Religion and Conflict, Conflict and Religion

Abstract

In this chapter, the relationship between confessional conflict and Catholic religious practice will be explored for France during the religious wars of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through the lens of the traditional devotion of long-distance pilgrimage. Study of the relationship between religion and conflict, particularly religion as a cause or catalyst of conflict, has a very long history and historiography. The relationship between religion and conflict through an inverted lens that of the impact of conflict on religion is currently of great interest in academic study, particularly issues such as "fundamentalism" and "radicalization" as causes and consequences of contemporary wars and insurgencies. It explores the nature and narrative of religious conflict as it affected pilgrimage, then examines different ways in which shrine-keepers and pilgrims responded to the conflicts and disorder around them. Reformed Protestants responded to the veneration of saints with iconoclasm.