Anna Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023, 235 pp., 37 Ill.

Anna Gryzymała-Busse’s thesis is that the foundations of the modern European state lie in the experience and practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. This assertion contradicts the basic assumption of most contemporary political theory which stipulates that the European state’s origins were secular and early modern. The author traces the beginnings of the European state to what she claims was the victory of the papacy over the German emperors in the so-called Investiture Contest of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The Church’s purported release from both royal and imperial control enabled it, and especially the papacy, to transform the European legal order and to invent new concepts that made political representation and rule by consent possible. While the immediate impact of ecclesiastical liberty led to the fragmentation of political power in Europe, eventually monarchs learned to adopt many of the tools of ecclesiastical governance and to employ them for their own purposes. Monarchs thereby steadily solidified their power within their territories and were eventually able to extend their authority even over the Church itself in their domains. Busse, thus, posits that through “a process of rivalry and emulation” (4–5) between the medieval Church and Europe’s secular rulers the cornerstones of the modern European state were laid.