Heinz Schilling is one of the most distinguished historians of early modern Europe. In this book, the three Menachem Stern Lectures which he delivered in Jerusalem in 2006, he reflects on the role of religion in shaping Europe's advance towards modernity, plurality and the rule of law. His starting-point is the essential dualism of Latin Europe as opposed to the monism of the Orthodox Christian world, and of Islam beyond, which not only entertained the possibility of the separation of Church and State, but which also contained an inherent dynamic. Religious confessionalisation he regards as the indispensable partner of modernisation, inasmuch as religion as revelation was superseded by religion as a philosophical system, echoing the emerging rationalism and empiricism of early modern science and medicine. Schilling points to the minority communities of religious refugees – especially Calvinists and Jews – whose sense of religious exclusivity went hand-in-hand with a marginalised status which hindered any assimilation into bourgeois society and by extension the possibility of a ‘treason of the bourgeoisie’ whereby they might seek to enhance their status by acquiring lands and titles in a feudal world. The elaboration of a system of international law after the cataclysm of the Thirty Years War, Schilling argues, was not a rejection of religious faith but rather its transvaluation into secular principles of peace and good citizenship, with subsequent conflicts in Europe no longer driven by fundamentalism but rather ‘cabinet wars’. Schilling's arguments are always trenchant: they will provoke much debate, not least from those who adhere to the contrasting model of an ancien régime Europe of Estates (altständische Gesellschaft), or who are deeply suspicious of western Europe's alleged exceptionalism (see Kenneth Pomeranz), or who see the roots of a ‘balance of power’ prefigured in the late medieval Swiss Confederation. These lectures would have benefited from editing by a native speaker: errors of English usage and infelicities of style abound on every page and greatly impair the force of the argument.