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