Book Review: Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg by Sean Dunwoody

Abstract

ography mirrored and influenced the development of these notions, and intimates that history writing was a major conduit for their transformation. Class, for instance, seems to have acquired increasingly economic overtones and become ever more associated with conflict: at first a defining element of a harmonious society – in physiocracy – it then became that of a peacefully cooperating community marked by class oppositions – in Sieyès’ thought – to end up as the driver of national class struggle across the centuries – in Guizot’s adaptation of Thierry’s ideas. Otherwise, to demonstrate the book’s significance, it would have helped to discuss how the historical works studied were received beyond the world of scholarship, and specifically how they might have affected or reflected government policy. D’Auria could also have given a sense of his authors’ relationship to present debates on the French national past – a move that could have aided in assessing their continuing influence on, or irrelevance to, present scholarship (including his own). These, however, are small objections to what will likely become a reference on the history of French historiography, as well as a definitive work on the historiographical shaping of modern French national identity.