:Julius Pflug et L'Allemagne du XVIe Siecle, Etudes et documents

Abstract

Robert von Friedeburg, Self Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530-1680, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, pp. 290, hb. £55, ISBN: 0754601773Recent historiography has witnessed two more or less discernable trends regarding the early modern world: the revival of comparative history, and the desire to understand 'England's troubles' within its European context. To the extent that this book seeks to address such concerns, and to introduce into English scholarship recent German research, it is entirely laudable. The author explores ideas of 'self-defence', in terms of the identity of those who could legitimately use force against rulers, and in what circumstances, and in terms of ideas of natural laws and rights. The aim is to demonstrate the 'influence' of German ideas in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries upon English thought during the Reformation, the reign of Charles I, and the civil wars, albeit the intention is to suggest that such ideas, displaced from their native context, had far more serious implications for social stability. In England, the lack of dispersed sovereignty, identifiable 'inferior magistrates', and elective monarchs, together with a rather different Reformation experience, ensured that notions of self-defence threatened the dissolution of civil government. This is a stimulating thesis, although its execution is far from successful, for a number of reasons.In developing the argument, stylistic awkwardness and clumsy translation accentuates some organisational difficulties. The first section, outlining developments in the understanding of self-defence in German thought, in terms of the role of minor princes, inferior magistrates, and heads of families, and in terms of resistance on the part of the whole body politic, discusses the importance of the Reformation, and discusses scriptual arguments from the Smalcaldic League to Melancthon and Selinus, and the Magdeburg Confession. Thereafter, it explores legal arguments for selfdefence later in the sixteenth century, particularly through the work of Althusius and Arnisaeus, and in terms of the development of ideas of popular sovereignty and representation, and of the notion that the monarch, or emperor, could be singulis maior, but universis minor, and that the provinces could defend themselves. It concludes by examining ideas of patria, 'fatherland', and salus populi during the Thirty Years War, and the attempts to rally the peasants in resistance. Such analysis is undoubtedly interesting, but the argument becomes lost under the weight of detailed scholarly exposition, which may be thought to be somewhat out of place in such a broad-ranging and comparative analysis, which arguably requires much greater organisational drive and sense of direction. More problematic is the concept of self-defence. Although this is logically distinct from resistance, which involves conscious struggle against governmental authority in the interest of different ideas, the authors under discussion may not always have been interested in such distinctions, and the two were often intimately connected. …