In La maison Dieu, published in 2006, Dominique Iogna-Prat examined the appearance and burgeoning, between 800 and 1200, of a singular discursive form, indicative of a mutation that was both social and ideological. The metonymy between the Church-as-institution and the church-as-building proclaimed that the Church was a place, while at the same time making places of worship—the “specific” places in which the mediation of the sacred was concentrated—the very figure of the Church in a context characterized by the coextensivity or complete overlap of Ecclesia and society.Footnote 1 His argument underscored the importance of the relationship with place in the production of the social. It belonged to a historiographical current that, from the late 1990s on, stressed the central role of the ecclesial institution in inscribing the social in space during the early Middle Ages, between the sixth and the eleventh century.Footnote 2
The first studies undertaken from this perspective, principally the work of archaeologists,Footnote 3 highlighted a long process of polarization of the rural habitat around places of worship, perceptible as early as the eighth century but particularly pronounced between the tenth and twelfth centuries.Footnote 4 Other research, both archaeological and historical, traced the evolution of burial sites; concentrated around churches from the Carolingian era on, then sacralized by the ecclesial institution between the tenth and twelfth centuries, these sites were gradually transformed into distinctly Christian cemeteries.Footnote 5 Henceforward the living and the dead were brought together at the heart of society and the human habitat: church and cemetery formed a focal point not only for towns and villages, but also for community and family practices linked to social and religious life. At the same time, studies of the parish were calling into question the idea of early territorial formation. Parishes long remained ritual communities centered around places and usages, until territorialization began to take place in the Carolingian era, increasing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and only completed, for the most part, in the thirteenth century.Footnote 6 These processes are what Michel Lauwers has proposed to group together under the concept of inecclesiamento, a term modeled on that of incastellamento, defined by Pierre Toubert.Footnote 7
In conjunction with these perspectives, other studies have emphasized the part played by Benedictine monasticism in the invention of singular, innovative spatial practices. In Cluny, the acquisition of privileges—exemptions or immunities—by monks preoccupied with dissociating their community from its traditional political environment, and the material delimitation by a reforming papacy of a “sacred ban” around the abbey at the end of the eleventh century, both contributed to the production of a “space apart from space” destined to establish the heart of the monastic seigneury as the antechamber to paradise.Footnote 8 In Tours, the differentiated socioreligious ethics of the monks of Saint-Julien and the canons of Saint-Martin determined the forms of urban development: the canons favored residential densification and sought to ensure regular flows between clerical space and lay space, while the hostility of the monastic precinct to excessively indistinct relations with the laity resulted in the formation of an interlying non-urbanized zone between the burgh of Saint-Martin in the west and the episcopal city in the east.Footnote 9 In the wake of these innovative studies, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500,Footnote 10 initially seems to represent the chronological and thematic continuation of the enquiry undertaken in La maison Dieu. But this new book also explores different avenues of investigation in its quest for the political origins of modernity.
In Search of an Alternative Genesis of Modernity
Transcending the horizon of 1200 is doubly significant for Iogna-Prat. After this date, the Church appears less and less as the “social Whole,” while the emergence of a more or less autonomous civic sphere must be considered in relation to both the assertion of the modern state and the process of secularization, whatever sense historians, sociologists, or political scientists accord to these vast concepts. Indeed, another figure, that of the town, staked its claim as the major incarnation of the community—the crucial question of whether this followed or coexisted with the Church’s own claim is the subject of the volume’s epilogue. All this took place in a period when Europe was experiencing urban growth unprecedented since Classical antiquity and witnessing the political assertion of the city via the crucible of the commune, though both phenomena were concentrated in a few favored regions (northern and central Italy, Flanders, northern France). As in La maison Dieu, in Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes, the study of a metonymic formula grounded in the relationship to space forms the guiding thread of the argument, though here it is less a matter of a single place than of a much vaster spatial ensemble. Iogna-Prat no longer focuses on the church-as-building but on the town as a metonymy of the “city of man,” that is, of society in its totality. The city as architecture and urbanism as discourse were the keystones of the new representations of “society as Whole” that flourished between 1200 and 1700.
This overall reflection is underpinned by three interrogations. The first concerns the reorganization of the institutional order, and what at first sight appears to be the retreat of the ecclesial sphere, that is, the substitution and replacement of the conceptual pair church/Church with that of town/city.Footnote * The second, derived from the first, considers the vicissitudes of the Church and the ecclesial dimension in this new context. The third, whose scope is even broader, addresses the topic of “modernity” and the foundations of modern political society. This wide-ranging analysis is driven by a dual ambition: first, to reestablish the continuity between antiquity and modernity by fully recognizing the place of the Middle Ages in the series of political models (against the dominant schemas of contemporary political philosophy, which often elide the medieval period by moving directly from Saint Augustine to Machiavelli or even Hobbes); and second, to reestablish the ecclesial institution’s role as a matrix for the genesis of modernity.
Making the City
Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes follows the logical structure of an essay, closely interlacing a dialogue with the social sciences, in particular sociology and political philosophy, with the study of a large corpus principally consisting of theoretical or normative discourses, both textual and iconographical, drawn from sources ranging from Italy to Spain, and from France to the New World. Though sometimes polemic, the author is always careful to avoid ambiguity and begins the volume with valuable historical and terminological clarifications concerning the main concepts used: the city—understood here as a social community and not as civitas—the Church, the state, and secularization. The most indispensable of these explanations concerns the Church as an institution which, as we are reminded at the outset, embraced its place in earthly affairs, and showed a readiness to invest in their transformation as early as the second and third centuries. Thereafter, and throughout the long Middle Ages that only came to an end with the Enlightenment, the ecclesial sphere concerned not only the ecclesiastical institution and its members (later referred to as the clergy), nor simply what since the eighteenth century have been characterized as religious beliefs and practices (as distinct from other social, economic, or political practices), but also and undeniably society and social practices in their totality. It therefore makes little sense to consider religious history as a particular field of study as far as the medieval and early modern periods are concerned; Iogna-Prat’s book is indisputably an essay in political history in the full sense of the term.
Building on this firm foundation, the discussion is organized into two parts. The first examines the end of the Church as “social Whole” and “the development of the town as the universal of the edifice, that is, as the built framework constitutive of places and space [defined as] public” (23). From the 1250s on, political Aristotelianism played a decisive role in this process. Grounding the political field in a framework that was philosophical and metaphysical rather than juridical (whether Roman law or canon law), it made it possible to envision “a legitimate society that was not a Church.”Footnote 11 Thereafter, Church and society were no longer indistinguishable (152–58). From the early fourteenth century, the metonymic relation between Church-as-institution and church-as-building was itself called into question by William of OckhamFootnote 12 and the rise of a current of thought encouraging the dematerialization (or spiritualization) of the Church-as-community, which continued with the Protestant Reformation (158–63). More broadly, the uncoupling of the theological from the political, reinforced by nominalism, facilitated not only the emergence of political thought that was independent from the ecclesial domain, but also the “demotion of the Church to the common regime of political models” (172), while the clergy was reduced to the status of one corporation or social group among many.
The second part of the discussion highlights the appearance, between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, of an authentic form of urbanism entrusting the function of “making the city” to the town. Even though Iogna-Prat recognizes that “urbanism” in the strict sense only appeared in the 1860s, along with the term itself and the profession, he argues that the concept is legitimate in this context and convincingly demonstrates its usefulness through the study of the “Italian urban laboratory” (292). Here, this expression needs to be understood in three ways. It refers, of course, to the institutional experiment of the commune and its various ramifications in the domains of civic ethics, political communication (through rhetoric or emblems), writing practices, and practices related to civic religion, all of which are specifically analyzed here and have also been widely explored in the recent historiography. The expression also refers to the emergence of a secularized public space which became the privileged stage for performances of power. Lastly, it refers to the appearance, in the earliest treatises on town forms, of the first truly urbanistic discourse; it is undoubtedly on this point that the argument is most innovative, underscoring the invisible yet extremely close connections between urbanism, political action, and social classifications inspired by Aristotelianism. Ultimately, Iogna-Prat argues that historians should “push back” as far as the 1200s the emergence of the principal characteristics of classical modernity as defined by Michel Foucault: the link between architecture and power, the elaboration of a science of administration grounded in writing practices, and overall control of social taxonomies (180).Footnote 13
The late-medieval res publica was appropriated by the secular political community (commune, principality, kingdom) to the detriment of the Church through a variety of institutional forms—including the city, presented by Iogna-Prat as the privileged crucible of modernity (281). Indeed, he is convinced that the primacy of the city in political thought is such that “a structural element of the city and the communal model remains present in the state” (295, 356–57), as in, for instance, Dante’s discourse on the necessary nesting of domestic communities (families or “houses”) within the communal city, and of communal cities themselves within the state or kingdom.Footnote 14 This is why the study of the Italian “laboratory” is complemented with an analysis of the role played by Paris in the kingdom of France during the late Middle Ages (330–37). While the demonstration is effective, however, the commune is always presented as a sort of miniature state, whereas in reality it assumed a variety of forms, some of which favored much more horizontal practices of government than those of monarchical states, including the drafting of statutes, the adoption of collegial structures and electoral or deliberative procedures, or the integration of the arti and corporations of artisans into municipal bodies. From this perspective, it is difficult to adhere to the thesis of a necessary filiation between the city and the modern state, or to that of the enduring and underlying presence of the communal model in the state. One could even argue, conversely, for the specificity of the monarchical or princely state, underlining the feudal matrix clearly observable in its forms of decision-making, in the ideology of royal authority, in the slowly emerging distinction between seigneury and regnum, and in the association of the aristocracy with the government and the resources of the monarchy. At the same time, one could point to the immaturity or incomplete “stateness” of numerous communal experiments, before the age of the seigneuries saw them subjected, willingly or not, to the model of the feudal, territorial state from the early fourteenth century on.
