Introduction

Abstract

perhaps feel closer to the age of religious wars and conflicts than to the ideal type of Voltairean enlightenment?Since the 1990s, early modern historiography has reacted to this shift of themes and the perception of time horizons. For example, from the 1960s on, historians discussed the wars in late sixteenth-century France in terms of 'Civil Wars' about social conflicts between some proto-bourgeois actors and feudal lords, or at least as wars caused only by conflicts between different noble factions. It was only with the monumental study by Denis Crouzet, bearing the telling title Holy Warriors (1991), that religion was reintroduced into the discussion, as Mack P. Holt 1993 has rightly remarked. Some historians even took up the nineteenth-century notion of 'fundamentalism' to project it back onto the confessional antagonisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Schilling 2007).At the same time that the 'religious turn' in historiography, political and cultural studies generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and of their cultural effects -from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices -the question of how people could dissemble their faith and avoid religious conflict began attracting new interest. Often, the issue of religious pluralisation and the divisions between Catholic and Protestant positions, among sectarian movements, between the church and the state or between Christianity and Islam, have been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation: the religious turn entered the scene with themes like 'holy warriors' and 'religious fundamentalism'. This may have been due to the fact that religious plurality becomes most evident in polemic representations such as pamphlets, treason statutes, religious tracts or ecclesiastical historiography, each claiming authority for their particular perspective. While such representations clearly reflected and actively shaped early modern culture, they did not comprise this culture in its entirety. As scholars like Carlo Ginzburg or Peter Zagorin already pointed out many years ago, 3 early modern confessional controversy did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred, nor did it lead to a paralysis of social agency. Rather, everyday life had to go on, people had to adjust somehow to divided loyalties -between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests or between officially sanctioned and privately held kler 2002kler , Singer 2003. For a discussion of this issue in relationship to the concerns explored in our volume, see the afterword by Jane Newman. 3 For a detailed overview of this scholarship, see part 3 of this introduction.