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Peter G. Wallace, Wayne P. Te Brake. Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1727–1728, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy332
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Wayne P. Te Brake’s Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe is an ambitious book that examines six sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious wars, the peace settlements that ended them, and the patterns of religious coexistence that ensued. Te Brake frames his comparative analyses with social scientific models, in part inspired by the writings of Charles Tilly. Nevertheless, the strength of the book comes from the detailed historical accounts of the processes that generated religious conflicts, the diverse efforts to resolve those conflicts, and the struggles to secure and sustain religious peace in religiously pluralistic states. Te Brake has consulted numerous monographic studies in Dutch, German, French, and English, which enables him to provide detailed examples to demonstrate the diversity of peaceful religious coexistence.
Citing Tilly, Te Brake defines wars as acts of “coordinated destruction” (6). What makes the wars that he analyzes religious is that the combatants identified their enemies based on their religious beliefs and practices and that the parties mobilized support against their enemies through political networks defined by religious identity. Although he presents common sets of mechanisms that generated religious identities, produced religious contention and warfare, and created frameworks for religious peace, they operated in very different combinations in the six religious wars and their aftermaths. For Te Brake, durable religious coexistence is the signature mark of religious peace. To plot out his case studies of religious coexistence, he creates a typology that he then graphs along two axes: one measuring the degree of religious diversity recognized in public life, and the other the degree of multireligious inclusion or exclusion within the state or community. For example, parity regimes, most commonly found in the Swiss Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire, inclusively recognized multiple religious identities, while in an exclusionary context, one faith might enjoy political and public privileges, such as the emerging Anglican Church in England following the Act of Toleration in 1689, where most dissenting communities of faith were recognized but excluded from political participation. Te Brake argues that in cases where inclusion of other religious groups received little public recognition, religious integration could take place, as happened at La Rochelle in France, whose Reformed civic officials quietly accepted the return of Catholic worship to a civic church as mandated by the Edict of Nantes. Finally, there were many cases where religious pluralism survived in secret despite exclusive official campaigns of religious suppression, perhaps most dramatically in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Ireland. By the end of the book, Te Brake has placed nearly fifty case studies on his graph.
