Definition
In ecclesiastical law, spiritualities (also rendered "spiritualities of a bishop") refers to the revenues, dues, and profits belonging to a bishop or other church official that derive from the exercise of ecclesiastical office and spiritual functions. These are distinct from temporalities — the bishop's income and property held in a secular, territorial capacity. Spiritualities arise from acts such as ordaining and instituting priests, conferring benefices, and other official religious duties. The term applies to the class of ecclesiastical income generally, not to a single payment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): plural of spirituality — matters of the spirit, religious or devotional concerns.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined as a legal term; used primarily in the sense of spiritual character or quality, or collectively, the clergy.
The gap matters. In ordinary English, "spiritualities" carries a devotional or abstract religious meaning. In ecclesiastical law it is a technical term of property and revenue classification — describing money owed to a bishop because of his spiritual office, not the quality of his faith or piety.
Common Confusion
SPIRITUALITIES vs. TEMPORALITIES: These two terms form a paired opposition and are frequently encountered together. Temporalities are the bishop's secular revenues and property — lands, lay fees, rents — held in his capacity as a feudal baron and lord of parliament. Spiritualities are revenues flowing from his spiritual office. The distinction mattered practically because different legal rules governed each class: the Crown's relationship to temporalities (including the right to hold them during a vacancy) differed from its relationship to spiritualities. Researchers conflating the two will misread historical sources on church-state property disputes.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of primarily historical and ecclesiastical legal significance. Researchers working in pre-modern English law, canon law, or the law of the Church of England will encounter it regularly; those working in modern American or secular law will rarely see it outside historical quotation.
Key research traps:
The term is almost exclusively found in sources addressing the constitutional and property arrangements of the established church in England. American legal sources treat it only incidentally, usually when discussing the historical background of church-state doctrine.
The distinction between spiritualities and temporalities was not merely academic — it determined which revenues the Crown could seize during a vacancy in a bishopric (sede vacante), which court had jurisdiction over disputes, and which obligations ran with the office. Sources that use only one term without the other may be silently assuming the reader understands the pair.
In historical dictionaries and ecclesiastical treatises, the term frequently appears in the phrase "guardian of the spiritualities" (custos spiritualitatum), referring to the official — typically the archbishop or a cathedral chapter — appointed to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction during a vacancy. This usage is distinct from simply describing the revenues themselves. A researcher who reads "spiritualities" solely as a revenue term will miss this institutional meaning in sources involving vacancy administration.
The corpus entry in Black's 2nd Edition is terse and tied to the bishop's situation specifically. Broader ecclesiastical law sources extend the concept to other church offices, including deans, chapters, and archdeacons.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the term in the narrow form "spiritualities of a bishop" and correctly identifies the core contrast with temporalities. The entry cites Cowell (a reference to John Cowell's legal dictionary, The Interpreter, 1607), which locates this definition firmly in the English ecclesiastical law tradition. Black's entry is accurate but compressed — it does not address the "guardian of the spiritualities" usage, nor does it signal that the concept extends beyond bishops to other ecclesiastical officers. Researchers relying solely on Black's may underestimate the breadth of the term's application in canonical and ecclesiastical records.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on the core meaning; the disagreement, where it arises, is about scope rather than definition.
Jurisdictional Note
Spiritualities in their technical legal sense belong almost entirely to English ecclesiastical law and its historical antecedents in canon law. The term has no operative legal meaning in American jurisdictions. Researchers working in English legal history, Commonwealth ecclesiastical law, or the history of church-state relations will find it functional; for all other purposes it is a historical artifact.