A Continent In Carnage: Was religious fanaticism the real reason for Europe’s decades-long conflict

Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Collins reviews a new book by Peter H. Wilson: The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Collins writes: “It also offers a bracingly novel interpretation. 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. Mr. Wilson severely qualifies this conventional wisdom. It turns out that the quintessential war of religion was scarcely one at all.”