The marketing materials for this book make it sound like a thriller about to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. A kidnapping, a family torn apart, an incident that escalates into a war. And indeed, when the story unfolds, many of the cinematic ingredients seem to be there. The hapless young woman, both perpetrator and victim; the scheming priest and the fanatical magistrate facing off against each other; riots, reprisals, hair-raising injustice; a literal tug of war with a newborn baby over a baptismal basin. The screenplay almost writes itself.

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But who needs another book like that? Benjamin Kaplan, a leading scholar of the bumpy history of religious tolerance, has written something much more interesting: a micro-history that has the unexpected, unmistakable flavour of the world as it actually was.

The story he has unearthed from a number of Dutch archives is straightforward enough. In 1762 in the Dutch border town of Vaals, a baby boy was born to Hendrick Mommers, a Catholic cloth-shearer, and Sara Maria Erffens, his Protestant wife. Into which faith would he be baptised? Various contradictory promises and assurances had been made. In the end, he was baptised Protestant ¨C but not before Mommers¡¯ sister, Cunegonde, who was known to all as a simpleton, burst into the church, tried to snatch the baby, and assaulted members of the congregation. She was arrested, but a party of Catholic youths from over the border promptly broke into her makeshift prison and freed her.

Frozen conflicts can warm up fast, and old scripts of hatred and suspicion are easily remembered. But the spasms subside easily, too

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These two events ¨C the attempted violation of the sacrament of baptism and the successful cross-border prison break ¨C stirred up a good deal of trouble, but it is an exaggeration to call it a ¡°war¡±. Precisely one person died, in an almost random murder. Dutch attempts to bring the Catholic perpetrators to justice matched the attempts by Catholics in the German city of Aachen, an hour¡¯s ride over the border, to protect the rights of their co-religionists in Vaals. There were assaults, threats, intimidation and pressure. But over the course of the 1760s the conflict simmered down without ever being properly resolved.

Meanwhile, a prosecution slowly wound its way through the Dutch courts, led by a headstrong young magistrate who was convinced that the young woman was a mere tool and that behind the outrages lay the machinations of Vaals¡¯ Catholic priest, Johannes Wilhelmus Bosten. Both Cunegonde (who was rearrested) and the priest spent years in prison awaiting trial. Opportunities to prosecute others whose guilt seemed much more certain were missed: the magistrate reckoned that the priest¡¯s guilt was ¡°a moral certainty¡± regardless of the evidence, and would not let up. Kaplan assembles a pretty strong case that evidence was deliberately fabricated. But in the end, although both the cleric and the child¡¯s aunt were convicted, they were released not long after. Both of them vanished back into ordinary life, where the sources are almost silent. So too did everyone else involved in the case.

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A screenplay would need to invent a better ending, and tidy up loose ends. There are too many characters drifting through the story whose roles have no satisfying narrative shape. (Readers will need to keep a finger in the indispensable list of dramatis personae at the beginning, especially during the complex reconstruction of the contested events on the day of the baptism.) And there are too many unsolved mysteries. Why did Cunegonde do what she did? What had the couple actually agreed beforehand about their child¡¯s baptism ¨C if anything? Was the priest involved or not? We simply do not know.

The lack of cheap dramatic satisfaction, however, is amply repaid in insight and subtlety. It is by living in the company of these ordinary people, in their very particular place and time, dealing with an unusual but not extraordinary situation, that we discover something of the texture of their lives. Kaplan¡¯s skill is in weaving these wider contexts seamlessly into the narrative. And this is where the real fascination lies, and what the story is really about.

So it is a story about borderlands: Vaals was an enclave of Dutch territory entirely surrounded by the Holy Roman Empire. The border was almost invisible. Some houses actually straddled it. But occasionally it mattered decisively. Just as treason is famously a matter of dates, in these borderlands, heresy was a matter of maps. Minorities on both sides could and did simply hop across the borders for worship. But borders also made those minorities vulnerable: if Aachen¡¯s Catholics wished to put pressure on the Calvinist Dutch authorities, they had only to restrict the rights of their own Calvinist population. The interplay between the opportunities and the hazards that a region of fragmented jurisdictions offered to both governments and people is one of the book¡¯s recurrent themes.

It is also a story about law: how it could sometimes turn a blind eye, as Aachen¡¯s rulers did when they dared not face down Catholic rioters, and how it sometimes fixed on a particular incident almost arbitrarily and locked its jaws on it like death. The underlying theme here is the impossibility of the rule of law in early modern society. The charge against Cunegonde stated that her sacrilege ¡°cannot be tolerated in a land of justice¡±. That was a claim, in the teeth of the evidence, that the Netherlands was, or at least aspired to be, such a land. Could poor, simple Cunegonde even have understood that, rather than trying to rescue her nephew from heretics, she was assaulting the majesty and the amour-propre of the Dutch state?

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It is, finally, also a story about intolerance. This incident was the century¡¯s worst flare-up of religious tension in the region, but not the only one, and it paled beside the horrors of the previous century. The pattern, a strikingly modern one, is one of communities that managed to live together amicably most of the time, even to the point of intermarriage, but which could be summoned back to the old battle lines very quickly. Frozen conflicts can warm up fast, and old scripts of hatred and suspicion are easily remembered. But the spasms subside fairly easily, too. As the Cunegonde affair faded away, the old normality re-emerged, and remained until the armies of revolutionary France swept it away.

Kaplan wants to emphasise that this story belies the claims ¨C already pretty threadbare ¨C that the Age of Enlightenment was one of toleration. It is no secret, for example, that London¡¯s worst ever anti-Catholic riots took place in 1780. A subtler point, made clear by the intervention of the Dutch magnates who finally arranged for the release of Vaals¡¯ Catholic priest, is that Enlightenment tolerance was laden with prejudice of its own. You might believe in freedom of conscience and still despise Catholicism, in particular, as a religion of superstition, corruption and priestly conspiracy ¨C the very antithesis of Enlightenment values.

Throughout this account, Kaplan is level-headed, judicious, humane and shrewd. His story is fascinatingly messy and inconclusive, but his writing is sharp and insightful. He has produced a book that is not only an incomparable guide to life on this particular frontier, but a model of what micro-history can be.