Religious warfare has been a recurrent feature of European history. In this intelligent and readable new study, the distinguished Crusade historian Norman Housley describes and analyses the principal expressions of holy war in the period from the Hussite wars to the first generation of the Reformation. The context was one of both challenge and expansion. The Ottoman Turks posed an unprecedented external threat to the 'Christian republic', while doctrinal dissent, constant warfare between states, and rebellion eroded it from within.
This is a major contribution to both Crusade history and the study of the Wars of Religion of the early modern period. Professor Housley explores the interaction between Crusade and religious war in the broader sense, and argues that the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was organic, in the sens that it sprang from deeply rooted proclivities within European society.

Review

"...Housely is uniquely qualified to discuss the subject of religious wars,...he succeeds in demonstrating the continuity of ideas linking the crusades of the Middle Ages with the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religious Warfare in Europe is also valuable as a broad historiographical study..."-- HISTORY: Reviews of New Books

"What makes Religiious Warfare extraordinarily good and of intest to scholars and students alike in any field is, first and foremost, its uncompromising comparitive perspective. Housley's story ranges from much-neglected central Europe and Iberia to the Ottoman lands, Africa, the New World, and the core lands of western Europe. Housley shifts from case studies to thematic discussions, inviting the reader to examine his conclusions from a variety of perspectives. We must all be grateful indeed to Housley for writing such an intelligent, insightful, and moving book. It illuminates vividly and reflectively one of his eary quotations from Peter Partner: "the violence men do, they seek to justify." Then, as is often done today, men justify violence by the preposterous claim that it is God's will." Speculum

About the Author

Norman Housely is a Professor of History at the University of Leicester