We are the creations of history. We are also the creations of the history in this book. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding this history.

The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism.

The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Yet all the participants professed Christianity, forgetting the teachings of Christ while tearing one another apart over religious differences.

Will Durant, author of the monumental eleven-volume series The Story of Civilization, is an unparalleled guide to this culturally rich but brutal and complicated era. He explains how religious differences meshed with the self-interest of nations and monarchs, showing how the spirit of later times was shaped and molded.

Durant takes us through the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France. His narrative reaches its climax with the titanic Thirty Years’ War, which pitted Spain and Austria against the rest of Europe, with appalling results.

Durant also shows how this mindless warfare led to a disillusionment with religious dominance of Western Europe, paving the way not only for reason and scientific progress but for individual rights—most crucially freedom of religious belief.

But this volume does not limit itself to wars and kings and politics. It explores the immense cultural heritage of the early modern era, including the golden age of Spanish art and literature, with painters such as Velásquez and El Greco and books such as Don Quixote. It reveals to us the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, the tragedian Pierre Corneille, and great artists from the Low Countries such as Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens.

Anyone wanting to understand the early modern era, which has shaped our minds and thought right up to the present, could find no better guide than Will Durant.