Medieval West and modernity : a look back at the historiography of the modern state

In the long history of the West, the Middle Ages have traditionally been considered the other of modernity, the two notions having largely defined each other during the ^18th and ^19th centuries. This opposition has been largely challenged by historiography, which for several decades has been striving to identify the precursors of modernity at the end of the Middle Ages. Jean-Philippe Genet's work on the notion of "State" since the early 1980s is particularly emblematic of this reformulation of the problem, which consists in identifying the ^13th-17th century as the period of the "genesis of the modern State". It is the results of this research that we would like to discuss in the course of this lecture, questioning both the interpretation they commit to of the societies of the medieval West, and the methodological implicit in bringing into play the notion of "modernity". The aim is to offer a critical assessment not only of a major historiographical project of recent years, but also of the underlying theoretical articulation in terms of the social sciences.