It can never have been easy to devise and assemble a collection of essays on religious conflict, since both the phenomenon itself, and its various interpreters, tend to indicate rather narrowly defined explanations. This compendium, notably well edited by John Wolffe, happily transcends received commonplaces, and offers the reader acute insights into the causes and circumstances of conflict without imposing really precise generalisations. This is in itself valuable: what emerges from these excellent studies is the significance of ever-changing historical circumstances in the determination of particular occasions of conflict, and the manner in which individual personalities generated action. The dynamic has often been the re-invention of past traditions of grievance in the promotion of contentious ideology. A lot of popular historical recollection is fictional, and the more zealously the mobs attack their adversaries, and tear down their sacred symbols, the more fictional the basis of their understanding of inherited tradition seems to become. On a world scale religious conflict would appear to be increasing – or, perhaps, is better reported, in a culture of information technology – and so a study of the sort presented by these essays is timely. In England views of conflict are preoccupied either with the difficulties of Northern Ireland or with the baneful effects of Islamic militancy. An escalating defection from religious belief in western liberal societies also, to some degree, reflects a sense that religion is inherently divisive. The assessment is understandable enough, but the rhetoric of discord, enveloped in emotive representations of the Crusades or the ‘Spanish’ Inquisition, scarcely furnish a dispassionate frame of reference. Wolffe and his contributors exist in a different atmosphere altogether: this collection of historical studies is reliable and, in places, very original. There are occasional parallels between the Catholic-Protestant conflicts and modern Islamic ones. We are in a different room here than that occupied by the current press and political vocabulary of vituperation – ‘fanaticism’, ‘sectarianism’ and ‘extremism’ – employed to identify seriously-held ideological difference. People, including religious people, who really believe in their values, are liable to defend or extend them at high cost, including violence. Liberal opinion does not shrink from the advocacy of violent solutions when its sacral values are threatened – as over racism or chemical weapons, for example. This collection of essays is sober and considered; it is consistently of a high standard of scholarship and reflection. As Mark Greengrass puts it in his contribution (and in a modern mode of expression), they take into account ‘the significant polyvalence and polysemy in confrontational content’. The financial sponsors of the book, the ‘UK Global Uncertainties Programme’ of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council, ought to be impressed.