As the title suggests, this is a work whose range in time and space is enormous. A medievalist by training, Buc grapples with the problem of violence in the Christian and “post-Christian” West over the course of two thousand years. His two-pronged thesis—that violence is not some deviance within the Christian tradition, but rather an omnipresent strain, and that the tradition of Christian violence has continued to shape violence in the secular West into the present—is compelling and convincing. He defines the West as the cultural area that was Roman Catholic Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the United States. He defines as post-Christian any society that is not specifically structured around religious institutions, but is nonetheless deeply informed by a predominant heritage of Christian institutions and culture. Buc calls his book “a typical laboratory experiment” because he aims to isolate a single variable, that of violence in the Christian and post-Christian tradition (289). This, along with his nuanced discussion of “the coexistence of continuity and purposeful reinvention” of violence in the post-Christian West, and “reoccupation” of Christian forms in post-Christian society, are Buc's major contributions (4).

The book is organized thematically rather than chronologically, as an “essay” rather than a narrative, and Buc returns again and again to a few major touchstones to draw out commonalities on both sides of the pre-modern/modern and Christian/post-Christian divide (4). These touchstones include the early church, the Reform Papacy and the First Crusade, the Wars of Religion, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the radical Rote Armee Fraktion of 1970s West Germany. Conspicuously absent are in-depth treatments of the Russian Revolution or the rise of Nazism, which would seem to be prime examples for Buc's argument. Indeed, he acknowledges they are, but justifies their omission on grounds that they have been analyzed extensively elsewhere along the lines that Buc pursues here.

In chapter one (“The American Way of War Through the Premodern Looking-Glass”), Buc begins at the end, revealing how American discourses about war are rooted deeply in a uniquely Western—and by extension, Christian—mode. He identifies the exceptionalist and universalist dichotomy of American war-making—which is really no dichotomy at all—as owing a deep debt to the Christian tradition. In chapter two (“Christian Exegesis and Violence”), Buc grounds this assertion about “The American Way of War” in a compelling discussion of the tradition of Christian scripture and exegesis. In chapter three (“Madness, Martyrdom, and Terror”), Buc compares the Christian conceit of one's enemy as seduced or bewitched by Satan with post-Christian explanations of an adversary's behaviors and motivations as rooted in madness or derangement. In chapter four (“Martyrdom in the West: Vengeance, Purge, Salvation, and History”), Buc explores ideas about violence as the engine of historical progress as well as a tool of purification in Christian and post-Christian contexts. In chapter five (“Twins: National Holy War and Sectarian Terror”), Buc examines a recurrent pattern in Christian and post-Christian war: that of linking a community or state's struggle against external enemies with the threat (real or perceived) of heretical or sectarian challengers within. In chapter six (“Liberty and Coercion”), Buc identifies how “liberty” and “liberation” have been used both in a Christian context and in the post-Christian epoch not to mean freedom from arbitrary control, but rather to mean freedom from falsehood, heresy, apostasy, or corruption. In chapter seven (“The Subject of History and the Making of History”), Buc asks explicitly the question he has been building an answer to throughout the first six chapters: “How modern is Modern violence?” (242). His answer, which the reader will certainly have anticipated, is: not very. In his estimation, modernity is obsessed with parsing religious from political violence—and largely misguided in doing so.

This is a twenty-first century book written in the shadow of September 11 and in the climate of the Iraq War, where accusations of Islam as singularly violent are pervasive—as are strict, misleading, and value-laden dichotomies between pre-modern/modern and religious/secular. Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror is important and challenging, both in the sense of raising challenging ideas—he aptly characterizes his book as “heuristically contrarian” (71)—and also in the sense of being difficult to work through. That is, while its thematic organization allows Buc to leap among examples vastly disparate in time and space in a single chapter, page, or even paragraph, this can make his line of argumentation difficult to follow at times—even for a trained scholar, let alone a general reader. Nonetheless, Buc's mastery of a broad chronology, his control of the sources, and his contrarian perspective make this an admirable book that both pre-modernist and modernist scholars alike will find well worth their time.