War and Supernature in Early Modern Europe

War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe. A study of the relationship between faith and warfare in 16th and 17th century Europe.

The great religious wars that took place in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s have always fascinated historians. This project investigates what people at the time thought about these holy wars.

Europeans at this time did not possess a secular category: they divided their world between the supernatural, where God intervened directly, and the natural, where humans used the reason God had given them to build their own lives.

The project will focus on two groups of intellectuals – Reformed or Calvinist Protestants and the Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church. Both these groups were accused by contemporaries of extremism; of drawing the supernatural too far into human life. For example, some Franciscans thought it was acceptable to convert Jews and Protestants by force, whereas most Catholics thought this was quite wrong.