The Vicissitudes of the Church
Be that as it may, the strength of Iogna-Prat’s argument lies in the fact that the two evolutions he highlights—the waning of ecclesial authority and the promotion of the urban model—are not presented in stark opposition, but as deeply intertwined in a truly dialectical dynamic. Ultimately, the Church is seen as the essential matrix of forms of human government, even in a chronological sequence (the years 1200–1700) and a social, political world (the town) from which a whole historical and philosophical tradition, ever quick to detect signs of secularization, would prefer to exclude it. According to Iogna-Prat, the principal effects of this matrix lay in “transfers of sacrality” from the Church to the state or the city—here, the one is assimilated to the other—which are apparent right down to the material and cultural levels. This feeds into an already well-developed historiographical vein, continuing in particular Ernst Kantorowicz’s work on regal “pontificalism” (81), though Kantorowicz himself was concerned exclusively with the state.Footnote 15 Iogna-Prat thus offers an analysis of a whole series of transfers that were of unequal importance but equal efficacy. Some were of a symbolic order: the model of the church-as-monument weighed heavily on the form of the “communal palace” or town hall until the eve of the Renaissance, when a new architectural and decorative grammar inspired by antiquity made its appearance; elsewhere, beginning with the reign of Charles V in France, the ancient figure of the sovereign as builder in his role as head of the Church evolved into that of the king as builder by virtue of his wisdom. Other transfers were clearly of a political order: the model of the pontifical Curia had a determining influence on lay courts everywhere; where once the town was the favored stage for popes and bishops it now became a stage for liturgies of power and the spectacular display of the sovereign, from equestrian statues to royal squares. Lastly, others still were of an intellectual order: a conceptualization of the town as social edifice and architecture of society was fostered by the Scholastic appropriation of political Aristotelianism and its humanist legacy, particularly in reflections on the concept of the “republic” that transcended confessional differences. Here the argument is based on a comparison of works by the Catholic writer Pierre Grégoire (1540–1597), the Calvinist Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), and the Lutheran Johann Angelius Werdenhagen (1581–1652), all of which provide “examples of the incorporation of the Church into societal schemas whose architecture was determined by civil taxonomies” (279), at times dominated by the prince, at others by the town.Footnote 16
Besides these transfers, what became of the ecclesial institution itself beyond the 1200s? From the late Middle Ages, it underwent increasing internal fragmentation, comparable to the compartmentalization of the space inside church buildings, as demonstrated in Iogna-Prat’s brilliant analysis of Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments altarpiece, dating from around 1440–1444 (17–21). At the same time, the clergy found themselves dispossessed, relatively speaking, of their ecclesial prerogatives in relation to sovereigns: they were no longer seen as the sole organizers of ritual, and churches came to represent merely one of many ritual poles within urban space (365). Thus the ecclesial sphere increasingly seems to have been subsumed in the political, a phenomenon that is reflected in the banalization of church buildings amid the city’s agglomeration of edifices and public places (town halls, market halls, schools, squares).
