1This ambitious, bilingual project was conceived as the result of an international conference on ‘Religious Writings & War in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth,’ held in November 2004 in Montpellier. The specific aim was to examine ‘how war is represented in the religious writings produced by British and Commonwealth Christians’ from the Middle Ages right through to the present-day hostilities in Iraq, with particular emphasis on the way war has been either justified or rejected by the members of various churches in different contexts.

2Two introductory pieces, a formal preface by Gilles Teulié and a theological presentation of the doctrine of the just war in Protestant thought by Jean-Daniel Causse, both in French, set the scene for a series of seventeen specific case studies, eleven of which are in English. These are divided into four sections: England 16^th-17^th Centuries, Great Britain 19^th-20^th Centuries, Empire, and Commonwealth. These are very varied, moving from the predominantly literary (Shakespeare appears twice and Bunyan once) to the strictly historical, with a musical interlude from Robert Griffiths, who provides an overview of war and peace in British hymnology in a fascinating study which places equal emphasis on the tunes and the words of the hymns in question.

3One of the highlights of the first section is Nicolas Myers’ analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumous reputation as a perfect example of Protestant chivalry and of Sir Fulke Greville’s role in creating and maintaining that image. This informative study finishes with some interesting speculation about James I’s eldest son, Prince Henry, who can also be seen as a model of Protestant knighthood in the lineage of Sidney. In the second section, Keith Robbins presents an overview of the British churches’ attitude to war from the Crimean conflict in the mid-19^th century to the fight to regain the Falkland Islands from the Argentinian invaders in the 1980s. This is followed by Michel Fourcade’s study of the Catholic-led “Sword of the Spirit” movement during the Second World War. Although most of the information included is easily available in English, this is probably the first French treatment of the movement and includes an interesting analysis of its role in opening up the English Catholic Church to the idea of collaboration with other Christians.

4The Empire section mainly concerns faith and war in Africa and includes three papers on the Boer War. Richard Samin’s presentation of Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland not only underlines the impossibility of separating religion and politics in the South African situation in the 1890s, but also how a writer known for her free-thinking and ambivalent attitude to the Christian faith could use Christianity to expose the unacceptable conduct of prominent political figures and the moral decline of a culture. Rodney Mader’s and Gilles Teulié’s contributions concern challenges to the well-known pacifist convictions of the Quakers. Mader shows how, in Pennsylvania, the Quakers’ refusal to fight led to the Friends being accused of unpatriotic attitudes and ultimately losing political control of the state founded by one of their number. Teulié, on the other hand, describes the crisis of conscience, which faced the Quaker chocolate manufacturers in England, when asked by Queen Victoria to provide special gift boxes of their chocolate for the British soldiers on active service in South Africa. The final section brings the volume right up to date with papers on the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Canadian Christians’ attitudes to the current, post-9/11 hostilities and Pope John-Paul II’s apology to the Australian Aborigines for the Catholic Church’s role in separating children from their parents from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s.

5Beautifully presented, with Frank Dadd’s thought-provoking painting ‘An Oath of Vengeance’ on the front cover, this collection of articles provides an enthralling overview of the subject of the Christian religion and war, which is well worth reading. The only possible criticism is that summaries of the articles in the other language might have been appreciated by the reader with limited knowledge of one of the two languages used. A companion volume on the subject of war sermons is at present being prepared for publication.