As the centenary of the crisis ignited in Sarajevo in June 1914 approaches, a wealth of material will seek to reconfigure understandings of what the war meant, both for contemporaries and beyond. In these debates, it is particularly welcome to have perspectives that transcend histories mired in the mud and blood of the Western Front. With the present work under review, Pavlina Bobič has successfully established a Slovenian voice for an English-language audience, thus making a contribution to the religious history of the war. The book's wider impact, however, will display self-imposed limitations.

Bobič’s book is a revised version of the author's DPhil thesis completed at the University of Oxford. As Bobič stresses, only after the breakup of the Yugoslav state could earnest scholarly research on the Great War essentially begin. Building on scholarly works both in Slovenia and internationally, Bobič’s book stresses the continuities and persistence of traditional religion. The book draws on a commendable range of Slovenian material including archival sources in ecclesiastical, national, and local archives, as well as a range of contemporary printed material, periodicals, and literature. As stated at the outset, Bobič declares that, “The key aim of this investigation is to examine the Catholic Church's interpretation of the causes (and the nature) of the war, an interpretation which endowed the war with a moral dimension and conferred on it adequate ideological legitimation” (4–5). That aim is largely accomplished, but it reinforces that the book under review is often a top-down institutional church history in which the voices of bishops and clergy predominate. It is thus at odds with the other stated aim: “The study is principally concerned with people's mentalities and is based on the examination of personal accounts of soldiers and civilians alike” (6).

The first two chapters are heavily top-down pieces that focus on Church rhetoric of legitimation, punishment, and atonement at the outset of the war and through the Italian declaration of war on Austria-Hungary in 1915, which considerably heightened ideological animosity. The third and fourth chapters begin again with Church interpretations of the links between homefront and battlefront, before moving into Slovenian soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences of war, strangely limited to 1914–1916 and often through the viewpoints of male clergy. The author stresses that heroic Christian ideals of virility and manliness stagnated with the lack of quick victory, contrasted with the consoling feminine ideal of the Virgin Mary. The Habsburg state failed to provide a “vision of a better future,” thus making the idea of death for the monarchy “nothing but empty propagandistic rhetoric” (118). But what filled the void, and how did ordinary religious believers adjust their mentalities to rapidly shifting social and political circumstances, particularly in 1916–1918 and beyond?

The book does not resolve these questions directly. Returning to top-down perspectives for the years 1916–1918, the book's final chapters discuss clerical and political arguments about the role of the Church in the emerging Slovenian national political orientation, especially from the perspective of the Prince-Bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Jeglič. The book ends its story in 1918, thus bypassing the continued warfare and social disturbance that continued after the fall of the monarchy. Thus, readers will miss the common Catholic believers’ perspectives on such issues as continued paramilitary clashes on the Slovenian border after 1918 and shifting reactions to the hopes engendered by the Paris Peace Conference.

Given the book's aim of bringing Slovenians into European discussions about the Great War ( 6), the work under review would have benefitted from methods integrating it into a broader literature on World War I. First, the matter of primary sources: although the book draws on ample Slovenian sources, it does not examine any archival collections in Vienna or Vatican City. Thus, its primary source research is rooted in perspectives solely from the periphery of the Habsburg state, making for a rather limited viewpoint regarding war experience. Next, the matter of secondary sources: Bobič omits discussion of any of Annette Becker's pioneering work in the religious history of the war, especially from the Catholic perspective. Indeed, Becker's main monograph on this subject even shares part of its title with the work under review: Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford, 1998). Ultimately, in order to connect Bobič’s portrayal of the Slovenian Catholic experience of the war with wider debates about the war's religious nature, even specialist readers will have to draw upon their own resources. Nevertheless, this book is to be welcomed as a useful introduction to the long-neglected study of wartime religiosity of a key group in the Habsburg monarchy.