If religion is a chain of memory, then how can breaks in that chain be repaired? How was Roman Catholicism restored as the normative expression of Christian religion in Bohemia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? In part the answer is simple—through the implementation of state law and through cruel and savage violence against dissenters. However, in part the answer is more complicated as the chain of Bohemian Catholic memory was not only forged through the hammer blows of Habsburg power. In part the answer lies in what Howard Louthan describes here as persuasion; through the mobilization of the creative resources of early modern Catholicism. Nowhere in Europe was the challenge to agents of Catholic mission more profound. In 1618 perhaps fewer than one in ten of the population of Bohemia were loyal to Rome. Different forms of dissent had long flourished on Bohemian soil. On top of deep-rooted attachment to the Churches of the Utraquists and Bohemian Brethren, Lutheranism had spread during the sixteenth century and there was some native support for Reformed styles of religion. However, in 1651 a Catholic commission could report with suitable glee to their Habsburg monarch that the last heretic had disappeared from Bohemia. When Joseph's edict of toleration was issued in 1781, fewer than one in thirty of the population took the opportunity to join either the Reformed or evangelical Churches. As Louthan concedes, the explanation at one level for this dramatic Catholic success was brute force. The 1627 imposition of the “renewed constitution” offered non-Catholics in Bohemia six months to convert or to leave their homes. As a result, perhaps as many as one in four of all Bohemia's nobility and urban population left the country. This exodus was encouraged by the torture and execution of leading political and religious opponents of the new regime and by repressive measures imposed against non-Catholics during the 1620s.

Alongside this destructive capacity of state and Church power, the more difficult task remained for the authorities to construct a new confessional culture. Louthan's study of Catholic triumph does not seek to analyse the development of a new interior world of private belief but reflects on how Bohemian dissent was forcibly silenced and how that void was filled with Catholic noise, spectacle, and memory. Louthan is interested in the restoration of Catholic orthopraxy in Bohemia through the promotion of a collective Catholic memory to frame the lives of communities. This involved processes of selectively forgetting and retrospectively inventing Bohemia's dissenting past. Bohemia was to be remembered not as a nation of heretics but as a land of saints and martyrs. Holiness was also to be infused into the country with the orchestrated move of the relics of Norbert to Prague in 1627. A visual grammar of Catholic religion was slowly established through the production of religious art, through shrines and sites of pilgrimage, through Loreto chapels which mushroomed across the countryside, and through the growing urban forest of Marian columns. Associations with the heretical past were buried under this new Catholic landscape. For example, Votice had been a center for the Bohemian Brethren and its local landowner was executed as a rebel in 1621. A new Franciscan cloister opened at Votice in 1627. In 1631 the remains of two Franciscans murdered in Prague by Saxon troops were installed in the cloister, which later housed a devotional image credited with saving Votice from Swedish forces in 1645. In the process, Votice was transformed into a center of Catholic piety. Louthan suggests that this process of “making Bohemia holy” reached its high point during the 1720s with the elaborate festivities to celebrate Charles's accession to the throne, which were delayed to time with celebrations for the millennium of Prague's foundation. Then in 1729 John Nepomuk was canonised and his cult was enthusiastically promoted through sermons, printed texts, and all sorts of material objects so that he became an ever-present figure in popular culture.

The local agents of Catholic recovery were the newly constructed ranks of loyal nobles, parish clergy, and Catholic orders. Louthan discusses the appeal of Catholicism to the nobility, beyond the practical necessity for landowners of demonstrating loyalty to their monarch's Church. He stresses the importance of universities as the Jesuits attempted to control the circulation of ideas. Other Catholic voices were drowned out in this new culture of religious uniformity. A Jansenist experiment was censored and crushed, while the Capuchin Valerian Magni who favored dialogue with dissenters was described by Jesuits as a “toad bloated with poison.” Parish clergy remained in short supply for much of this period, so the work of evangelism in the countryside was often conducted by wandering missionaries such as Albrecht Chanovský and Fridrich Bridel. They circulated stories of miracles to demonstrate the superior spiritual powers of Catholicism. Images and material objects (including nativity scenes) were also important teaching aids as Catholicism assimilated, or was amalgamated into, rural Bohemian culture. Even the Hussite past was appropriated as songbooks adopted older tunes once used by heretics. A 1661 hymnal showed either great confidence or surprising forgetfulness by borrowing a Brethren woodcut which included the figure of Jan Hus apparently singing along to Catholic hymns. Louthan's important book reflects on a wide range of archival, textual, and visual sources, and engages with Czech historiography, writing on the Catholic Reformation, and work on the sociology of religion. The breadth of vision behind this book will ensure its enduring significance among those interested in the history of Bohemia, in early modern Catholicism, and in the history of mission.