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This chapter introduces various ways in which rulers in England and the Netherlands were assuming greater powers over their subjects, and the role of war in such developments. Princely ambition was evident in the wider provision of justice and in the regulation of religion in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; in the use of propaganda to shape public opinion and national identity; and the development of economic and social policy. Some of these trends were more closely related to war than others, but all interacted with it in shaping the relationship between princes and subjects.

This chapter outlines the religious development of Ireland between the Reformation and the late 18th centuries, and explains the failure of the Reformation in Ireland. It argues that the religious geography of Ireland was settled by the early 18th century and has remained unchanged since then.

The Conclusion investigates lines of continuity between the humanist hagiography and what precedes and follows it, especially in light of the Protestant Reformation. The chapter identifies two ways – the polemical and the critical – that later Catholic authors used and transformed the hagiographical legacy to which the early German humanists had made a substantial contribution. Counter‐Reformation authors such as George Witzel and Peter Canisius mastered a polemical use of hagiography to persuade readers away from the Protestant Reformers and instead towards renewed Catholicism. “Critical hagiographers,” in contrast, developed philological rules with which to evaluate the written traces of ancient and medieval Christianity's saints. These include Laurentius Surius and the Bollandists. This chapter illuminates the variety of ways that these later figures relied on and transformed the work of the early German humanists.

This chapter explores the history of the theatre and drama and its varying relationships with religious belief. It begins in the ancient world where the term ‘liturgy’ had its origins and where one such liturgical act was the staging of drama. It traces the revival of religious drama after its initial suppression by Christianity, not only in medieval mystery plays but also in now largely forgotten Reformation and Counter-Reformation drama. It then turns to baroque poetry and explores how disputes about ritual often reflected wider cultural change that is indebted to notions of theatre. Finally, it draws attention to the ways in which a relationship with religion continues, especially in the various theories that have been proposed about the value and purpose of drama.

The theology of the passion in the Catholic Counter‐Reformation is examined in the decress of the Council of Trent and in the Catechism written by Robert Bellarmine. The art of the early Counter‐Reformation is dominated by the figure of Michelangelo. His portrayals of the passion and crucifixion are studied in relation to the humanistic and theoretical emphases of the reform era. Michelangelo's “Mannerist” followers exemplify the new triumphal and affective emphases in Catholic theology in response to the Protestant Reformation.

Ferdinand II successfully terminated a Counter-Reformation campaign that had received its first impetus from the meeting of Habsburg and Wittelsbach princes in Munich in October 1579, but which had failed to achieve its main objectives in the reign of Karl II. This chapter assesses the achievements and shortcomings of the Ferdinandean Counter-Reformation by looking at the confessional development from the general expulsion in 1628 to the abolition of religious persecution in 1780–1781. Particular attention is given to the activity of the protagonists of the process of confessional consolidation which roughly spanned the century from the Inner Austrian edict of emigration to the resumption of systematic persecution in 1731. The imperfections of the Catholic achievement are discussed as part of an analysis of the governmental and ecclesiastical response to the problem of crypto-Protestantism in the Austrian lands and Bohemia in the 18th century.

This book demonstrates that the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to the process of state building in Inner Austria in various ways, most important among which were the enhancement of the power of the Habsburg Monarchy and the creation of an ideological formula for the consensus between the dynasty and the provincial nobilities who represented the political nation. On the other hand, there was the case of Hungary and the unsolved problem of crypto-Protestantism which illustrated the dialectics of a confessional policy that already carried the germ of self-destruction. In the course of the 18th century, it was to succumb to the dissolvent, secularising forces of the Enlightenment, whose ‘cosmopolitan’ expansionism was in turn checked by the countercurrents of nascent nationalism. The age of confessionalisation and aspiring confessional absolutism thus left an ambivalent legacy of repression and revolt, to be rejected or assimilated by the modern national movements of the peoples in the Habsburg Monarchy.

The events of the last quarter of the 16th century in the Kyivan metropolitanate largely determined the course of further ecclesiastical development, playing a decisive role in the history of the Ukrainian lands. The new era made unprecedented demands on the leaders of the Kyivan church, its institutions, and the mass of the faithful, while expanding contacts with the West brought the powerful influences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to bear on the Ukrainian lands. The impact of confessionalisation, which intensified both internal and external pressures on the old traditional structures of the Kyivan metropolitanate, proved overwhelming, and the church, failing to withstand them, split in two and sparked a religious crisis between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. One branch remained under the authority of the patriarchs of Constantinople, while the other subordinated itself to the pope of Rome. The growth of Counter-Reformation tendencies in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a great influence on the development of religious life in Ukraine.

By the early 17th century, the blurred religious allegiances of previous decades were rapidly giving way to a clear confessionalization. The Protestant Church of Ireland had become a colonial institution, in which a clergy overwhelmingly recruited from England ministered to an almost exclusively settler population. Meanwhile, the Catholicism of the Gaelic Irish and Old English was being reorganized along Counter-Reformation lines. Conflict between the government and the Old English reached a peak at the parliament of 1613. A later agreement to trade religious toleration for assistance in resolving the crown's financial difficulties (‘the Graces’) only confirmed the estrangement that now existed. The writings of the growing community of Irish exiles in Catholic Europe reflect the development of a militant Catholic ideology. By contrast, the dominant theme within Ireland itself was the continued attempt to seek an accommodation with the new political and social order.

