Wars of Decontamination

Following the lead of Natalie Zemon Davis, Mack Holt writes that the French “Wars of Religion” were truly religious wars, but then adds that “religion” has to be understood in a sixteenth century sense.  He denies that “three generations of French men and women were willing to fight and die over differences of religious doctrine, whether it was over how to get to heaven or over what actually transpired during the celebration of mass.”  Religion at that time should be seen as “a body of believers rather than the more modern definition of a body of beliefs.”  Thus, to talk about religious wars it simultaneously to talk about society: “In these terms, Protestants and Catholics alike in the sixteenth century each viewed the other as pollutants of their own particular notion of the body social, as threats to their own conception of ordered society.”

Further evidence that modernity is a purity movement.