University of Pennsylvania history professor Richard S. Dunn based his book on the maelstrom of religious events in Europe during the era of absolutism. 130 years between 1559 and 1689 were an era of Protestant-Catholic struggle that revealed the ever-widening gap between Western and Eastern Europe. The French Civil War, the Dutch revolt against Philip II, the Scottish revolt against Mary Stuart, the Spanish attack on England, the Thirty Years' War in Germany, the Puritan Revolution, the Glorious Revolution in England - all these are religious conflicts, but caused simultaneously by other reasons. The ideological confrontation, which actively spread with the cessation of the dynastic wars between the Habsburgs and the Valois, left its mark on almost all aspects of European life: party politics, social structure, science, philosophy and art...