This is a comparative analysis of collective religious violence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Te Brake asks two complex questions: how did religious warfare begin in Europe, and how did it give way to relatively stable religious peace? His frame of comparison, which conditions his interpretation of religious violence, encompasses Switzerland, the Holy Roman Empire, France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles, including Ireland. The book achieves two objectives. The first is a detailed account of the various religious war and peace settlements that accompanied the fracturing of European Christianity into Catholic and Protestant strands. Second, Te Brake presents a framework for understanding, at a more conceptual level, the general characteristics of religious warfare and religious peacemaking during a particularly turbulent period of European religious history. Both narrative and analysis are in the service of Te Brake’s larger argument that “in order to envision a more peaceful world for ourselves … we need to develop a more realistic—that is, historically informed—understanding of what religious peace actually looks like” (xiv).

The first element of the book—a comparative history of religious warfare and its resolution—is admirably done. Te Brake divides the period into three segments (1529–55, 1562–1609, 1618–51) that correspond to the Swiss and German wars, the French and Dutch wars, and the Thirty Years’ War and the English-Irish-Scottish Civil Wars. An impressive body of research, in English, Dutch, German, and French, helps narrate the experience of religious conflict in each of these three phases. In addition to a comprehensive bibliography of secondary literature, Te Brake examines the major documents of religious peacemaking, and innovatively uses photographic evidence to make the case that religious peace emerged from a combination of on-the-ground realities and elite statecraft. Bringing the separate histories of religious warfare in Europe together cogently is itself an impressive achievement; this book will serve well for students and researchers seeking an overview of the topic or the details of particular religious wars taken separately.

Te Brake also argues that several core characteristics of religious warfare and peacemaking are common among each phase and place. Drawing on the language of sociology and political science, and particularly the ideas of Charles Tilly (to whom the book is dedicated), Te Brake posits a set of mechanisms and processes that conditioned the outbreak and resolution of religious warfare across the period. He lays this schema out in a detailed introduction: a set of mechanisms produced politically charged religious identities; another set produced religious contention and conflict; and still another set produced forms of religious coexistence. In various combinations and chronologies, these mechanisms ultimately resulted in the several patterns of religious peace that emerged following each phase of warfare. These patterns themselves fit into a matrix that accounts for the place of religion both in local identities and in the cultural politics of elites and rulers. Armed with this interpretative schema, Te Brake takes the reader successively through each of several wars, and subjects each to the mechanical and processual framework described in the introduction. Religious War and Religious Peace is in that sense a highly readable book: each chapter proceeds through a narrative of either warfare or peacemaking, and then describes the mechanics that produced a pattern of outcomes. There are no surprises here, which helps to bring together such a wide array of experiences into a cogent analysis.

However, for every rule there is an exception, and Te Brake often must account for different outcomes emerging from similar combinations of mechanisms. For example, the Henrician reforms in England did not produce large-scale civil war, and Te Brake’s framework struggles to explain why. Much variation seems to boil down to local and regional differences. Moreover, the analysis is strictly limited to intra-Christian warfare, which elides a great deal of the religious strife that preceded the book’s time frame (such as the wars of the Reconquista), took place afterward (such as the Ottoman invasions of the late seventeenth century), or occurred concurrently in the global context of European colonization. Definitions of religious and nonreligious violence are perhaps overly crystallized. But these issues do not obscure Te Brake’s admirable integration of several histories of religious violence into a coherent whole.