The Church, the City, and Modernity

Abstract

Dominique Iogna-Prat’s latest book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, follows on both intellectually and chronologically from La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200). It presents an essay on the emergence of the town as a symbolic and political figure of society (the “city of man”) between 1200 and 1700, and on the effects of this development on the Church, which had held this function before 1200. This feeds into an ambitious reflection on the origins of modernity, seeking to move beyond the impasse of political philosophy—too quick to ignore the medieval centuries and the Scholastic moment—and to relativize the effacement of the institutional Church from the Renaissance on. In so doing, it rejects the binary opposition between the Church and the state, proposes a new periodization of the “transition to modernity,” and underlines the importance of spatial issues (mainly in terms of representation). This last element inscribes the book in the current of French historiography that for more than a decade has sought to reintroduce the question of space at the heart of social and political history. Iogna-Prat’s stimulating demonstration nevertheless raises some questions, notably relating to the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the increasing power of states, and the process of “secularization.” Above all, it raises the issue of how a logic of the polarization of space was articulated with one of territorialization in the practices of government and the structuring of society—two logics that were promoted by the ecclesial institution even before states themselves.