The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589-1715 by Paul Kleber MonodReview by: Theodore K. RabbThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, Special Edition: Gender in Early ModernEurope (Spring, 2000), pp. 310-311Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2671384 .

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310 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXI/1 (2000)

end of his book is how an intellectually gifted and talented monarch such as Philip II could be perceived by friend and foe alike to be an utter failure? The answer lies in the political policies that the king pursued. Perhaps Kamen is correct to assert that some events were beyond the king's control, but surely not all of them! Until we investigate the king's role in such matters, particularly in the pivotal decade at the end of his reign, the definitive biogra- phy of Philip II will remain unwritten.

Edwvard Shannon Tenace, Lyon College

The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589-1715. Paul Kleber Monod. New Haven:Yale University Press. 1999. x + 417 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-300078- 10-2. A century has passed since Max Weber put the label "disenchantment of the world" on

the process whereby a European society permeated by magic and the power of the divine came to be seen in materialist, rational, and scientific terms. Even earlier, both temporally and historiographicallyJacob Burckhardt had called this momentous shift the discovery of the world and of man, and ever since scholars have sought both to define the process and to trace its tortuous development between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Monod focuses on one major aspect of this larger theme: the disenchantment of monar- chy, which he describes as taking place between the accession of Henri IV and the death of Louis XIV.With bureaucrats, secular-minded theorists, and the declining force of confes- sionalism ever more visible on the political scene, the struggle of the devout to retain the sacred aura of kingship became increasingly futile, and Monod lays out with admirable clar- ity the successive stages whereby such considerations as efficacy and practice came to justify royal authority. It was not so much the triumph of scepticism as the elevation of the state into a unifying cause for all its subjects. As Monod puts it, "the devout were gradually elbowed towards the fringes" and "millenarianism became a sign of dissidence or madness."

The decisive period, in his view, was the mid-seventeenth century, the period of upheaval that has come to be called an age of general crisis. Monod embraces this formula- tion, but is curiously hesitant and defensive about the usage. He fears that the "allure" of this periodization "has faded" as specialist studies have multiplied, and he cites a couple of hostile critics who have resisted the notion from the outset. But the term has now entered the textbooks, and seems almost as secure as "Renaissance," not to mention that Routledge felt the need to issue a second and enlarged edition of Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century in 1997. Monod confirms the usefulness of the concept as he demonstrates that the decisive moment in the rethinking of the nature of political authority (as in other areas) was the mid-seventeenth century.

His approach to the subject is carefully chronological. Although boundaries are often blurred, each of his five central chapters takes on a specific period, with the years 1610, 1637, 1660, and 1690 as turning points. Within these chapters, Monod surveys all the major states of Europe, and it is a notable feature of his analyses that he incorporates Russia and Poland-entirely appropriately, and to telling effect-into his discussion. As a result, he is able to find common concerns from Stockholm to Lisbon, from Moscow to Madrid. He has absorbed an enormous secondary literature, written in half a dozen languages over the past half century, to create his overview, and the result puts all students of the period in his debt.

Given his range, one must also applaud Monod's mastery of detail. The only slips I detected had to do with Charles I's patronage (Philip IV would have had good reason to

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Book Reviews 311

bristle at the tribute to the English king as "the greatest collector of paintings in seven- teenth-century Europe") and with a misreading of Jonathan Brown's interpretation of Velazquez's "Las Meninas." More generally, there should have been some treatment of the issue of dynastic politics. Herbert Rowen's work on proprietary dynasticism is closely related to Monod's themes, and its neglect is a weakness. Similarly, there seems to be insuf- ficient attention to the Scientific Revolution, that powerfully disenchanting, secularizing, and rationalizing force, which swept Europe at the very time that ideas about sovereignty and government were changing so dramatically. Even if one does not wish to posit cause and effect, one must recognize that the rise of science was a central and widely influential force in the transformation of western cultural life during the middle decades of the seven- teenth century.To the extent that the reconceptualization of politics was a part of that trans- formation, this crucial component deserves more consideration than it receives here.

Monod would not have needed to add more pages to take these matters into account, because they could easily have substituted for the one topic, recurring throughout the book, that seems a diversion from its main themes. This is what he calls "naturalizing the body," a venture into Foucauldian and psychological analysis of the definition of the indi- vidual that seems neither convincing nor directly applicable to his principal concerns. It is true that the belief in the king's "two bodies" is connected to the belief in sacred monarchy, and that the former had to wither before the latter could be overturned. But this quite spe- cific subject is expanded into a running commentary on attitudes toward the body and self, in which a few allusions are built into fragile generalizations. Monod is not always suffi- ciently cautious about the limited representativeness of courtiers' or theorists' comments, and in this instance he shapes a tenuous narrative that seems neither fully relevant nor entirely helpful to his larger case.

But this is a venial sin, easily forgiven in the context of a learned, lucid book. All treat- ments of Monod's subject will in future have to begin with the progression of ideas and policies that he has so carefully laid out; we will watch through his eyes as we see holy, anointed kings gradually become embodiments of collective will, and states slowly replace monarchies as the object of political veneration.

Theodore K. Rabb, Princeton University

Erasmus, the Anabaptists, and the Great Commission. Abraham Friesen. Grand Rapids and London: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998. xi, 196 pp. $18.00 PB. ISBN 0-802844-48-0. Professor Friesen's book is well written and his basic argument is well argued. In sum,

he maintains that Erasmus's idea of the normative standing of the Early Church was the guideline for the sixteenth-century Anabaptist program of the reform of the church. The book is enriched by several excursions into sundry stages of later historical interpretation. These excursi include a discussion of the pilgrimage of the pioneer American Mennonite historian, John Horsch, from praise for the "undogmatic" Hans Denck of the South German Anabaptist Brethren to defense ofAmerican Fundamentalism. Friesen also provides fresh insights into the way in which Harold Bender, Horsch's son-in-law, managed as an educational statesman and major church leader to walk a path between the alternatives of the sterility of a dehydrated dogmatism and the emancipated mush of American culture- religion. Serious students of this part of the story will find Albert Keim's biography-Harold S. Bender (1897-1962 of great help in fleshing out the details.

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