Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. By Anna Grzymała-Busse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. xxi + 235 pp. $29.95 paperback

Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. By Anna Grzymała-Busse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. xxi + 235 pp. $29.95 paperback. Where and when does one locate the origins of European statehood? The question is an old one with more answers than Europe has states. In this insightful book, Anna Grzymała-Busse argues that modern state formation owes its genesis to the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Medieval states, she asserts, developed their means of governance by emulating ecclesiastical institutions and also by competing with them: a rivalry that eventually and perhaps ironically placed the modern state in a position of dominance over the church. As she explains, “Many of the distinct features of European state development—the multitude of sovereign statelets, rule of law, autonomous universities, and national representative assemblies—thus have sacred foundations: the powerful medieval church” (179). By making this argument for the “sacred foundations” of modern states, Grzymała-Busse also seeks to push back against a school of thought which argues that early modern warfare drove processes of state-building and centralization.