Language and Political Communication in France and England (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries)

Symbolic power depends on the efficiency with which the values of any dominant group are transmitted to society at large. In the eleventh century, the Latin medieval Church initiated a fundamental transformation of the Western European symbolic communication system. In France and England, the symbolic power of the Gregorian Church was derived from the superiority of the spiritual power of the papacy. Its armies of monks and priests had to convince the members of the ecclesia (the Christian society) of the necessity to embark on the road to individual salvation under the guidance of the Church, imposing a new division between clergy and laity. Yet, whereas clericus and litteratus had earlier been synonymous, many lay people were now able to read and write. If the Church had developed its own administration and bureaucracy, the Gregorian educational and cultural revolution offered the same opportunity to cities and states, which thus acquired the capacity to govern by the written word. As the laity entered into an age of literacy, the foundations were laid for the genesis of a new type of state.