A TYPICAL Protestant view of European religious history might go like this. In medieval times, the Roman Catholic church grew increasingly corrupt and impervious to criticism. Then came the Reformation, with its new breath of freedom and tolerance. After a brief fightback that culminated in the ghastly Thirty Years War in 1618-48, Europe moved smoothly towards the Enlightenment and today's ideal of secular tolerance. It was all quite unlike, for example, Islam and the horrors of the Ottoman empire.
Most of this conventional picture is entirely wrong, as this splendid book by Benjamin Kaplan shows. Certainly, the medieval Catholic church continued to stamp heavily on heresy, but Enlightenment Protestants were often also deeply intolerant, not only of Catholics but also of each other (Mr Kaplan's book opens with the burning of Servetus, a noted Spanish Protestant, in Calvin's Geneva). It took more than 150 years after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 for most Europeans even to grasp the concept of religious tolerance. Well into the 19th century, the Ottomans were far more hospitable than the rest of Europe to religious minorities.
As he tells this story, Mr Kaplan ranges widely around Europe. He gives due weight to Britain and Ireland in a European setting: the civil war and the spread of Puritanism, the Catholic intolerance of James II and the anti-Catholic Gordon riots as late as the 1780s all argue against the easy assumption that the English were unusually tolerant compared with, say, the French. Yet Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and, later, his expulsion of the Huguenots were exceptionally intolerant acts that did much damage, not just to Protestants but to France.
The main focus of the book is, however, on the regions of Europe that had the most mixed-up religious map of all, such as Switzerland, the Low Countries (American-born Mr Kaplan, a history professor at University College London, is a Dutch specialist) and, above all, the German principalities that made up the Holy Roman Empire. The empire soon adopted the curious and often cruel practice of Cuius regio, eius religio (“whose the region, his the religion”), under which a local sovereign chose his subjects' religion. The book is worth a look merely for its fascinating vignettes of religious life in these regions.
One striking discovery is that there was more religious freedom in the 16th century than after the wars of religion ended a century later. The author tells of the widespread use of Auslauf, whereby Protestants were able to worship outside a Catholic city's walls; of the clandestine yet accepted Catholic churches in the Netherlands known as Schuilkerken; and of the practice of Simultaneum, the sharing of churches between Protestants and Catholics in such places as Biberach and, later, Augsburg. That sensible arrangement would be hard to imagine today.
Indeed, it would be a long time before Europe's Christians rediscovered such a spirit of religious tolerance. That is something critics of today's Islamic world should remember, as should unquestioning believers in the virtue of the European Enlightenment. As well as its fine story-telling, Mr Kaplan's book has the great merit of reinstating religion and quarrels about religious practice at the heart of the modern European history—where they clearly belong.