Periodization
In Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes Iogna-Prat contradicts the two dominant periodizations of the transition to modernity prevalent in French research. He does not sidestep the question of the rise of the state between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, and therefore discounts the thesis of the long Middle Ages or the long feudal era, notably based on the social importance of the ecclesial dominium up to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 17 Moreover, in opposition to the grand narrative of modern political philosophy,Footnote 18 he argues for the singularity of an ideological sequence based on political Aristotelianism—a sequence that, originating in the mid-thirteenth century and extending to about 1650, closely articulated material architecture (in the urbanistic context) with social (that is, classificatory) architecture. For Iogna-Prat, this new regime of Christendom was distinct from its predecessor, which associated the Carolingian idea of hierarchy with the conception of the societas christiana advanced by the Gregorian reform; it extended beyond the fracture of the Reformation and the process of confessionalization, since Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans all remained more or less equal heirs to its legacy. However, it would have been useful to have examined more closely the geopolitical complexity of the earliest modern period (1200–1650) compared to the preceding ecclesial model (800–1200), which in many respects appears to have been more unified and universal.Footnote 19 There are real differences between the Italian urban “laboratory,” which was profoundly secularized at an early date, the great sacred kingdoms of Western Europe (France, England, Spain), the German territorial principalities, and the first “republican” experiments (the Swiss Confederacy, the United Provinces, the Cromwellian Protectorate in Great Britain). These differences were particularly heightened by the diversity of the ecclesiological configurations introduced by the Reformation, which powerfully influenced the survival, rejection, or modification of the former (medieval) ecclesial model.Footnote 20
The Substitution or Coexistence of Models?
The subtle epilogue with which the book concludes seeks to reintroduce the Church-as-institution into modernity, not just as a practical source of reusable forms or an ideological matrix of secular political configurations (towns, principalities, kingdoms), but also because it continued to exist and seems to have conserved its vitality despite competition from these entities (439–61). According to Iogna-Prat, it is our modern gaze that overselects the features of modernity peculiar to secular configurations, favoring them over continuity with the previous ecclesial model. We would therefore do better to observe the coexistence of both models over the long term rather than assuming the elimination of the earlier ecclesial model by the modern urban one. This thesis leads the author to propose a typology of relational “configurations”: one, described as “stable” or “traditional,” which continued to assign the management of social affairs mainly to the ecclesial sphere; another, qualified as “modern,” which entrusted this responsibility to the new civic model, in which the Church was merely an “incorporated element”; and a third, based on interaction between both models and combining “the superiority of the person as spiritual being with the superiority of the community as a natural and human value” (449–54). Moreover, he suggests that the end of the “totalitarian” domination of the Church stimulated its internal renewal, which was indispensable to the preservation of a certain sacral attractiveness, together with the more global “acculturative capacities” of Christianity, beyond the advent of modernity.
The strength of such an interpretation undoubtedly lies in the fact that it transcends the binary, often caricatural, opposition between Church and state, between the decline in ecclesial or sacral authority and the progressive emergence of a secularized or profane modernity, in favor of a “dialectical relationship … between two ‘institutional abstractions’ nourished by common references in a regime of Christendom” (459). While this perspective is attractive, one may nevertheless have reservations as to its social and institutional efficacy. In Iogna-Prat’s account, the various configurations mentioned above are essentially exemplified by theoretical or normative discourses. However, the parallel existence of different discourses within a single society does not mean this society is itself plural. The diversity of political-ecclesial discourses that characterized early fifteenth-century Europe was in no way accompanied by sociopolitical pluralism—conciliarism, Wyclifism, and the various forms of Hussitism neither stifled the advocates of traditional pontifical theocracy, nor prevented the emergence of Gallicanism (in France) and other organic, “national” conceptions of the Church (in England, Castile, and certain Italian seigneuries). The same holds for late sixteenth-century France and the early seventeenth-century Low Countries or England, even though they were influenced by very diverse currents of thought and social movements. In each instance, a “relational configuration” carried the day, in the context of processes that were less irenic than those suggested by the dialectic hypothesis favored in the book. Certain discourses, in their original contexts, appear to be more in harmony than others with the evolution of political and ecclesial constructions (themselves varied in nature). For such discrepancies to be fully appreciated, the three ideological configurations sketched out by Iogna-Prat would need to be backed up by close examination of specific social and institutional contexts, themselves increasingly diverse in the post-Reformation world despite the persistence of certain transconfessional intellectual filiations. However, this would represent a huge task that was not part of Iogna-Prat’s project, and which could only be undertaken at the level of a collective, international research program.
