Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable flowering of historical writing on religion's place in European society and culture since 1800. Whereas earlier generations of scholars often assumed that religion was, at best, a declining force during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, work since the 1980s has placed religious institutions, beliefs, and practices at the heart of our understandings of social, cultural, and intellectual developments in European history since the era of the French Revolution. The edited volume, Religionen im Krieg 1914–1918: Katholische Kirche in Österreich, should be read as extending this insight to the period of the First World War, a conflict long assumed to have exerted a modernist, secularizing influence on European society and culture (14). Emerging out of collaboration between a wide range of historians and theologians, as well as the Austrian Military Chaplaincy, this volume represents an important resource for scholars seeking to explore the diverse histories of Catholicism in the Habsburg monarchy between 1914 and 1918. As Patrick Houlihan notes in his engaging introduction, the book's chapters are “especially rich in archival details” (29), ensuring that, collectively, they provide an excellent snapshot of the primary sources available to write the histories of Catholicism in wartime Austro-Hungarian society.

This book's great strength is the breadth and scope of its coverage, with individual chapters tackling social, cultural, intellectual, and military themes. This is indeed a volume that contains something for almost any historian working on Austro-Hungarian society in the era of the First World War, although its primary focus on the monarchy's military chaplaincies ensures that female religious practices and experiences are underrepresented within its pages. A range of essays discuss the theological frameworks the Catholic clergy employed to understand the conflict, and the sacralization of the Habsburg dynasty and Austria within pastoral letters and sermons. As Hermann Bahr argued in 1917: “Austria is mythical … Austria is Catholic” (127). Other essays, by contrast, investigate religious belief and practice on the ground, with Fabian Brändle's engaging contribution discussing the piety of an individual soldier, Erich Mayr, and Lea Herberg's important chapter outlining the mentalities of a military chaplain, Pius Parsch. Cultural history is also well served by this volume, with Claudia Schlager's piece on Catholic soldiers’ attitudes toward death and bereavement standing out for the nuance of its analysis and engagement with wider debates on this theme in First World War historiography, as developed by Annette Becker and Michael Geyer.

In addition to incorporating these social, cultural, and intellectual histories, Religionen im Krieg does an excellent job of including discussion of the vast range of Catholic constituencies, whose experiences of World War I on the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire varied quite considerably from each other. For example, the volume analyzes the clergy's attempts to provide pastoral care to civilian refugees, driven from their homes by Russian advances in 1914, and the Church's ministry to foreign Catholic prisoners of war interned on Habsburg soil. The volume's chapters also offer a range of regional perspectives, with individual essays including in-depth discussion of several localities across primarily German-speaking Austria, such as the diocese of Linz and Seckau. Despite this prioritization of Cislethania within the volume, its essays do provide excellent insights into the war's impact on the relationships between religious faith and the monarchy's multiethnic composition. As Claudia Reichl-Ham's piece on pastoral care at the front outlines, the relative lack of Protestant and Orthodox military chaplains in the Habsburg armed forces ensured that mortally wounded soldiers belonging to these denominations frequently had to receive the last rites at the hands of a Roman Catholic clergyman, furnishing a source of interconfessional tension throughout the war years (331). Collectively, these strengths ensure that Religionen im Krieg is an extremely helpful volume, which will be an indispensable reference work for future scholars working on the religious histories of the Habsburg monarchy between 1914 and 1918.

It is perhaps, however, as a springboard for future research that Religionen im Krieg should be read, and not as the articulation of a given interpretation concerning its subject matter. Many of the volume's essays are driven primarily by archival detail, description, and chronological narrative, holding back the development of an overall argument throughout the text. Patrick Houlihan's introduction does sterling work in providing historiographical framing for the volume, but the lack of a conclusion surely indicates that this is a work designed to open, rather than conclusively answer, key questions in the field. Judged according to this criteria, however, Religionen im Krieg must be deemed a notable success. Its rich archival base and wide thematic coverage ensures that it provides an intriguing panorama of potential future research into the histories of Central European Catholicism in the era of the Great War, the questions these projects might ask, and the tools available to help answer them.