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The starting point for many analyses of European state development is the historical fragmentation of territorial authority. The dominant bellicist explanation for state formation argues that this fragmentation was an unintended consequence of imperial collapse, and that warfare in the early modern era overcame fragmentation by winnowing out small polities and consolidating strong states. Using new data on papal conflict and religious institutions, I show instead that political fragmentation was the outcome of deliberate choices, that it is closely associated with papal conflict, and that political fragmentation persisted for longer than the bellicist explanations would predict. The medieval Catholic Church deliberately and effectively splintered political power in Europe by forming temporal alliances, funding proxy wars, launching crusades, and advancing ideology to ensure its autonomy and power. The roots of European state formation are thus more religious, older, and intentional than often assumed.

Awarded the Best Article Prize by the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association in June 2024.

Under what conditions do powerful ideological movements arise and transform politics? The Protestant Reformation changed the religious, social, and economic landscape of Europe. While the existing literature has focused on the mechanisms and institutions of its spread, this article argues that an important precondition for the spread of the Protestant Reformation was territorial fragmentation, and the political autonomy it offered local rulers. Local rulers could then protect the reform movement both from central authorities, and from local rivals. Where power was centralized, kings could more easily either adopt or defeat the new religion. Using a data set that includes measures of territorial fragmentation, I find that it is strongly associated with the rise and diffusion of the Protestant Reformation. Local political heterogeneity can thus protect and diffuse ideological innovations.

From the mid-eleventh century, the reformed papacy launched a campaign against clerical marriage that, within a hundred years or so, would largely succeed in establishing the priesthood as a celibate (if not always chaste) caste. According to the reforming monk Peter Damian, women who associated with priests formed a particular target of papal discipline: Peter reports that Pope Leo IX ruled in 1049 that such women should be made slaves of the Roman church. This paper revisits sources concerning the reported enslavement of clerics’ women, arguing that it was Peter (and not the pope) who promoted enslavement and, moreover, that Peter’s ideas were never broadly adopted.

Over the course of the 19th century, ballads proliferated in German-speaking Europe in a truly remarkable range of contexts. Audiences were of course likely encounter balladry in the volumes of Goethe and Schiller, in various anthologies or illustrated editions. But they were just as likely to come across objects billed as ballads in recitation evenings by popular actors, in song-settings by Schubert and Loewe, in piano pieces by Chopin, in the opera house and the concert hall, in mass-produced drawings, paintings and even chinaware. Ballads were poems one could use - schoolteachers used them to train their students' memory (or punish them), women composers used them to assert their place in the musical canon, actors used them to bolster their income, mothers used them to put their children to sleep. Ballads intersected with gender and class, promising to democratize art, while in fact helping make distinctions. In What the Ballad Knows: The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture and German Nationalism, Adrian Daub tells the story of this itinerant genre across media, periods, regions and social strata and shows that, even though it was often positioned as an authentic product of "German spirit," the ballad frequently unsettled and subverted the national project. The popular imagination rooted these poems in pre-modern oral culture, among bards and peasants in the everyday life of common folk. But in fact nineteenth-century ballads were in the end all about modernity – modern modes of association, of attention, of dissemination.

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