Library
The largest special library on religion in the Nordic countries
The Donner Library opened as long ago as 1957 and is today the largest specialist library on religion in the Nordic countries. The library’s collection is stored in Åbo Akademi Library’s remote storage facility, Rix, and the collection is accessible via the Alma-Finna database. Ordered books can be picked up from ÅAB’s premises in Arken (Tehtaankatu 2), open Monday–Friday from 10:00 to 18:00. Our primary customers are students and researchers of religion, but our library is also open to the general public.
Our collection comprises approximately 90 000 volumes pertaining to research on religion in a broad perspective. The central journals within the field are available in printed form in the library and we can help you to find your way among the e-publications as well.
Book of the month
Inventing the Church is an impressive and ambitious book. Its central argument is that the official narrative of the Catholic Church does not correspond to the messy reality of late medieval archives. To maintain an image of the unerring Church and to legitimise papal monarchy, ecclesiastical history has suppressed some memories while inventing traditions where they do not exist. Papal infallibility serves as an excellent example: as defined in the nineteenth century, it was legitimised with medieval arguments, yet the medieval idea was almost the opposite of the modern one, limiting rather than expanding the pope’s powers.
The book is historiographical, but also more than that. Inventing the Church is history of knowledge, drawing from Foucauldian tradition. The book is divided into seven thematic chapters — conciliarism, constitutionalism, collegialism, reform, anti-romanism, modernism, and infallibilism — that cumulatively build the main argument. The first chapter on conciliarism is the key to all others and should be read first, even by those interested only in a particular theme. The chapters form a coherent whole, and Sère’s remarkable achievement is to present in clear academic prose the entangled and complex history of ideas defending and contesting papal centralism.
The book belongs on the reading lists of study programmes for medieval history and church history, and the book fascinates also expert readers. Inventing the Church is also recommended to anyone interested in modernity’s ambivalent relationship with tradition and the premodern.
Bénédicte Sère, Inventing the Church: The Pull of the Past in Ecclesial Politics, transl. Caroline Wazer has been published by Columbia University Press (2025). It is available at the Donner Institute library.
Reima Välimäki, Docent, University of Turku