Inspired by contemporary concerns, these two books revisit the old issue of Calvinism's contribution to modern politics with particular reference to issues of human rights and religious pluralism. Although emerging from different national contexts and driven by different concerns, both attempt to position the Reformed tradition on the side of the angels, even while recognising, as Bonney and Trim write in their introduction, that Calvinists were ‘both courageous resisters of persecution and zealous oppressors of others’ (p. 15). As might be expected from a single-authored volume, Witte's Reformation of rights is the more cohesive and ambitious book. Its author directs the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University Law School. As he makes clear in his concluding reflections, he wants religious rights and religious communities to play a greater role within contemporary international human rights debates. At the same time, he feels that Churches should pay more attention to considerations of human rights in their internal affairs. To encourage this, he provides an account of Calvinist political theory from Calvin himself to the era of the American Revolution dedicated to showing how ‘Calvin and his followers developed a distinctive theology and jurisprudence of human rights and gradually cast these rights teachings into enduring institutional and constitutional forms in early modern Europe and America’ (p. 2). In view of the ample recent scholarship, of which the author is fully aware, demonstrating that ‘both the Reformation and the Enlightenment inherited many more liberties than they invented’ (p. 23) and that none of the post-Reformation confessions had a monopoly on rights talk, this is no simple task. The strategy Witte adopts is to be highly selective. Rather than examining the full range of early modern Calvinist political theories, he devotes successive chapters to four figures who expressed with particular force and originality ideas associated with the great moments in the Whig narrative of the rise of representative government, from the Reformation itself (John Calvin) through Huguenot resistance theory after St Bartholomew (Theodore Beza) to the Dutch Revolt (Johannes Althusius) and the English Revolution (John Milton). A final chapter then looks at a wider range of texts and authors from eighteenth-century New England. The great strength of the book lies in the richness and clarity of its exposition of each author's political ideas. There are few better introductions to the political ideas of Beza or Althusius. Yet however valuable these chapters will prove to students of these authors, and whether one judges Witte's attempt to create a positive human rights pedigree for early modern Calvinism laudable or self-deceiving, a strict historian's assessment of this book cannot but note that its presentation of each author's historical context embraces their own vision of the persecution or tyranny they endured more uncritically than specialists on the periods in question would currently judge warranted, while the introductory or concluding portions of many chapters make claims that go beyond what the exegesis of the authors' ideas supports. Pace Witte, Calvin cannot accurately be said to have encouraged respect for the democratic process within the Church; his church polity was avowedly aristocratic and rejected the direct election of pastors or elders once the first elders had been chosen. Beza never came to believe that ‘peaceable heretics should be tolerated … and religious pluralism embraced’ (p. 141), only that the true religion deserved free rights of exercise. At moments such as these, The reformation of rights, for all its ample merits, reveals itself to be not merely selective, but tendentious as well.

Persecution and pluralism is a volume of conference papers of very uneven quality, but it has a fair degree of coherence thanks largely to the long and forceful introduction signed by the two editors and to the implicit dialogue among the better essays about certain of the largest interpretive questions related to their topic. Bonney, after a long and distinguished career as a historian of early modern French finance and administration, is now a non-stipendiary priest of the Church of England and chairman of the Europe-Islamic World Organisation, dedicated to building trust and friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims. Observing that ‘there are striking superficial similarities between late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Calvinists, and late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Muslims’, he and Trim offer this volume in the conviction that a fuller exploration of the Calvinist experience of religious diversity can help inform discussions of how to accommodate religious minorities in the multicultural Britain of today’. One important theme of the book is that Michael Foot and other secular politicians of the left are mistaken in thinking that Europe escaped from religious warfare thanks to ‘the sceptics, the doubters, the mockers even’ who ‘dared to deny the absolute authority of their respective gods’ (p. 149). As John Coffey shows, in seventeenth-century England sceptics often opposed the toleration of religious minorities on the grounds that this weakened the unity of the commonwealth, while the prophets of freedom of worship were zealots from the Independent or Baptist fringes of English Calvinism. As the editors argue in their introduction, both the causes and the cure of intolerance thus lie within religious traditions. Bonney also deploys an interesting model of four levels of pluralism to trace the advance and retreat of religious toleration in Hungary. The utility and pertinence of his model is implicitly called into question by perhaps the richest and most important essay of all in this collection, Judith Pollmann's contribution on religious choice and toleration in the Dutch Republic, which shows that ‘Dutch believers were not either tolerant or intolerant, they tended to be both; fiercely committed to confessional difference and often deeply opposed to tolerant policies, much of this aggression was suspended in day to day contacts with people of other faiths’ (p. 147). The editors give insufficient attention to the meaning of the key term ‘Calvinism’ and to the variations within that tradition, but their interest in the contemporary implications of their subject imparts to the volume an urgency and an impulse to seek and to test broad generalisations that sets it apart from most essay collections. Amid the growing number of recent books about the history of religious coexistence in early modern Europe, this one should not be overlooked.