In writing Germany and the French Wars of Religion, 1560–1572, Jonas van Tol set himself an ambitious goal. By using the correspondence of ten Protestant princes of Germany, along with 124 printed publications in German, he “aims to uncover how Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire responded to news from France, which factors shaped their interpretation[s] of this information, and how they aimed to influence the outcome of the conflict” (3); moreover, he “aims to take into account the full spectrum of ideas, concerns, and interests that informed decision making in response to the French Wars of Religion” (9). Dedicated to Franco-German relations, the book will be of particular interest to readers of the Journal of British Studies interested in Elizabethan religion, politics, foreign policy, diplomacy, and international relations. The first two chapters set the scene; the remaining four investigate particular aspects of how those in Germany engaged with the Wars of Religion in France.

Although the survey chapters rely principally on existing scholarship, van Tol's analytical acumen is on display throughout. The first chapter discusses the multiple connections within and beyond the Rhineland. Here van Tol demonstrates how the Rhenish nobility saw themselves as part of the European cultural elite for whom multilingualism was a sine qua non and indicator of cultural cosmopolitanism. Such an outlook meant that notions of German nationalism (such as it was) existed alongside and sometimes competed with both a more particular sense of regional identity within the Rhineland but also a more capacious transnationalism extending to France and Italy. These personal and intellectual connections were maintained by way of the regular and frequent exchange of news and correspondence among the princes (“gute Korrespondenz”) regarding foreign affairs in France, the Netherlands, and England as well (36). Such interest and potential engagement in international affairs was not, however, without its dangers for princes of the Holy Roman Empire, for debates were ongoing whether the princes were genuinely sovereign rulers within their own territories and able to pursue their own foreign policies, or constrained by the imperial constitution and forbidden from doing so. Thus, as van Tol informs, the princes “had to balance their local, national, and transnational interests” (49). The second chapter surveys the variety of opinion among the German Protestant princes vis-à-vis their fellow Protestants in France and (to a lesser extent) the Netherlands; here the reader really gets a sense of where the book is heading, and that the geography of the empire really does matter. In short, princes in the west (such as the Elector Palatine, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Dukes of Württemberg and Zweibrücken) had different and generally more positive views of the Huguenots than did those in the east (such as the Elector of Saxony, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar). This difference could be due to closer historical ties in the west between a prince and the French monarchy, as in the case of Württemberg, or because of a more flexible, Melanchthonian, quasi-Reformed attitude regarding Protestant solidarity and the downplaying of doctrinal differences, as was particularly the case in the (Lower) Palatinate. The tensions among German Protestants (Gnesio-Lutherans, Philippists, and Reformed), so amply explored by Irene Dingel among others, “to a large extent shaped German perceptions of French Protestantism,” and decided whether and how individual princes would get involved in the French wars (73).

The remaining four chapters detail the competing narratives of the Wars of Religion coming into the Empire from France, the different German Protestant princes’ proposals for restoring peace, the fears among Protestants of an international Catholic conspiracy during the late 1560s, and the four military interventions in the Second and Third Wars of Religion between 1567 and 1569. A key theme running through these chapters is that attitudes and responses among the Germans, notwithstanding their common Protestantism, were anything but uniform because of the princes’ various religious and political views. Wolfgang, Duke of Zweibrücken, was a fervent Lutheran who genuinely sought to aid the Huguenots not because of a sense of confessional solidarity with the Reformed, but because he sought to align them with the Confession of Augsburg; he led an army into France to support the Huguenots in 1569. Johann Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, was also a hardliner, but he espoused a stronger Gnesio-Lutheran attitude, and thus condemned the Reformed and viewed them as sectarian rebels who threatened the authority of magistrates and deserved punishment accordingly; his intervention in support of the Catholics was in 1568. Philip and Wilhelm, Landgraves of Hesse, were broadly in support of their Huguenot coreligionists and did their best to persuade other German princes by way of correspondence and peer pressure. Above all, though, were Friedrich III, Elector Palatine, who served as “the spokesperson for the Huguenot cause in Germany,” and his son, Johann Casimir, Count Palatine, who, “like his father . . . was an ardent supporter of the Huguenot cause” and was the first German prince to prepare an army into France in 1567 (122, 197). The volume concludes with an epilogue discussing the watershed and aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. In many respects, as van Tol argues, the bloodshed demonstrated to the German princes that their previous attempts at religious reconciliation and political persuasion had failed to stem the tide of confessional violence; that their “gute Korrespondenz” continued, with further military intervention, into the 1590s testifies to their increasingly strong fears of the threat to Protestants posed by Catholic powers.

The strengths of this clearly written and wonderfully readable book are clear. The wide source base in both manuscript and print helps to bring the traditional tools of the historian of diplomacy to recent social and cultural methodologies. Highlighting the psychological effect of the supposed international Catholic conspiracy (stretching across France, the Netherlands, and indeed all of Europe) explains why the Germans avoided military intervention until after the Duke of Alba's reactionary measures against Dutch Protestants in 1567. The emphasis on religious and political heterogeneity among the German Protestant princes, so evident in the correspondence edited in Briefe Friedrich des Frommen, stands as a reminder that the confessionalization thesis has significant limits. My criticisms are comparatively minor. A close reader unfamiliar with the period may find van Tol's jumping forward and backward with dates a little confusing. An attentive reader may notice a few inconsistencies in detail (such as the dating of the Fürstentag at Naumburg as 1560 or [rightly] 1561). A German reader may raise an eyebrow at the double-barreled Vórname, Johann Casimir, abridged to simply Casimir after the fashion of most monoglot English historians. Yet these minutiae are, in the end, inconsequential, or in the parlance of the transnational Protestant, adiaphora. This is a great book deserving to be read widely by all who work on the Wars of Religion, religious identities, and international relations.