The Meaning and Usages of Medieval Territory

Abstract

Based on Florian Mazel’s book L’évêque et le territoire. L’invention médiévale de l’espace (ve–xiiie siècle), this article seeks to revisit the spatial turn that has marked medieval studies in France over the last thirty years. Historians of dominium in the feudal period draw on the phenomena of incastellamento or inecclesiamento to suggest a territorial anchoring of populations around the “poles” or “cells” of domination represented by the castle, the church, the cemetery, and the parish. Mazel, however, offers a reflection on another scale. He sees territory as a space for the expression of political sovereignty, with the Church and its establishment of a new form of spatiality—the diocese—preceding the state as an institution realized via a territorial construction. Through its focus on the diocese, this analysis concentrates on a scale which makes sense within a general hierarchical dynamic of ecclesial spatialization, from top to bottom, from local to universal. But it also and above all enables an interrogation of how the territorial practices of the medieval Church made possible the transition to space in the modern, homogeneous and isotropic, sense.