This volume has its origins in the Emmy Noether Research Group, ‘Battles over Belief: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe, 1848-1914’, based at the Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, which ran from 2013 to 2019, and in which the editor Eveline G. Bouwers was principal investigator. The collection gathers together seventeen essays (including the editor’s introduction and conclusion) which are organised into five parts: ‘Rejecting Secularisation’; ‘Contending Clericalism’; ‘Resisting Religious Pluralisation’; ‘Imposing a Catholic Order’; and ‘Opposing Catholic Invasion’. On the book’s web page, Routledge advertises it as ‘the first study to systematically analyze the link between faith and violent action in modern history’, claiming that it shows ‘that the link between faith and violence was more nuanced than theoreticians of “religious violence” suggest’.

In part i, Philip Dwyer re-emphasises the connection between religion and violence during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, citing Jean-Clément Martin’s suggestion that the French Revolution was the last of the French ‘wars of religion’. He stresses that in the minds of many revolutionaries, the Catholic Church was inextricably connected with counter-revolution, and, for Catholics, the Revolution would come to be inextricably associated with anticlericalism. He also draws attention to the scores of lower clergy who died fighting during this period, and the employment of crusading rhetoric, as in the case of the prior of the Carmelites in Logoño in the north of Spain who exhorted his friars to become ‘holy warriors’. Mary Vincent discusses how, despite religion being ‘one of the fault lines of civil war, which punctuated Spain’s political life for over a century’, the theological underpinnings of counter-revolution have not been given adequate attention in the historiography (p. 57). She sees anarchism on the one hand, and Carlism on the other, as embracing violence ‘as a means of controlling, purifying, and remaking society’ (p. 59). Vincent pays special attention to the phenomenon of devotion to the Sacred Heart and the promise to the Spanish visionary Bernardo de Hoyos (1711–35) that ‘I will reign in Spain and with more veneration than elsewhere’, which from the 1880s served as a ‘clarion call for the “social reign of Jesus Christ”’ and the restoration of the Church’s ‘rights’ (p. 63). In the third essay, Eveline G. Bouwers turns to controversy regarding the provision of primary education in Belgium, and in particular a 1879 bill by Minister Pierre Van Humbeeck which aimed to wrest control of education from the clergy and to legislate for education based on liberal principles. Bouwers judges what was soon after passed into law as certainly anticlerical, but not anti-religious (p. 79). None the less, the reaction of the Belgian episcopate was swift and uncompromising, leading to a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the Belgian government and the Holy See, but also to the alienation of large numbers of practising Catholics supportive of the measure; most of these never returned. Although the Catholic cause eventually won out, it was, in reality, a Pyrrhic victory. The incidences of violence which followed, culminating in a mass demonstration in Brussels in support of Catholic education in 1884, were variously conceived: as martyrdom by those opposed to the measures introduced by devils and heretics, and as proof of religion’s close association with violence by those promoting a secular view of society.

