A. C. Duke

War has ever exercised a great appeal on men's minds. Oscar Wilde's witticism notwithstanding this fascination cannot be attri buted simply to the wicked character of war. The demonic forces released by war have caught the artistic imagination, while sages have reflected on the enigmatic readiness of each new generation to wage war, despite the destruction, disillusion and exhaustion that war is known to bring in its train. If there never was a good war and a bad peace why did armed conflicts recur with such distressing regularity ? Was large-scale violence an intrinsic condition of Man? The answers given to such questions have differed widely: it has even been suggested that the states of war and peace are not as far removed from one another as is usually supposed. The causes of war and the interaction between war and society have long been the subject of philosophical enquiry and historical analysis. Accord ing to Thucydides no one was ever compelled to go to war; Cicero remarked how dumb were the laws in time of war, while Clausewitz's profound observation concerning the affinity between war and politics has become almost a commonplace. War being the severest test a society or state can experience historians have naturally been concerned to investigate their rela tionship.

Volume VI War and Society Paper Delivered to the Sixth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference

Britain and the Netherlands

C. A. Tamse

The theme chosen for the seventh conference of Dutch and British historians - relations between Church and State in the two countries since the Reformation - cannot pretend to any originality. A subject so germane to the history of Europe, and indeed of those parts of the world colonized by Europeans and evangelized by the Christian churches, has naturally attracted the attention of numerous scholars. The particular attraction of this study of the action and reaction of Church and State in Britain and the Netherlands lies in the scope it offers historians and political scientists for making comparisons be tween two states, both of which endorsed the Protestant Reformation while rejecting absolutism. But the dissimilarities are quite as striking. In the Netherlands the Reformed Church came to hold a curiously equivocal position, being neither an established Church in the English sense nor an independent sect. Yet even after the formal separation of Church and State in 1796 and the rise to political prominence of Dutch Catholicism, ties of sentiment continued to link the Dutch nation and the Reformed Church for some time to come. Within England the Anglican Church maintained its constitutional standing as the established Church and its social position as the Church of the 'Establishment', though it had to recognize a non-episcopal estab lished Church of Scotland and accept its disestablishment in Ireland and Wales.

Volume VII Church and State Since the Reformation Papers Delivered to the Seventh Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference

Britain and The Netherlands

Alastair Duke has long been recognized as one of the leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands, known internationally for his important work on the impact of religious change on political events which was the focus of his Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (1990). This new volume explores the emergence of new political and religious identities in the Netherlands. These essays, together, demonstrate how dissident identities shaped and contributed to the development of the Netherlands during the early modern period.

A. C. Duke

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