- Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe by Wayne P. Te Brake
This comparative history of the major religious conflicts across Europe in the early modern period offers a useful and thought-provoking overview of how "religious wars began, but also how they ended, and in some cases, kept on beginning and ending" (4). From the Kappel and Schmalkaldic Wars in the early sixteenth century, to the British Civil Wars, via the French Wars of Religion, the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War, this is an ambitious project, but one that is handled deftly and clearly. Te Brake's study chimes with recent scholarship exploring the peacemaking side of these conflicts, whilst offering a fresh approach by trying to answer bigger questions than those sometimes addressed in more regional or nationally-focused historiography. The author sets out to answer three broad questions of the range of conflicts studied: "(1) How did religious wars start, and why did they look the way they did? (2) How did the various clusters of religious wars end, and what did their peace settlements look like? And (3) What did religious peace actually look like?" (351). The book manages to maintain a balance between the clarity of these larger questions, and the highly complex specific detail of experience on the ground. This is partly achieved through a social-science approach, and the repeated application of some clear categories and types. This use of models and prototypes might be unfamiliar to many undergraduate students of history, but the approach is clearly explained and is not applied in on overly-rigid way. The author also includes a section in his introduction on how the book might be used.
Within the broader typology (privilege/parity/repression/integration), details matter. Different territories chose different approaches—the French model between the religious wars and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, was that of a biconfessional state, while the structure that emerged in Low Countries was based on exclusivity, albeit in a context that allowed for the survival of other religious minorities. A number of different factors, or their absence at certain points, made peace possible, from the top-down attempt at repression that still left room for underground congregations, to the acceptance in the Low Countries of Catholic and Mennonite worship in buildings that lacked ecclesiastical facades, but could host significant minority congregations.
Te Brake's analysis emphasizes how earlier attempts at religious peace in the sixteenth century, which were often assumed to be unsuccessful—including those laid out by royal edicts at the height of the French wars of [End Page 103] religion, for example—in fact set the ground for later developments, when apparently more durable forms of peace seemed possible. The discussion of the peace treaties that ended the Thirty Years War is particularly instructive here. Te Brake reminds us that whilst the Peace of Westphalia is usually regarded as a landmark in the emergence of modern peacemaking between sovereign states, it was in many ways the product of at least a hundred years of religious war and religious peace. The Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück are rightly viewed as "extensions or elaborations of earlier templates for religious peace" (247).
Te Brake's perspective is a refreshing one, offering a relatively optimistic analysis. Whilst attempts to make and live in peace were frequently messy, complicated, and contingent on local and national variations, Te Brake emphasizes that peace, defined here as "the absence of coordinated destruction and the sustained experience of religious coexistence" (143) in its many different guises did emerge, and in the right conditions and with the right level of commitment, could endure. While offering a large-scale comparative analysis, he nevertheless emphasizes the importance of the local and parochial. Larger-scale negotiations or proclamations often reflected the reality of actions taken on the ground, from the schuilkerke of the Netherlands, which allowed for Catholic practice hidden behind a...