The elements of the “modern” model nevertheless seem to have undermined the previous ecclesial model more profoundly than the author suggests, and not just in a few specific geopolitical contexts. The Reformation marked the end of the universality of the Church, which lost forever its predominant position as the “social Whole,” even in the restored Catholicity of the Counter-Reformation. The trend was now toward the territorialization of the different Churches, the fragmentation of the “city of man,” and anxiety in the face of the new non-Christian perspectives just beginning to come into view. The increasing hierarchization of the practical forms of domination powerfully asserted itself to the advantage of the secular powers. It does not appear unfounded therefore to continue to speak of “municipalization” or “secularization,” insofar as these terms refer, without prejudging the extent of their influence on “ecclesial” discourse itself, to the authority or institution that controlled, directed, and governed the polity. In particular, this control, domination, or government tells us something about the ecclesial sphere, about what the Ecclesia had become in the age of modernity: an institution fragmented by the political order and obliged to adjust to a situation in which the clergy found themselves increasingly stripped of their former social power.
Government and Space: The Logic of Polarization and the Logic of Territorialization
Recent research accords the Church a decisive role in the social and political construction of the West, far greater than was generally thought by French historians—unlike their Italian, German, or American counterparts—until well into the 1990s.Footnote 21 This role principally lay in the ecclesial institution’s function as a matrix for government and governmental practices. Iogna-Prat’s book stresses the ideological power of the Church, and more particularly its ability to formulate linguistic expressions capable of providing conceptual metaphors and effective symbols with which to reflect on government, using terms that were at once abstract and incarnated, mystical and material. Other studies highlight certain practices, or what could be called “the exercise of government,”Footnote 22 whether through uses of the written word, the invention of hereditary public offices, jurisdictional or fiscal innovations, or sociospatial practices. In light of this work, it is no longer possible to conceptualize the history of the state—of the great monarchies or feudal principalities, of the papal theocracy or the Italian city-states—without referring to the legacies and experiments of the only true institution known to Latin Europe before the thirteenth century: the Church. Such an observation necessarily feeds into another, of a more epistemological nature: to continue to restrict the study of the ecclesial institution to the specific domain of religious history (or, failing that, of cultural history)—as French historiography, whether in the Jacobin, Marxist, or Catholic tradition, is still wont to do—is hardly appropriate today and only serves to perpetuate a compartmentalization that is detrimental to a proper understanding of medieval realities.
As regards the relation to space and sociospatial practices, Iogna-Prat’s thinking diverges somewhat from the research presented in my book, L’évêque et le territoire.Footnote 23 In both La maison Dieu and Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes, he consistently highlights the transformation of relations to place. However, from the church-as-building of the early Middle Ages (and its extension through the presence of a cemetery) to the late medieval and early modern town, the spatial logic is considered to have remained the same: a polarization of social relations and the political imaginary around a “specific place,” initially the edifice where people worshiped, and then the city as a whole, which continued to be considered primarily as a group of places. Over the long term, the Church is seen as the first institution to anchor social relations by reference to a place (in this case, a place defined as holy and sacredFootnote 24 ), and to provide a sociospatial model of polarization and the networked social and political organization that goes with it—a model that can easily be transposed to other, more secular medieval realities, such as the castle and the castellan seigneury of the feudal era. In L’évêque et le territoire, however, I undertook to demonstrate that in reality the Church’s relationship to space evolved profoundly over the Middle Ages, and even underwent a radical modification, shifting schematically from the logic of polarization, dominant until the eleventh century, to a logic of territorialization which reached its peak in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though presented as reactivating a tradition dating from late antiquity, this was nonetheless profoundly new and closely linked to the veritable refoundation of the ecclesial institution effected by the Gregorian reform. This logic of territorialization organized social assignations above all by reference to expanses of land (the parish and the diocese, henceforward considered as territories), and it conceptualized practices of government in terms of mastery over these expanses and control of their boundaries, rather than the management of networks. Within this framework, the Church remained the model institution or matrix for social and political processes that were rapidly appropriated by the proto-states of the later Middle Ages. It provided them not only with a tried and tested set of sociospatial practices, but also, via the logic of territorialization and its jurisdictional and fiscal implications, with a means of exercising and conceptualizing a new kind of domination—one that was no longer networked or feudal in form, but sovereign in nature. It is to be hoped that regardless of their differences these two theses, when articulated with research on the spatial conceptions and practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century states, will inspire new interest in the relations between Church and state, or between government and space, inscribed in the longue durée of Western history.
