"This book is comprehensive in its treatment of the political, social and cultural issues surrounding the Reformation and the development of European states. . . . It will provide an excellent conclusion to the late medieval developments covered in the first half of the Western Civilisation sequence of courses; it will also provide an excellent baseline for students studying the second half." -- Nancy McLoughlin, Willamette University
The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History fills a gap in recent studies of the great pan-European conflict, providing fresh translations of thirty-eight primary documents for the student and general reader. The selections are drawn from the standard political documents, from the Apology of the Bohemian Estates for the Defenestration of Prague to the text of the Treaty of Westphalia, as well as from imperial edicts, trial records, letters, diary entries, and satirical broadsheets, all directly translated from the Early New High German, French, Swedish, and Latin. The volume contains some ten illustrations and one map . . . and on the whole is well organized and well presented with a judicious amount of footnotes and a slim For Further Reading section. A succinct introduction introduces the four sections, each with its own substantial introduction: (1) Outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1623), (2) The Intervention of Denmark and Sweden (1623-1635), and (3) The Long War (1635-1648). The concluding section (4) Two Wartime Lives (1618-1648), interestingly juxtaposes the journals of a wandering mercenary and a settled townsman. The first is the diary of Peter Hagendorf, kept between the years 1624 and 1649 and only rediscovered in 1993. Hagendorf experienced the war as a common mercenary from the Baltic to Italy, from France to Pomerania. His counterpart is Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a small town in the territory of the free imperial city of Ulm whose Zeytregister chronicled happenings both in the neighborhood and further afield. The engrossing accounts of their shifting fortunes over the three decades of the war really help to give this collection of texts, and the troublesome period itself, a human face. They are the stuff from which Grimmelshausen would craft his great novel of the war, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1668). Tryntje Helfferich is to be applauded for this consistently interesting and eminently useful volume. --Martin W. Walsh, University of Michigan, in Sixteenth Century Journal
There is, to my knowledge, no other book of this sort in English that competes in giving a detailed account of the Thirty Years War. Helfferich has done a remarkable job in assembling texts that convey the sweep of the war, the religious and constitutional questions involved, the international involvement of especially Denmark, Sweden, and France, and the turbulent misery that the war produced, especially in the Holy Roman Empire. I do not know of a better representation of what the Peace of Westphalia (the two treaties, at Osnabrück and Münster) actually settled. Helfferich has done a fine job of accurately translating from German and other languages . . . and she has chosen rather large documents for inclusion instead of snipping out small paragraphs from many more documents. One thus has a chance to settle into an author's main points and to appreciate his or her style and point of view. --Erik Midelfort, University of Virginia
[A] remarkable collection. . . provides a riveting eyewitness account. . . superb. -- Times Literary Supplement