This first chapter introduces the purpose of the book, which is to examine the Counter-Reformation in Styria, one of the provinces of Inner Austria's Habsburg Monarchy, from the beginnings of forcible recatholicisation in the late 16th century to the definite termination of religious persecution by the end of the 18th century. The geographical focus of this study reflects Styria's importance as the administrative and political centre from which the complex of Inner Austrian territories in the south-east of the Monarchy was governed directly (until 1619) or indirectly (after that date). Together with the adjoining Inner Austrian duchies of Carinthia and Carniola and the archduchy of Upper and Lower Austria, early modern Styria belonged to the so-called hereditary lands which formed the territorial core of the Austrian Habsburgs' Monarchy and the bedrock of the dynasty's political power. The terms of the 13th- and 14th-century constitutional settlements by which the Inner Austrian estates had pledged themselves permanently to the service of the Habsburgs as hereditary territorial princes invested the latter with a considerable measure of discretionary authority.

To some extent, the rise of Styrian Protestantism as one of Austrian Protestantism was generally associated with the spiritual turmoil which attended the formation of the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy in the 16th century. The spread of heterodoxy stood at the beginnings and accompanied the early stages of dynastic ‘state-building’ policy by which the Austrian duchies of Upper, Lower, and Inner Austria were slowly but inexorably drawn away from the Empire to become part of an increasingly eastern-based composite Monarchy. While this chapter argues that the Austrian Monarchy received its distinct intellectual identity during the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, it does not dispute the fact that the dynasty had hitched its fortune to the Catholic faith well before this date in important ways which effectively precluded members of the Austrian branch from open confessional deviance.

Towards the end of the 1570s, the forces of the Counter-Reformation were already rallying at the courts of Munich, Innsbruck, Vienna, and Graz, reflecting a more general though gradual Catholic recovery in central and eastern Europe towards the end of the 16th century. To the eyes of contemporary observers, however, the Inner Austrian nobility seemed to have achieved a success that spelt religious toleration for the Austrian lands at large. This chapter shows that 1578 was a turning point in bringing the opposed Catholic forces together in an effort to stem the tide of heresy. Although the Catholic counter-attack during the second half of Karl II's reign could not effect a complete reversal, it was able to discourage the further spread and institutional consolidation of the new faith by restrictive legal and political measures against urban Protestantism and the Lutheran school and church ministry.

Karl II's reign as duke of Inner Austria ended with a revolt in Graz against his Counter-Reformation policy. He was succeeded by Ferdinand in 1596. The circumstances of Ferdinand's accession draw attention to those factors which determined the eventual success of the Ferdinandean Counter-Reformation: the outlook and political approach of the new ruler and the attitude of the Inner Austrian estates. Ferdinand not only rejected the estates' demand for an incorporation of the ‘Pacification’; he also reverted to the old, strictly Catholic formula of the prince's oath, which had been modified in 1564 so as to be less offensive to the Protestant estates. Furthermore, he insisted that the estates' assemblies should take their oath of allegiance prior to any discussion of their religious grievances. Ferdinand made every effort to promote the numerically still weak Catholic party, a campaign that resulted in the complete abolition of the Protestant school and church ministry in Inner Austria.

Ferdinand's facile political victory over the Inner Austrian estates during his reign was not matched by equally swift progress of the Counter-Reformation in the villages and municipalities. Above all, it was the experience of local resistance which shaped the governmental response over the three decades from the beginning of the urban campaign in 1598 to the general expulsion in 1628. The shortcomings of the systematic reformation campaign in 1599–1600 were revealed by subsequent reports testifying to the resilience of Protestantism in the remoter regions of Upper Styria, in the settlements along the Hungarian border, and, most conspicuously, in the patrimonial villages and municipalities of the nobility, which in turn hampered the progress of the Counter-Reformation in ducal towns such as Bruck an der Mur. A residue of Protestantism in Upper Styria survived the Catholic onslaught of Ferdinand II and his successors and became a political problem in the 18th century.

The Counter-Reforming initiative between 1580 and 1600 in Inner Austria had rested first with the Catholic alliance shaped in 1579 and a nucleus of clerical reformers centred on the court in Graz. With the accession of Ferdinand in 1596, the Catholic court became the headquarters from which the Counter-Reformation was devised and directed under the leadership of a resolute prince who set himself successfully to the task of recovering control of the government apparatus, with the temporary exception of the War Council. The roving reformation commissions that had operated as ad hoc inquisitions in the reign of Karl II were turned into the regular device of a systematic policy. In the final stages of the Counter-Reformation, their activity was coordinated and directed by a new executive council, the government board of the Inner Austrian reform commission acting on the orders of the then Emperor Ferdinand II.

The Dantean hell was ordered, even hierarchical. The hell of the Catholic Counter‐Reformation, as well as most Protestant versions of hell, gave up that order in the interests of the psychological drama of damnation, with millions of the damned crushed promiscuously together, with a revolting stench. The chapter examines some Jesuit versions of hell, including one whose fearsome picture of the eternal and unspeakable sufferings of the damned bears a remarkable resemblance to the sermons on hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of James Joyce. It traces an English tradition of empirical speculation about the exact nature of hell, the composition of its fires, and where it might be located in the universe (in the sun, for instance), and the gradual rise in a sentiment hostile to the idea of everlasting punishment.