Inventing the Church: The Pull of the Past in Ecclesial Politics, Bénédicte Sère, övers. Caroline Wazer, har givits ut av Columbia University Press, 2025.

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