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Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX
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About Before Church And State: A Study Of Social Order In
Product Description Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones explores in great detail the "problem of Church and State" in thirteenth-century France. It argues that while the spiritual and temporal powers existed, they were not parallel structures attempting to govern the same social space in a contest over sovereignty. Rather, the spiritual and the temporal powers were wrapped up together in a differentiated and sacramental world, and both included the other as aspects of their very identity. The realm was governed not by proto-absolutist institutions, but rather by networks of friends that cut across lay/clerical lines. Ultimately, the king's "fullness of power" and the papacy's "fullness of power" came together to govern a single social order. Before Church and State reconstructs this social order through a detailed examination of the documentary evidence, arguing that the order was fundamentally sacramental and that it was ultimately congruent with contemporary incarnational and trinitarian theologies and the notions of proper order that they supported. Because of this, modern categories of secular politics cannot be made to capture its essence but rather paint always a distorted portrait in modernity's image. In addition to a detailed reconstruction of the institutions of the kingdom, the work offers a reading of the political and ecclesiological thought of St. Thomas Aquinas that is consistent with that reconstruction. Thomas is here rescued from the liberal or Whig reading that has dominated in recent centuries and is returned to his thirteenth century context. Previously, scholars interested in challenging modern conceptions of the secular and the religious when treating the Middle Ages, have had to rely largely on historical scholarship written from within the conventional modern paradigm. In this text, Jones provides these scholars with a methodologically and technically rigorous alternative. If the book's thesis is widely accepted, it will call for the reconsideration of the accepted narrative of medieval Church and State. Review "Scholars over the last few decades have challenged the construction of the religious/secular duality from a theoretical point of view. That was the easy part. In this fascinating volume, Andrew Jones does the hard work of historical analysis to deconstruct the religious/secular divide. In a richly detailed study of Louis IX's reign, Jones shows how anachronistic our categories of religious/secular, religion/politics, and Church/ State are when we talk about the medieval period. Even more importantly, Jones suggests how those same categories operate ideologically when we talk about our own period, because they help to reinforce the notion that the way we divide up the world is natural, inevitable, and the summit of a process of evolution begun with our benighted medieval forebears. Jones' work is history at its best, helping us to understand not only the past, but ourselves, better." William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University "Even many of the best scholars still construe the Middle Ages in terms of tensions between Church and State that prefigure those of modernity and modern tensions between the religious and the secular. But in this exciting and scholarly new book Andrew Jones amply shows that in the 13th C the 'secular' time of this world and its concerns was still governed by processes of sacramental mediation. The West was originally more integrated than we like to think, in a way that may allow us to see that, if our legacy is significantly different from that of Islam, it may not be different in quite the way that we think. For this reason, amongst others, the book could not be more timely." John Milbank, University of Nottingham "For the past half-century, social historians have been recovering a lost world of pre-modern, organic social relations. This scholarship has challenged modern readers to re-think
