War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648-1713- Edited by David Onnekink. [Politics and Culture in North-Western Europe, 1650-1720.] (Burlington, VT:Ashgate Publishing. 2009. Pp. xvi, 274. $124.95. ISBN 9780-754-66129-0.) The treaty of Munster has been considered a watershed of early-modern history for a considerable period of time. Whereas up to 1648 religion- or, to be more precise, the confessional divide- was the determining factor of internal and external politics, it ceased to be so once the Thirty Years'War had come to an end; instead, politicians (mostly monarchs) began to form alliances and wage war purely from considerations of reason of state; if religion played a role in politics at all, it merely served as a convenient means of conveying higher dignity to Machiavellian interests that were in need of benevolent disguise. This understanding of early-modern relations, the conviction that war and peace underwent a rapid process of secularization after 1648 has been questioned for at least the last ten years; the diplomacy of individual nation-states such as England and France or the international outlook of the semi-sovereign principalities of the Holy Roman Empire have come to be interpreted as mirroring their power politics as well as the religious convictions of their princes. This reinterpretation of post- Westphalian politics, however, has not yet led to a fundamental reappraisal of the system of that period; in so far, the eleven articles collected in this volume (together with the editor's introduction and Benjamin Kaplan's concluding remarks) represent a new approach to the political history of the second half of the early-modern age and to the complex question of the relationship between politics and religion on the eve of the Enlightenment. The majority of the contributions deal with British and Dutch phenomena; during the reign of William III of Orange (1689-1702), Great Britain and the Netherlands were, indeed, hardly distinguishable as factors of politics. Consequently, the volume can hardly be considered a balanced account of western European perceptions of politics between 1648 and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, let alone of Protestant and Catholic perspectives alike (as is suggested in the introduction); instead, the reader is presented a picture of the growing fears of Protestant Europe toward an inexorable Catholic supremacy embodied by belligerent France, which had come to supplant Habsburg Spain as the epitome of an aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Although it is, without a doubt, correct to assume that many English and Dutch politicians in that period conceived Louis XIV's France a threat to European Protestantism and, consequently, felt the need to unite against the universal aspirations of the Bourbon monarchy, this does not imply either that the cause of Protestantism was in truth at risk at the time or that Catholics did not feel more or less the same toward the emerging Protestant powers, notably Great Britain and the States General. …