After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the repression of clerical crimes and the need to manage what canon law then regarded as the cornerstone of lay Christian life—namely, marriage—made increasingly necessary three governance instruments: the pastoral visitation, the diocesan synod, and the ecclesiastical court for "spiritual" matters. It has been argued that these ecclesiastical courts contributed to the "disciplining" of Christian society. For Elizabeth L. Hardman, for instance, their mission was to uphold the moral discipline of the faithful and to establish a "normative system"—both legal and moral—within urban and rural communities. In practice, it is clear that Church courts were not merely vectors of canon law; they also carried a pastoral function. Their existence was in fact closely linked to the episcopal visitation, since certain offenses or conflicts discovered during that annual inspection were later brought before the tribunal. Moreover, both the visitation and the trials relied on series of testimonies and on fama—that is, the collective opinion regarding a fact or an individual—which served as a source of knowledge and information for the bishop. Unfortunately, complete documentary sets that include, for a single diocese, the synodal legislation, records of pastoral visitations, and judicial acts are extremely rare. Nonetheless, this paper aims to compare several Tuscan cases from the 13th and 14th centuries (Pistoia, Pisa, Arezzo, Cortona, Lucca, and Florence), for which sufficiently diverse documentation survives. The goal is to understand to what extent the activity of ecclesiastical courts extended the pastoral visitation and implemented synodal legislation—and conversely, how it influenced them. In doing so, the article seeks to shed new light on the diffusion of Church norms within the social body.