In medieval military history, it is generally taken as a given that decisive field battles were rare and unusual events, generally avoided by medieval generals to the extent possible. Instead, warfare revolved around ravaging and siege - a positional, attritional warfare based on grinding one's enemy down. It is also my understanding that this was largely true for early modern warfare as well. However, beginning in the 17th century, European generals seem to have shifted from avoiding the risks inherent in large battles to fervently seeking them.
There wasn't an Age of Battles, to put it pithily. Battle has always been a part of war, but by their very nature, decisive battles are rare things. Siege, raid, and pitched battle are all tools available to a commander, and there are many problems in defining an age by one of them.
Beyond the questions of methodology, though, the alleged shift towards seeking battle just didn't happen in the 17th/18th centuries. Chandler credits the Duke of Marlborough with 'reviving' decisive battle (earlier 17th century figures like von Wallenstein, who had a big financial stake in their units, obviously tended to use the most cost effective approach), but we should remember that he really fought four large battles and scores of sieges. The last of these four, Malplaquet, was furthermore fought as part of his attempts to put the fortress at Mons under siege; he was fighting a positional war, just like the Duke of Parma a century before him and Frederick the Great a half century later.
Frederick the Great bears some investigation, too. Certainly, he fought a great many battles, but it's been commonly pointed out that he had little alternative to battle, since his kingdom lacked a solid fortified frontier (he liked to invade Saxony so as to knick their share of the Bohemian frontier). Furthermore, his writing and experience in warfare would indicate he considered strategic maneuver a superior tool to the tactical engagement. Contemporary writers like Lloyd and de Saxe joined him in agreeing with Vegetius, that it was better to destroy an enemy army by hunger than by the sword. Frederick got at least two bucketfulls of icewater to the face from Field Marshal von Daun, who at one point countered his invasion of Bohemia by maneuvering against Frederick's communications with Prussia (much of his army melted away in the precipitous retreat), and again at Kolin, where operations against the fortifications at Prague consumed his army to the point of being vulnerable to von Daun's counterstroke. Indeed, Frederick became quite a pessimist by the end of his career, declaring that the general symmetry of military skill and alliances made it impossible for a monarch to profit through military aggression.
If there was an 'age of battles', it was a very short one, lasting perhaps from 1805 to 1870. With Napoleon's Army Corps system, active use of partisans, general staffs, intensified foraging, more rapid marches, and professional officer corps, destroying an enemy army in a single battle (ideally by a concentric attack by separated army corps) and following up with a blistering pursuit became a possibility. While the Revolutionary levee en masse often fell short of expectations, the trend towards larger armies, which could simultaneously garrison their own fortresses, bottle up those of the enemy, and fight large field battles, was unmistakeable. Whereas the fortresses on the frontiers previously pointed like a knife at an invader's line of communications, now armies could leave behind troops to observe the garrison and proceed into the enemy's interior. This threat would force the enemy to accept battle, whereas for centuries prior the enemy army would as often opt to maneuver against your communications.
The great triumphs of decisive battle in the 19th century were quite short lived. The opening phase of the Franco-German War was as 'decisive' as any string of battles you could imagine, destroying both principle French field armies in a matter of months, but the increased mobilization of society that had made this short 'age of battles' possible would prove to be its undoing. After the destruction of their field armies, the French population itself took up arms against the German invaders, drawing out the war for months longer in a brutal national partisan struggle as well as several reconstituted Republican armies. von Moltke the Elder, one of the greatest theorists and practitioners of 'operations in the classic style' recognized as much by the mid 1870s, having calculated that a a preventative war against a rapidly rearmed France would no longer be possible. The world had left behind the Kabinetkreigen of the previous era, in which kings and princes fought battles on the field and made deals in palaces, and had entered the age of the Volkskrieg, the national struggle for existence.