Early modern Bohemia has always been an elusive subject for Anglophone readers, who until now have only been able to rely on the relevant sections of R.J.W. Evans's classic The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), together with a relatively small number of articles and chapters in larger works, and a handful of detailed monographs. Bohemia's demographic, economic, and political importance within the Habsburg monarchy has not been matched by adequate historiographical attention. This neglect in itself is sufficient for a warm welcome to the two books under review, which testify to a welcome revival of interest in English-language scholarship devoted to the lands of the Bohemian Crown.

Howard Louthan's subject is the notable revival of Catholicism in seventeenth-century Bohemia, viewed through the lens of recent approaches to the Counter Reformation. In keeping with this idiom, that of the cultural history of religion, there are illuminating accounts of the noted revival of antiquarianism and of the role of art in the service of the Catholic cause, together with much important detail on the remarkable expansion of pilgrimage in the century after the Habsburg victory at the battle of the White Mountain (1620). There are some interesting pages on the role of music in the Catholic revival, together with an illuminating emphasis upon the role of sanctification and specifically on the canonization of Saint Norbert of Xanten and Saint John Nepomuk.

Even on its own home ground, however, Professor Louthan's account is open to serious criticism. Remarkably, the fundamental and extensive publications of Eduard Winter are almost entirely ignored, being cited on only two occasions (101n46, 107n65) and omitted from the bibliography. In an earlier generation, Winter made a subtle and powerful, if overdrawn, case for the survival of Protestantism in Bohemia into the eighteenth century and beyond. Winter argued that Protestant communities existed in secret behind a facade of conformity to the dominant Catholic faith. Six years after Joseph II's celebrated grant of toleration to non-Catholics (1781–1782), the Staatsrat estimated that there were no fewer than 156,000 declared Protestants in the monarchy's central and western territories (the Austrian Archduchy and the lands of the Bohemian Crown): a figure which suggests that Winter may have been correct about the extent of the survival, if not its precise scale. Instead of confronting this question directly, Professor Louthan embraces the approach recently favored by Z.V. David, especially in his Finding the Middle Way (Baltimore 2003), and argues that Utraquism (the religion of Jan Hus) was in an overwhelming majority before 1618 and that this facilitated the Catholic triumph during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although it is difficult to be certain about the detailed religious complexion of sixteenth-century Bohemia, there are substantial grounds for concluding that Converting Bohemia underplays the strength of Lutheranism and even Calvinism before the rebellion of 1618 and their subsequent survival.

In keeping with this approach, Professor Louthan dismisses the important recent study of Arno Herzig, Der Zwang zum wahren Glauben (Göttingen 2000), which is the subject of a distasteful imputation (318) about its author's use of the term Gleichschaltung because of its Nazi associations. Herzig emphasized that force was integral to the success of the Counter Reformation in Central Europe, a view which echoed arguments made by R. Po-Chia Hsia in The World of Catholic Renewal 1550–1770, his well-known study of the early modern Catholic revival (Cambridge, 1998). Any study—such as this one—that does not find space for coercion side-by-side with persuasion, as Professor Louthan's own subtitle promises, and seek to assess their respective roles, is bound to seem limited. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the author, in his laudable desire to escape from a Czech nationalist grand narrative, which viewed the battle of White Mountain as the beginning of a political martyrdom that would last for almost three centuries, has replaced it with another grand narrative: that of the triumph of Catholicism through the superiority of its religious teachings, in a way which is almost Hegelian in its assumptions.

There is a failure throughout to explore rigorously how religious change was implemented. At one point, the author notes that it is “difficult to underestimate [sic] the significance of the nobility for the success of the Counter-Reformation in Bohemia” (48). From the surrounding sentences, however, it is clear that “overestimate” is intended; and at various points in his book he acknowledges the role of the nobility (e.g., 49), while there is a particularly valuable discussion of noble responsibility for the construction of rural shrines and pilgrimage chapels. Indeed, at one point he notes correctly (210) that the Roman Catholic Church was reluctant to intervene on the great noble latifundia that were created during the first half of the seventeenth century. These estates were one key arena for the successful re-Catholicization of Bohemia. Yet Professor Louthan never subjects the role of the magnates and lesser nobility to sustained analysis, with the result that his book is always one-dimensional. The near-simultaneous imposition of the “second serfdom,” the consolidation of an aristocratic elite more loyal to Vienna than its predecessor and the New Government Regulation (Verneuerte Landesordnung) of 1627 were all integral to the success of the Counter Reformation, but are here either seriously downplayed or ignored altogether. Thirty years ago, R.J.W. Evans argued persuasively that Crown, magnates, and Church marched in step, and that dynastic, aristocratic, and religious motives and interests were in harmony, in Bohemia as throughout the rest of the Habsburg monarchy. Neglect of this fundamental insight hobbles Professor Louthan's book, and makes it much less useful than it could and should have been.

Once again the author is actually his own best critic. He concludes by wisely noting that “the recatholicization of the Czech lands was a complicated interplay between force and persuasion … . The historian must be careful not to embrace one without forgetting the other” (320), a verdict which comes strangely at the end of a book that for long periods appears to do precisely that. Even more remarkably, he then rightly acknowledges (321ff) the survival and strength of Protestantism, which calls in question his own failure to investigate it more fully and even his overarching emphasis on the success of re-Catholicization. Although his study contains much significant detail on the culture of baroque Catholicism in Bohemia, its manifest shortcomings in its wider political framework together with its preference for description over analysis militate against it being regarded as the modern study of the subject that is so badly needed.

Rita Krueger's study, by contrast, places the nobility squarely on center stage. Inspired by the theories of Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, she traces the well-known transition by a proportion of Bohemia's traditional elite from eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to mid-nineteenth-century nationalism. Based on printed materials leavened by some research in Czech and Austrian archives, she provides a new perspective on familiar events and illuminates the roles of the Sternberg and, to a lesser extent, the Czernin families. There is much emphasis on noble involvement, in the spirit initially of the Enlightenment and then romanticism, in the learned societies founded in the later eighteenth century and in the subsequent establishment of first a modern art gallery in Prague and then a national museum, with the intention of creating a cultural heritage for the Czech lands. This was of course the high road to nationalism, but in the crisis of 1848, many of the modernizing nobles hesitated and ultimately remained loyal to the Habsburg government, reinforcing the impression that Krueger may exaggerate the extent of the transformation and underestimate the important continuities that are also evident.

At the heart of Krueger's study is a real question over the nature and meanings of “nationalism,” which she never satisfactorily resolves. At one point she comments persuasively that “for aristocrats … nationality was not an issue of exclusion, but rather a question of the relationship of the individual and the community to the process of progress and enlightenment” (188), and she rightly finds important distance between this approach and that of more radical figures, above all Palacký. There is a sense, however, which the author acknowledges but never fully explores, that Bohemia's aristocrats themselves believed they were part of a separate historic natio, which the nobility alone comprised, and this created a potential obstacle to any wholehearted adoption of nineteenth-century Czech nationality in ways which, disappointingly, are left unexplored.

Like many first books, Krueger's work still bears marks of a revised dissertation: the style is occasionally discursive, and throughout the author has a weaker grasp of the wider context than might be desired. In part this is because Krueger occasionally draws on seriously outdated secondary material: most strikingly, Bryce's late-nineteenth-century study of the Holy Roman Empire is cited repeatedly in preference to the sizable more recent literature that now exists in German. Yet her monograph gives important issues a welcome airing, provides a distinctive viewpoint on some well-known events, and adds new detail to our knowledge of this century of transition.