Putting History Back into the Religious Wars: A Reply to Mack P. Holt

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Mack P. Holt's review essay on the historiography of the French religious wars entitled Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion, which recently appeared in French Historical Studies 18:2 (1993), attempts to assess the meaning of recent work on the French religious wars. Scrutinizing the work of Denis Crouzet, Barbara Diefendorf, Denis Richet, Michael Wolfe, and myself, Holt argues that-my work excepted -the tendency is more and more to view religion as an independent variable explaining the civil wars. Tracing the sources of the recent historiography of this period to its origins in Weber, Durkheim, the Annales, and twentieth-century anthropology, Holt seeks to show how as a result of the work of Natalie Davis and John Bossy a new appreciation of religion has emerged, seen as practice and consciousness as well as dogma. As a result of this deeper understanding of religion, contemporary historians have become increasingly inclined to view religion as a historical force in its own right. Holt allows that my work does a superb job of showing that social tensions were rife during the civil wars and that class conflict was a significant element of sixteenth-century society. He nonetheless concludes that he [Heller] is unable to delineate the correspondence these tensions have with the Wars of Religion. Holt regards my book as the latest and perhaps most extreme example of a series of works by Henri Drouot, Elie Barnavi, and Robert Descimon which wrongly seek to explain away the religious by invoking the social and economic. In so doing Holt raises some important methodological issues which