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  • The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization
  • Mack P. Holt
The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization, Vols. 1 and 2. By Cathal J. Nolan. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. ISBN 0-313-33045-X (set). Maps. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. lxxxv + lxvii, 1076. $249.95.

Wars of religion were hardly unique to early modern Europe, as the author of this fine reference work makes clear in the introduction. Indeed, the idea that "God (or the gods) is with us" is almost ubiquitous throughout the history of the world. What makes this work significant, however, is the author's contention that religious wars changed in intensity and in global [End Page 212] scale in the late Middle Ages during the later Crusades and the Hundred Years' War, as the idea of a common res publica Christiana dissipated in the face of competing conceptions of the nation state. This led to a period of intensive and violent religious warfare from ca. 1450 to 1650. Though I would have liked a more thorough discussion of this point than the three to four pages in the introduction, this forms the author's justification for a reference work covering the period 1000–1650.

What stands out immediately about this encyclopedia is that the entire work—over 3,000 entries from abatis to Zwingli spread over 1,000 pages of closely printed text—was written by Cathal J. Nolan. He is not an editor in the usual sense of an encyclopedia, but the author of this work. This way of constructing an encyclopedia of largely (though not exclusively) military history has its strengths and weaknesses, but in my view the advantages—coherence, readability, and focus—far outweigh the disadvantages. Moreover, in every area of expertise—from firearms and technology to social history and theology—Nolan has read and synthesized the major expert or experts in the field, making this a very impressive work of synthesis. The work is truly global in scope, even if the coverage is more weighted toward Europe and its colonies than the rest of the world and toward the second half of the period covered compared to the first. Both of these focuses, however, are convincingly explained by the way gunpowder transformed European warfare in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

Finally, the work will be useful to both military historians and non-military historians of early modern Europe alike. While all the set-piece battles, firearms, wars, and generals are given full coverage, the book sets out to explain the more complicated and symbiotic relationship between war and society. Hence there are extended entries on the heresies of the later Middle Ages and the reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to a bibliography of more than 40 pp. (including nearly a hundred web sites and on-line sources) and 25 pp. of clear and useful maps, the author's intensive efforts at cross-referencing and listing every possible way an entry might be found means that this is an extremely user-friendly as well as reliable reference work. If you have only one reference work on early modern military history on your shelf, this is now the one to have.

Mack P. Holt
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
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