Religious Warfare in Europe 1400-1536 [Hardcover]

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.


1. Religious Warfare in the Late Middle Ages and Early Reformation
2. A Crucible of Religious Warfare: Bohemia during the Hussite Wars 1400-1437
3. The Christian Commonwealth of Europe 1437-1536
4. The Assembling of Authority: Scripture, Messianic Individuals, and Symbols
5. the Three Turks
6. The Critique of Religious War
7. Conclusion: Perspectives
Bibliography
Index

...Housely is uniquely qualified to discuss the subject of religious wars...[H]e 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 Europeis 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 OttlcZ