(Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholic...)
Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.
Guillermo el Taciturno: Guillermo de Nassau, príncipe de Orange 1533-1584 (Spanish Edition)
(Campeón de las libertades de los Países Bajos frente al p...)
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Cicely Veronica Wedgwood was a British writer and a narrative historian of the 17th century. She was one of Britain's most celebrated historians.
Background
Cicely Veronica Wedgwood was born on July 20, 1910, in Stocksfield, England. She was the descendant of the great 18th-century Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood, about whom she wrote a biography. Her father, Sir Ralph Wedgwood, was chairman of British Railways during World War II. Her mother, Iris Pawson, was the author of several books of history and topography. Her mother's father, a formidable patriarch, doted on his favorite granddaughter. He was well-travelled and well-read and had a great influence on her. At age of 12 she was encouraged by her father to write history because he thought she was writing too much poetry and fiction.
Education
In 1927-1928 Wedgwood attended Bonn University and learned German. She was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. She then studied at Oxford University, where her history tutor was the famed A. L. Rowse. She graduated with honors in history in 1931.
Wedgwood published her first book with the support of Rowse and historian G. M. Trevelyan, a family friend. This was Strafford, 1593-1641 (1935), the story of the brilliant, tragic adviser to King Charles I. Her second book is a study of "that squalid struggle", as Wedgwood called it, The Thirty Years War (1938). She relied on primary sources in the relevant languages and on seeing for herself the locales she was to describe in her history. Written with clarity, detachment, and freshness, it was the first good book on the subject, written when she was 28. William the Silent (1944), a book about William I, prince of Orange, the Dutch statesman and the father of Dutch independence, has been criticized for being unfair to Philip II of Spain, but the book points out that William was a happy man until his country's sufferings made him "Silent. " It has been translated into six languages. Wedgwood went on from The Great Rebellion, the British civil war, to give the conclusion of the story in A Coffin for King Charles: The Trial and Execution of Charles I (1964). The book is the "finest account of the trial that has ever been written," according to the historian J. H. Plumb.
Her studies of poetry and literature are also impressive. She edited poetry: New Poems, 1965: A P. E. N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1966). Wedgwood also was successful as a German translator.
Wedgwood lived off her books, lectures, talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation, reviews, and fellowships. She was literary editor of Time and Tide, a London journal from 1944 till 1950, and a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University from 1953 to 1968.
She was a trustee of the National Gallery in London for 16 years from 1960.
Her writings include her essays, which are interesting for autobiographical reasons: Velvet Studies: Essays on Historical and Other Subjects (1946) and Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays (1960). She spent her later years working mainly on a volume of world history, The Spoils of Time: A World History from the Dawn of Civilization through the Early Renaissance (1985). Unlike many academic histories, Wedgwood's books were highly readable and sold in great numbers.
Wedgwood’s narrative style in writing historical tomes made her work appeal to the layman yet was so accurately researched and detailed that some of her books, especially ones on the English Civil War and Thirty Years War, became standard texts for history classes.
She is also on the Editorial Advisory Board of American Imago.
Wedgwood respected the power of historians' view of truth and believed that "historians should always draw morals", so that villains could not use their work to deceive the public. She was also willing to change her assessment of historical figures when new information was unearthed.
Quotations:
"I have tried to describe the variety, vitality and imperfections as well as the religion and government of the British Isles in the seventeenth century, deliberately avoiding analysis, and seeking rather to give an impression of its vigorous and vivid confusion."
"I am by nature an optimist. I continue stubbornly to believe that if an intelligent reader is given all the facts (or should I say all the available facts), he should be able to work out his own conclusions about the underlying causes. .. I have a very deep suspicion of the modern habit of analyzing causes without a close attention to facts."
"The stuff of history is by no means coherent. No agreed consensus has yet emerged, nor ever will. "
Membership
Wedgwood was a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom.
Personality
A great narrative stylist, Wedgwood was criticized by some historians whose writing was more analytical or interpretive. Wedgwood shunned interpretation and let the narrative speak for itself. She was interested in how things happened, rather than why they happened.
Quotes from others about the person
"She had a novelist's talent for entering into the character of the giants of history."
Connections
Wedgwood was a lesbian. Her partner of almost 70 years was Jacqueline Hope-Wallace.