The Invention of the Church: The Ecclesial Roots

of Politics from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Bénédicte Sère

(PUF, 288 pages, 2019)

In this ambitious study, medievalist Bénédicte Sère explains the discursive gap between the archival sources she reads and the official historiography of the Roman Church disseminated in academic and religious textbooks. To make sense of this discordance, she meticulously retraces the genealogy and centuries-long layering of narratives to reveal how the Church came to write and rewrite its past in response to the needs of the time. More specifically, she examines how theological historians of the past and present—in particular those who inspired and accompanied the Vatican Council II—have drawn on sources from the period of the Western Schism and the conciliar debates of the fifteenth century. Alternating between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, Bénédicte Sère unearths the ecclesial roots of Western political thought.

Drawing from a wealth of recent studies, Sère organizes her argument around the following seven isms: conciliarism, constitutionalism, collegialism, reformism, anti-romanism, modernism, and infallibilism. In examining many unpublished medieval sources, and by comparing them with canonical accounts, she sheds a new light on the ways in which these concepts were replayed and reused over time. We come to understand, for example, that contemporary episcopal collegiality has nothing to do with that of synodal and conciliar assemblies of the fifteenth century. Conversely, while papal infallibility was meant to consolidate pontifical power in the nineteenth century, in the fourteenth century its intent was the opposite: to limit the power of the pope by preventing him from invalidating the decisions of a previous pontiff. One recurring theme in Sère’s detailed analysis of narratives and counternarratives is the contrast between the fragility of the papal figure in primary sources and the assertion of its power in later accounts.

In The Invention of the Church, Sère brings her passionate erudition and sharp critical eye to unraveling the continuities and discontinuities between the religious and the political. Boldly questioning traditional religious history, Sère’s complex depiction of ecclesiastical debates draws us into a Middle Ages that inform the debates and passions of our time.

Bénédicte Sère is a professor in medieval history at the University of Paris Nanterre. Among her most recent monographs are Les débats d’opinion à l’heure du Grand Schisme. Ecclésiologie et politique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), Les 100 dates de l’histoire de l’Église (Que sais-je? PUF, 2018), and with Jörg Wettlaufer (ed.), Shame between Punishment and Penance: The Social Usages of Shame in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Micrologus, SISMEL, 2013).