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42 Historically Speaking · November/December 2007 History over the Water: Ages of Faith and Ages of Terror Derek Wilson In the autumn of 2006 a superb exhibition entided Holbein inEngland-was put on atTate Britain. As part of the celebration of the work of this great artist a revised edition of my own biography, Hans Holbein—Portrait of an Unknown Man was published . Recenti}', a belated review appeared in a fairly insignificant journal in which the author took me to task for perpetuating the Whig view of history and ignoring Eamon Duffy's revisionist treatment of the Reformation. This criticism, as far as I can discern, was based on the fact that I proposed the theory that, insofar as one can identify Holbein's religious allegiance , it seems to fall into the category of what we might call "humanistic Lutheranism" (one might almost say "Melancthonism"). Now, as it happens, I do dissent from Duffy, not so much in the splendid accumulation of evidence for the support of Catholic ritual and sentiment that he offers us in The Stripping of theAltars, but ratherin his self-declared motivation for his study: "to exorcize certain types of writing about the Reformation." To resurrect the 19th-centuryconfrontations between Catholic and Protestant apologists does not, it seems to me, advance our understanding of a Europe in a fearsome state of turmoil . A Europe not dissimilar to our own. Margaret Aston in England's Iconoclasts surely sets us off on a stronger scent: "just as modernvandalism and terrorism may be related to the cycles of international conflict , so Protestant image-breakingwas related to the fluctuations of contemporaryreligious struggles."We need to eschew academic pugilism aimed at asserting that traditional Catholicism was in decline or flourishing and keep our eyes fixed on the bigger issue: Whence arose the discordances in 16th-century society ? And, if historyis to say anythingto us at all, how should we detect the fissures in our own world order and try to prevent them widening? AsI write, the British media is wringingits hands over the latest example of gang violence in our cities. An eleven-year-old boy on his way home from football practice was stopped by a teenager on a bicycle who pulled out a handgun and shot him dead. This was one of several recentexamples of adolescentgun crime. Rival analysts tell us that society is becoming more violent and, contrariwise, that gun crime is actually decreasing. But, surely, the truth lies neither in the anecdotal evidence nor in the statistics. And if anyone canimpart anair of calm,intelligentappraisal, it should be historians. Militant Islam is spawning (or justifying) acts of appallinghomicideinmanyparts of the world. Western governments wage their "war on terror" with troops and tanks. There is no sign of the conflict abating. What has gone wrongwith theworld order? Do we hear any historians proposing that there have been parallel convulsions, studyofwhich might An untitled engraving depicting a procession to a cathedral, in Gabriel Dellon, Relation de !inquisition de Goa. (Paris, 1688). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. prove instructive? Almost exactly a century-and-a-half of "hot" and "cold" war, state-sponsored terrorism, and multitudinous acts of local barbarism separated Luther's posting of the 95 Theses and the Peace of Westphalia . The Reformation and the so-calledwars of religion were largely about competing ideologies and the lengths individuals and governments were prepared to go to in asserting their own belief systems and annihilating those of dieir rivals. How do we historians set about explaining this vast malfunction of Western society? Well, certainly not by taking sides and fightingthe old batdes anew through the pages of academic books and journals. However widely researched our offerings may be, the end results will be unhelpful if the motivation for them is skewed. Take for example the "age of faith" myth. No one would, I think, label late 20th-century Britain as an "age of faith" but historians in another 400 years might be imagined as pointing to die spate of cathedral building—Guildford, Coventry, Liverpool (two!)—and the adornment of numerous parish churches as proof positive of the liveliness of traditional Anglicanism. The trudi is that there were...

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