Faith in War: Religion and the Military in Germany, C.1500-1650

While the social and cultural history of the early modern military has greatly advanced in the last few decades, the religious dimension of the military life in the Holy Roman Empire between 1500 and 1650 has hardly been explored. The Reformation brought profound political, social and cultural upheavals, but the religiosity of the men and women who followed the Christian life in the chaos of war still represents a large gap in the historiography. Faith in War shows that confessional antagonisms lost much of their meaning during war and coexistence became a fact of army life. Connecting military and civilian social and cultural history in these ways, Nikolas Funke’s case study on this period brings new life to important current historiographical discussions in a military context, including stereotyping, confessionalization, social discipline, deviance, toleration, religious violence, and the culture of death.

Nikolas M. Funke is a Research Assistant at the University of Münster. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Sussex, held a Past & Present Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research (London), taught at the University of St. Andrews and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and then a BRIHC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham.