![]() ![]() ![]() It is huge both in its scene-setting and its unfolding narrative detail… It is to Wilson’s credit that he can both offer the reader a detailed account of this terrible and complicated war and step back to give due summaries. It turns out that the quintessential war of religion was scarcely one at all… Wilson’s masterful account of the Thirty Years War is a reminder that war, and peace, are almost never the offspring of conviction alone. Wilson severely qualifies this conventional wisdom. Historians typically portray the Thirty Years War as the last and goriest of Europe’s religious wars-a final bonfire of the zealots before the cooler age of enlightened statecraft. It also offers a bracingly novel interpretation. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy is a history of prodigious erudition that manages to corral the byzantine complexity of the Thirty Years War into a coherent narrative. “Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory… A definitive account has been needed, and now Peter Wilson, one of Britain’s leading historians of Germany, has provided it. ![]()
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