In this study, Wayne Te Brake examines the historical literature on roughly a century and a half of religious warfare and religious coexistence in early modern Europe (between the years 1500 and 1650) through the lens of social-science theory. He clusters this violence into three generations of increasingly destructive conflicts: starting with the Swiss and German wars of the 1520s through 1550s; then the long French and Dutch religious wars of the second half of the sixteenth century; and finally, the Thirty Years War and the British conflicts of the seventeenth century. By analyzing these conflicts and their concomitant attempts at religious peace, Te Brake offers an account of the origins of religious pluralism in early modern European society. Since force and coercion failed to impose confessional uniformity, managing some sort of coexistence became inevitable. This confessional pluralism was not merely the result of elites imposing settlements on their subjects but also of local actors (both dissenting and conforming) hammering out complicated and improvised arrangements of religious coexistence.

Te Brake offers a social-science taxonomy of different patterns of religious coexistence that eventually obtained in early modern Europe, from privilege to parity, to repression, to integration. Between these four points lies what he calls “ad hoc tolerance,” which was enjoyed by such religious minorities as Jews in Metz and Lutherans in Amsterdam, and which may have come the closest to modern ideals of religious freedom that the early modern era could have reached. Te Brake's point in presenting these models is to underscore both the variety and durability of European religious diversity in the post-medieval era. Early modern Europe, he argues, successfully, if haltingly, transitioned from Christendom to Christianities.

The author makes clear, however, that none of this happened without cost. State employment of force was usually the first response to widespread religious dissent, and Te Brake makes it clear that religious war in this era was violent and bloody indeed. He provides a theoretical model of the mechanisms of religious war, from activation, to polarization, through brokerage, to escalation, and then applies each of the six cases of conflict to this model. Perhaps most interesting are the comparisons he makes within each of the three cluster of wars, both their parallels and their divergences. Each cluster grew in scale and destructiveness, from the territorial conflicts of the Swiss and German wars, through the national conflicts that afflicted France and the Netherlands, to the international contests that made up the Thirty Years War. The same theoretical mechanisms obtained to each conflict, yet each one had quite divergent outcomes. The author describes the landscape of early modern European religious conflict with a deft eye for detail.

Likewise, Te Brake provides a theoretical process for the emergence of durable multiconfessional settlements as a result of each of these wars, with the dynamics of domination, negotiation, subversion, and segregation, in various combinations, leading to viable pluralistic outcomes. One thing Te Brake's analysis makes clear is that religious peace, by which he means coexistence in the absence of coordinated destruction, was as widespread as religious war was in early modern Europe. And just as no two religious wars were alike, neither were their settlements, though all of them fit within the author's taxonomic table of varieties of pluralism.

In his conclusion, the author tries to draw out the larger implications of his models of religious war and religious peace, that is, to answer what he rather self-consciously describes as “BIG questions.” These questions include: what give rise to political powerful religious identities?; what makes religious wars possible?; and what makes religious peace possible?; It seems that the author has an eye on the present day and its own version of religious conflict. The typologies he presents might be a useful heuristic tool, he suggests, in figuring out what questions we must ask when addressing problems of religious conflict in our own day. What we can conclude from this mode of analysis is that religious coexistence, as Te Brake repeatedly notes, is complex and messy; it is costly and requires continued, arduous cooperation among many parties. Still, his overall tone is optimistic: the emancipation of religious minorities in post-medieval European history has been slow and fitful, but on the whole, he argues, successful. The notion of freedom of conscience, which he asserts got its start out of the crucibles of early modern war and peace, would in the long term contribute to the modern notion of the right to religious freedom. Te Brake does not offer any specific prescriptions for present-day religious conflicts but instead leaves it to the reader to ponder the more particular implications of his models. Students of early modern religious coexistence will find this work to be very interesting reading.