Part ii, ‘Contending Clericalism’, begins with Tim Buchen’s exploration of two flashpoints of religious violence in Austrian Galicia, the largest crownland of the Habsburg Empire. During the first, the Rabatz of 1846, Catholic peasants intimidated and murdered both noblemen and members of the clergy supportive of the temperance movement (in one case a priest was forced to kneel in imitation of the sobriety pledge and vow allegiance to the ‘revolution’); the second flashpoint involved attacks on Jews and their property in 1898. In each case, Buchen shows, clerical mobilisation strategies had indirectly contributed to the violence by identifying both nobles and Jews as enemies of the Catholic faithful. The essay following shifts location to Mexico, with Brian A. Stauffer exploring how in the 1870s, during a period of intense secularisation, a group of Catholic rebels called the Religioneros in the state of Michoacán not only attacked government officials, but also took the opportunity to take out their anger on Ultramontane clergy who were keen to stamp out syncretism in Mexican Catholicism (indeed, some Catholic prelates cynically welcomed the government’s secularising prohibition of elements of public religion as an opportunity to snuff out undesirable elements of popular religiosity); in turn, many Religioneros, intent on preserving cherished forms of traditional religion, ‘died with the names of their patron saints on their lips’ (p. 120). Far from soldiers of Pius ix, Strauffer regards the Religioneros as ‘defenders of the saints-martyrs in a cosmic war in which the Catholic hierarchy played a distinctly ambiguous role’ (p. 134). The third essay in this section is by Roberto di Stefano, and examines the anticlerical riots of 1875 in Buenos Aires, which he views as an example primarily of a ‘religious riot’ as defined by Natalie Zemon Davis, and not simply a result of political and economic unrest. Di Stefano shows how these riots, involving a broad swathe of the male population, were not indiscriminately anticlerical, nor an assault against Catholicism pe se; rather, their targets were carefully selected and reflect a reaction against the close union of Church and State, and particularly against the local archbishop Aneiros, an ultramontanist and staunch defender of Pope Pius ix’s Syllabus of Errors, who got himself elected to parliament. The riots also drew on anti-Jesuit sentiment, and thus targeted religious images associated with the order, such as the Sacred Heart or Francis Xavier; in one case a knife was thrust through the mouth of an image of Ignatius of Loyola as a symbolic act of silencing the order. These were riots with a very clear rationality, Di Stefano argues, problematising how they have often been portrayed by historians.

Part iii, ‘Resisting Religious Pluralisation’, begins with Julie Kalman’s essay on French Catholic responses to the Damascus and Dreyfus affairs respectively. She argues that the Damascus affair of 1840, in which the Catholic press in France branded Jews responsible for the ritual murder of a Capuchin friar and his servant, contributed to a shift from anti-Judaism to antisemitism later in the century. Kalman sees much in common between the Damascus affair and the Dreyfus affair in 1898, both exposing fissures in French society, and both showing Catholics in France stubbornly clinging to a world already lost. While the essay title suggests that both events will receive more-or-less equal treatment, however, this is not the case; the Dreyfus affair is merely given a page-and-a-half before the essay’s conclusion. The remaining essays concern the Trillick Railway Outrage of 1854 (Sean Farrell) in which Ulster newspapers explained the derailment of a train differently: it was regarded as an act of religious violence according to the ultra-Protestant press, whilst the Catholic press presented that response as evidence of Orange fanaticism, which had transformed a railway accident into a Popish plot; and finally, Franklin Rausch’s two case studies from Korea a century apart (1801 and 1901) of the suppression of Catholicism during the Chosǒn dynasty, and the depth of Confucian critique of the religion, which included the rumour that Catholics stole the eyes of children and ate marrow from the bones of the dead (p. 209).

Part iv, ‘Imposing a Catholic Order’, contains essays on ‘Missionaries and colonial politics during the German war on the East African Coast, 1888–1889’ (Richard Höltz); ‘Catholic missionaries, violence and the creation of religious statehood in south-eastern Congo, 1867-1914’ (Reuben A. Loffman); and ‘Religion, childhood, and violence in colonial New Guinea around 1900’ (Katharina Stornig).

Part v, ‘Opposing Catholic Invasion’, contains the final three essays of the volume: ‘Celebrating fête-dieu in mid nineteenth-century Montreal’ (Dan Horner); ‘Nativism, anti-Catholicism and violence in antebellum America’ (Cassandra L. Yacovazzi); and ‘Catholic life in nineteenth-century China between coexistence and subjugation’ (Lars Peter Laamann). The volume concludes in part vi with a short essay by the volume’s editor, which serves as an epilogue, and an opportunity to remind readers that ‘the chapters in this book … illuminate the variety of ways in which religion and violence have interacted historically – a plurality that contradicts essentialist understandings of the nature of religion-related violence’ (p. 353).

It is a truism that essay collections by their very nature are uneven, and this title is no exception (furthermore, not every essay contains the helpful concluding section present in most others); that said, Bouwers is warmly to be congratulated on editing a volume with a remarkable range of contributions, fortified by a comprehensive introduction and helpful epilogue, with each essay being of easily readable length. Scholars working in the field, and postgraduate students contemplating entering the field alike will greatly profit from having a copy on their bookshelf.