Knowing almost nothing about this significant period in history I really want to read up on it soon. When I was looking for what to read I found Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy in the sub's booklist, but looking on goodreads I also found C.V. Wedgwood's book The Thirty Years War is very popular.
I was wondering if anyone here has read Wedgwood's book and could give me some insight on how accurate it is since it seems to have been written in the 1930s, and might be outdated compared to Peter's? Also, which might be a better read?
Perhaps I should also add that for me it isn't very important that it covers absolutely everything about the Thirty Years War as I will just be reading it for fun. I'm more of a casual reader so if the writing is quite convoluted I'm not sure I'll be able to stick with it (although I doubt these books are convoluted based on their popularity).
Wilson's book is clearly a doorstopper of a book and is incredibly detailed and represents a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on early modern Europe. As such, while the number of pages is intimidating, Wilson actually manages to touch a number of key areas to give a more holistic picture of this messy conflict. Wilson does an admirable job of conveying the convoluted nature of the war's origins and course in a coherent fashion.
This more nuanced and thorough approach is in contrast to Wedgwood's 1938 account of the war. Wedgwood was a popular historian of the interwar period and she often sacrificed theory and nuance for narrative. According to her book, the war was "an outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict." She gives relatively weight to the nature of confessionalization and religious conflict (which, to be fair, in 1938, historiography had not quite been able to wrest the history of the Reformation from the hands of theologians) and some of her descriptions of military commanders and decisions is somewhat simplistic. In the latter case, Wedgwood pushed the narrative that war fed war as lower-level military captains preferred a life of looting and pillage rather than listening to orders from their superiors, which according to her, added significantly to the destructiveness of the conflict. While this thesis has some merits, it is not as tenable as it would have been in 1938 given the subsequent historiography on the early modern military produced by the likes of Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker.
Two things that do stand out about Wedgwood's account. Firstly, her book is one of the classics of narrative history and although she self-consciously avoided theory, she does know how to package a diverse set of information into a workable and elegant narrative. Secondly, her bias and focus is on the civilian side of the military conflict, which is something not usually seen in popular histories of wars which have a marked tendency to put their gaze on battles, great captains, soldiers, and maneuvers. While this bias meant Wedgwood put too much uncritical attention on atrocity stories, it does tend to make her narrative history stand out, even for contemporary audiences.
So while Wedgwood's book is more readable, and, please note, Wilson is no slouch in this area as well, a lot of salient details are lost in her accessible narrative. Partly, this is the result of scholarship on the early modern period moving on from where it was in the interwar period, but the datedness of Wedgwood's account also stems from her own, rather negative, view of this conflict. Some of this bias is justified, especially with regards to civilian suffering, but other aspects represent a more simplistic view of the past.