ABSTRACT
Both Britain and Germany had experienced civil war. But after more than a century of religious strife since the advent of the Reformation, and several decades of civil strife and even civil war, very different conclusions about the meaning of self-defence had emerged. This book studies the emergence of these nationally diverging paths by looking at Early Modern debates about self-defence in England and Germany and the reception of German ideas on the issue in England. The debate on self-defence cuts across the issues of state-building, European intellectual connections and ideas about sovereignty. The history of self-defence is simultaneously located in various contexts of current research on European religious strife, in which Protestants found themselves embroiled, and the specific context of what historians used to address as 'state-building'. Self-defence was at the core of defending the legality of resistance by explaining specific circumstances in which subjects, despite their subordinate position and without undermining the social order, might draw the sword.
