John Adamson
Showing Her Metal
The Iron Princess: Amalia Elisabeth and the Thirty Years War
By Tryntje Helfferich
Harvard University Press 319pp £25 order from our bookshop
Even for contemporaries, the conflict that became known in retrospect as the Thirty Years War was a source of bafflement and bewilderment. What began in 1618 as a dispute between rival Catholic and Calvinist claimants to the Kingdom of Bohemia (roughly the modern-day Czech Republic) escalated by fits and starts into a conflict that embroiled most of western Europe. Over the following three decades, war aims metamorphosed. Combatants came and went. Peace treaties proclaimed, prematurely, the end of hostilities – only to be torn up, yet again, as the belligerents returned to the battlefield. By the time the conflict entered its third decade (which is when this new book takes up its narrative), the war had come to involve not only almost all the states of the Holy Roman Empire (the patchwork of principalities, large and small, that sprawled from Dunkirk in the west to the borders of Hungary in the east), but also the three greatest military powers of Europe: France, Spain and Sweden, each of which, at various times, had armies engaged in the fight.
The bigger the war became, the obscurer was the answer to the question of what it was being fought about. Was it a war of religion between Catholic and Protestant? Or a constitutional struggle for states’ rights against the centralising ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor? Or an old-fashioned dynastic
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete