Table Of ContentThe European Wars of Religion
Edited by Wolfgang Palaver, Universität Innsbruck, Austria; E W P ,
DITED BY OLFGANG ALAVER
Harriet Rudolph, Universität Regensburg, Germany; and
H R D R
Dietmar Regensburger, Universität Innsbruck, Austria oT ARRIET UDOLPH AND IETMAR EGENSBURGER
fh
In recent years religion has resurfaced amongst academics, in many ways Re
The European
replacing class as the key to understanding Europe’s historical e E
l
development. This has resulted in an explosion of studies revisiting issues iu
g
r
of religious change, confessional violence and holy war during the early
io
modern period. But the interpretation of the European wars of religion op Wars of Religion
n
still remains largely defined by national boundaries, tied to specific e
a
processes of state building as well as nation building. In order to more
n
thoroughly interrogate these concepts and assumptions, this volume
W An Interdisciplinary Reassessment of
focusses on terms repeatedly used and misused in public debates such
as ‘religious violence’ and ‘holy warfare’ within the context of military a
r Sources, Interpretations, and Myths
conflicts commonly labelled ‘religious wars’. The chapters not only focus s
on the role of religion, but also on the emerging state as a driver of the
escalation of violence in the so-called age of religious war.
By using different methodological and theoretical approaches historians,
A W
philosophers, and theologians engage in an interdisciplinary debate that N
O
D
contributes to a better understanding of the religio-political situation of L
D F
early modern Europe and the interpretation of violent conflicts G
IE A
interpreted as religious conflicts today. By adopting a multi-disciplinary T N
M G
approach, new and innovative perspectives are opened up that question A P
R
if in fact religion was a primary driving force behind these conflicts. A
R L
A
Cover image: The massacre of Huguenots at Cahors, 19 November 1561. Engraving by E V
G
E
Franz Hogenberg. © AKG-images. E R
N ,
S
B H
U A
R R
G R
E I
E
R
T
R
U
D
O
L
P
H
www.routledge.com
The european Wars of religion
Page Intentionally Left Blank
The european Wars of religion
an interdisciplinary reassessment
of sources, interpretations, and Myths
Edited by
Wolfgang palaver
University of Innsbruck, Austria
harrieT rudolph
University of Regensburg, Germany
dieTMar regensburger
University of Innsbruck, Austria
First publishe d 2016by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2016 Wolfgang palaver, harriet rudolph, dietmar regensburger and the
contributors
Wolfgang palaver, harriet rudolph and dietmar regensburger have asserted their right under
the Copyright, designs and patents act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
a catalogue record for this book is available from the british library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
The european wars of religion : an interdisciplinary reassessment of sources, interpretations, and
myths / edited by Wolfgang palaver, harriet rudolph & dietmar regensburger.
pages cm
includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978–1–4724–2711–3 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
1. War – religious aspects – Christianity. 2. violence – religious aspects – Christianity.
3. religion and politics – europe – history.
i. palaver, Wolfgang, 1958– ii. rudolph, harriet. iii. regensburger, dietmar.
bl65.W2e97 2016
201’.7273094–dc23 2015022651
isbn 9781472427113 (hbk)
Contents
introduction 1
Wolfgang Palaver, Harriet Rudolph, and Dietmar Regensburger
parT i: hisToriCal approaChes
1 religion and violence in the hussite Wars 19
Pavel Soukup
2 religion, War, and violence in the swiss Confederation 45
Thomas Lau
3 Were the french Wars of religion really Wars of religion? 61
Philip Benedict
4 religious Wars in the holy roman empire? from the
schmalkaldic War to the Thirty Years War 87
Harriet Rudolph
5 england’s Wars of religion: a reassessment 119
Charles W. A. Prior
6 Justifying force in early Modern doctrines on self-defence
and resistance 139
Luise Schorn-Schütte
parT ii: approaChes froM philosophY and TheologY
7 secularization of the holy: a reading of the ‘Wars of religion’ 165
William T. Cavanaugh
8 The Modern state or the Myth of ‘political violence’ 185
Paul Dumouchel
vi The European Wars of Religion
9 The Modern Military–humanitarian hybrid state: a response
to paul dumouchel 197
Bruce K. Ward
10 Confessional Wars and religious violence in Christianity
from a Theological viewpoint 205
Ralf Miggelbrink
11 religion and violence: The Case of Wars in the former
Yugoslavia 219
Janez Juhant
12 The debate about the european Wars of religion as a
Challenge to interdisciplinary Cooperation 247
Wolfgang Palaver
Index 259
introduction
Wolfgang palaver, harriet rudolph, and dietmar regensburger
Three major events in recent decades have brought the relationship between
violence and religion into the centre of academic and socio-political debates:
it began with ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary establishment of an islamic
republic in iran in 1979, increased with the outbreak of ethno-national conflicts
– often at least partly accompanied with religious differences – in parts of
the former soviet union and Yugoslavia after the end of the Cold War, and
culminated with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the united states. all these
events led to an increasing and on-going discussion about the relationship
between violence and religion that is nowadays even more intensified against
the backdrop of violent conflicts in asia and africa which, in public discourse,
are frequently linked to religious movements of various kinds.1
it was especially against the increasing challenges coming from jihadism
that many Western thinkers started to defend the modern separation between
politics and religion by referring to the so-called european religious Wars as a
very dangerous threat in the past that was only overcome by the establishment
of the secular nation state and its neutrality in regard to religion. in eric o.
hanson’s book Religion and Politics in the International System Today we find
a good example how a reference to the european religious wars is used to
distinguish between the West and the islamic world: ‘The West chose secularism
in response to religious war within the society. islam did not have a Thirty Years
War’.2 similarly, Monica duffy Toft, an american international relations scholar,
makes the point that ‘because islam had no Thirty Years War, the islamic world
did not inherit the West’s now instinctive rejection of the idea that violence in
the name of religion enhances one’s religious credibility […], and church and
1 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular
State (berkeley, 1993); david C. rapoport, ‘some general observations on religion and
violence’, in Terrorism and Political Violence 3 (1991): 118–39; Jeff haynes (ed.), Religion
and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (london, 2010); niels Kastfeld
(ed.), Religion and African Civil Wars (london, 2005).
2 eric o. hanson, Religion and Politics in the International System Today (Cambridge,
2006), p. 107.
2 The European Wars of Religion
state should be the same’.3 Much more prominent and internationally discussed
was Mark lilla’s book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
that also provided a secularist narrative referring back to the time of hobbes and
the european Wars of religion.4
it seems, however, much too simple to rely on this secularist narrative that
scapegoats religion as the ultimate root of violence and claims that only a world
in which all religious attitude are completely privatized might be able to prevent
further outbreaks of violence. as Mark Juergensmeyer, a leading expert on
religious terrorism, has pointed out the current danger of a global confrontation
between secular nationalism and religious politics will not be solved by solely
blaming religion for the escalation of conflict but by understanding what
religious people all over the world miss in secular nationalism and by the ‘revival
of tolerant forms of moderate religion’ that may help to overcome the current
crises.5 historical evidence has proved that religion can be one root of violence.
however, violent conflicts and – even more – wars are usually caused by a
multitude of diverse factors. it is certainly necessary to discuss the ambivalence
of the effects of religions on human societies but it is inadequate to identify
these solely with violence.6
These more general observations about the manifold relationship between
violence and religion apply also to the discussion about the european religious
Wars. again, it seems very short-sighted to emphasize only the religious roots of
these wars. in a much broader sense, these military conflicts can be understood
as the birth pangs of the emergence of the modern state with its own affinity to
violence showing traces of a ‘barbarism lurking within the very core of modernity’.7
3 Monica duffy Toft, ‘religion and political violence’, in Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo
Kitts, and Michael K. Jerryson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (new
York, 2013), pp. 332–44, here p. 340.
4 Mark lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (new York,
nY, 2008); cf. Wolfgang palaver, andreas oberprantacher, and dietmar regensburger (eds),
Politische Philosophie versus Politische Theologie? Die Frage der Gewalt im Spannungsfeld von
Politik und Religion, edition Weltordnung – religion – gewalt 7 (innsbruck, 2011).
5 Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State,
from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda, Comparative studies in religion and society 16
(berkeley, 2008), p. 266; cf. Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘religion in the global Jihadi War’, in
Kjell-Åke nordquist (ed.), Gods and Arms: On Religion and Armed Conflict (Cambridge,
2013), pp. 16–32.
6 r. scott appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation,
Carnegie Commission on preventing deadly Conflict (lanham, Md, 2000); Thomas
scheffler (ed.), Religion between Violence and Reconciliation, beiruter Texte und studien 76
(beirut, 2002).
7 samuel n. eisenstadt, ‘The reconstruction of religious arenas in the framework of
Multiple Modernities’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29/3 (2000): 591–611,
Introduction 3
it is also important to note that not secularization was the immediate result of these
wars but the attempt to establish religiously largely homogeneous territories – cuius
regio, eius religio – a confessionalization of the state that was deeply intensified
from the end of the sixteenth century onwards and that did not end in 1648.8
The secularist perspective on the wars of religion caused many modern thinkers
to disregard the potential of religion to act as promoter of stability and peace
and effectively ignoring the testimony of many religious people and movements
to that avail.9 such an anti-religious bias also fails to explain adequately the rise
of ideological fundamentalism, which seems to represent much more a modern
phenomenon than an offspring of traditional religions.10
The current debate on violence and religion has resulted in an enormous
amount of scholarly publication. Many collections of essays, special issues of
journals, and even large handbooks have recently been published that were
dedicated to this topic.11 however, it is striking that the european Wars of
here p. 611; cf. Jan philipp reemtsma, Vertrauen und Gewalt: Versuch über eine besondere
Konstellation der Moderne (hamburg, 2008).
8 for the research paradigm of confessionalization developed by the german
historians Wolfgang reinhardt and heinz schilling following studies by ernst Walter
Zeeden cf. Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Konfessionalisierung’, in friedrich Jaeger (ed.), Enzyklopädie
der Neuzeit, vol. 6 (darmstadt, 2007), pp. 1053–70; helga schnabel-schüle, ‘vierzig
Jahre Konfessionalisierungsforschung – eine standortbestimmung’, in rolf Kießling and
peer frieß (eds), Konfessionalisierung und Region, forum suevicum 3 (Konstanz, 1999),
pp. 23–40; Kaspar von greyerz et al. (eds), Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität –
binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, schriften
des vereins für reformationsgeschichte 201 (gütersloh, 2003).
9 heather dubois, ‘religion and peacebuilding: an ambivalent yet vital relationship’,
Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace 1/2 (2008): http://www.religionconflictpeace.
org/volume-1-issue-2-spring-2008/religion-and-peacebuilding (accessed 23 april 2014);
hélène Cristini, ‘a different Model for solving political Conflicts: a Comparative study
of religions’, Peace & Change 32/4 (2007): 574–89; also bernd oberdorfer and peter
Waldmann, Die Ambivalenz des Religiösen: Religionen als Friedensstifter und Gewalterzeuger
(freiburg i. br., 2008).
10 Cf. the discussion of the concept of confessional fundamentalism in heinz schilling
(ed.), Konfessioneller Fundamentalismus: Religion als politischer Faktor im europäischen
Mächtesystem um 1600, schriften des historischen Kollegs 70 (München, 2007).
11 andrew r. Murphy (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Malden,
Ma, 2011); Juergensmeyer/Kitts/Jerryson, Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence;
nordquist, Gods and Arms; david Martin, Does Christianity Cause War? (oxford, 1997);
peter partner, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (princeton, nJ, 1998);
J. harold ellens (ed.), The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, 4 vols. (Westport, CT, 2004); Mathias hildebrandt and Manfred brocker
(eds), Unfriedliche Religionen? Das politische Gewalt- und Konfliktpotenzial von Religionen
(Wiesbaden, 2005).
