Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910–1997) was born into an
innovative and intellectual English family. Her father, a direct
descendant of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, was the chief general
manager of the London and North Eastern Railway and her mother was
a novelist and travel writer. After success at Oxford, Wedgwood
rejected an academic career and took up writing instead. She
published her first history, The Thirty Years War (1938), before
her thirtieth birthday, and in the years that followed wrote a
succession of chronicles of seventeenth-century Europe that made
her one of the most popular and best-known historians in Britain.
Her most important works include The King’s Peace; The King’s War;
and William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange,
1533–1584, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
biography in 1944. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced
Studies, a Dame of the British Empire, and in 1969 became the third
woman to be appointed a member of the British Order of Merit.
Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of
History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent
book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.
"A book which is, and will long remain, the standard authority on
the subject…I doubt if there is anything in any European language
which covers the ground so comprehensively and so
satisfactorily."
— Spectator
"[Wedgwood] tells a story supremely well….she is by far the best
narrative historian writing in the English language. She is a
superb stylist, her eye for colorful detail is unerring, and she
has an unrivaled capacity for catching the signs and sounds and
smells of the past."
— Lawrence Stone
"God, I love this book. It’s the history of an utterly depressing
war with no real nobility that ultimately descends into
cannibalism. Right up my alley.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My 10 Favorite
Books," T: New York Times Style Magazine
"The greatest narrative historian of the twentieth century,
Wedgwood told complex stories in precise, human terms. The formal
perfection and clarity of her prose often recall the work of one of
her heroes, Edward Gibbon. Yet she contemplated and described in
rapid, vivid detail scenes of past and present horror that would
have robbed even the unflappable historian of the Roman Empire of
his marmoreal calm. The Thirty Years War shows her at her epic
best."
— From the introduction by Anthony Grafton
"This is a masterful narrative, written by one of the great
exponents of that all-too-rare skill. Threading her way through one
of the most complex and fraught eras of European history, Wedgwood
gives all who have followed her an object lesson in clarity and
readability that has not been surpassed."
— Theodore K. Rabb, Princeton University
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