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Probably the most prolific, and arguably the most learned, religious historian of his generation, W. R. Ward, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Durham, has produced an admirable synthesis of his many years of labor on the history of early modern Christianity in Britain and continental Europe. In a career stretching back some 40 years, Ward has produced over a dozen seminal studies of British and German religious history, including some of the most powerful writing on Methodism and Pietism ever published.

Having once described himself in print as an old Ranter (an English Primitive Methodist), Ward was unusual in his generation for having nothing much to do with either traditional ecclesiastical history or the new-fangled social history of religion as pioneered by Marxist historians and those influenced by social anthropology. For Ward's liking, the former was too prone to celebrate the achievements of established churches while the latter had a way of reducing religious history to the bare foundations of economic and social control. Ward has always had too much interest in the religious achievements of enthusiasts to peer at the history of religion either through the windows of cathedral closes or from the perspective of mainly reductionist theories about the social function of religion. He has been, and still remains, an iconoclast, and a formidably intelligent one at that.

For those of us who entered the academy in the 1970s, Ward was something of a hero figure. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm had written spellbinding pieces on Methodism based on the thinnest of evidence; Ward, in his Religion and Society in England 1790-1850 (1972), produced a work of intricate brilliance based on the thickest of evidence. The problem with younger Ward, as with older Ward, is that he made few concessions to the ignorance of his readers and resolutely refused to simplify a complex story. Some historians can be read by the yard, Ward only by the inch. Densely packed sentences, an endless supply of ideas and few pauses for breath or summary are his trademarks, and have persuaded some to en gage Ward, not through his monographs, but through his essays, many of which were collected and published in Faith and Faction (1993). Some of his most innovative essays were attempts to discover the roots of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, not in the transatlantic revivalism of common historical currency, but among the displaced and persecuted Protestant minorities of Habsburg-dominated central and eastern Europe. The themes explored in these essays were brought to a dazzling climax in the publication of his Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992), which will re main the standard ac count of the Great Awakening for years to come, though it too is not a book for casual reading.

Not surprisingly, some of the themes and not a few of the dramatis personae of that book reappear in Christianity under the Ancien Regime, but the scope and purpose of Ward's new book is quite different from his earlier work. His aim here was to pro duce "a brief, but comprehensible, account of Christianity in Europe between the Westphalia settlements of 1648 and the French Revolution of 1789." The main focus of the book is not the religious institutions themselves, nor even the religious beliefs and practices of early modern Europeans (the primary work in this area according to Ward has not yet been done), but rather to investigate the religious policies formulated by rulers, churchmen, revivalists, and missionaries. With characteristic forthrightness, Ward states in the preface that his book is organized around a British/Central European axis, with comparatively less attention paid to France, Spain, and Italy. Protestantism is therefore more comprehensively treated than Catholic ism, despite the fact that there were more Catholics than Protestants in early modern Europe. Ward's defense of such an approach is to state that the Counter-Reformation was running out of steam at any rate, and that more new things were happening on the ground in Protestant Europe than in Catholic Europe.

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