![]() 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. Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War., 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. By the war's end, ravaged as all the states were by violence, disease and destruction, Europe was more stable, but with sovereign states rather than empires, and with a secular order. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict.Wilson then provides a meticulous account of the war, introducing some of its great personalities: the crafty General Wallenstein the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, who preserved his state through canny political treaties and military operations and Hapsburg archdukes Rudolf and Matthias, the brothers whose quarrels marked the future of Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |