The Impact of the Church on English Politics

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There are still quite a few influences. Canon Law kind of seeps in, as one scholar put it. There's still an entirely Catholic legal system where basically penitence can go and get justice from the Catholic church courts. So there's still quite a bit of influence of the Catholic church on English politics. The king has always been given more power over the bishops.

When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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