Основные направления современной англоязычной историографии датского периода истории Тридцатилетней войны

Abstract

The article explores the history of the Danish period of the Thirty Years' War in the English-language historiography of the 20th and 21st centuries. The main characteristics of British historiography at the beginning of Modern History are presented. The article gives a brief overview of the main scientific patterns of studying events of the Danish period. English-language historiography refers not only to achievements of scientists from the United Kingdom and the United States, but also to publications of any other European historians made in English and actively used in historical society. In general, the use of achievements of scientists from other countries in the study of the Thirty Years' War history is quite typical for English-language historiography. This can be explained by the situation when parallelly with this “continental” war came the outcome of the English Civil War, which is steadily more interesting for British historians. The English-language historiography of the Thirty Years' War at the present stage represents both traditional themes of military history and new topics that appeared in the second half of the 20th century. Among the traditional, we can highlight descriptions of various military campaigns and battles, biographies of talented generals, kings and politicians. Among the new, we can note different attempts to expand the chronological and territorial framework of the war, as well as the use of the Thirty Years' War as one of the illustrations of the processes of military revolution or evolution in the European military art and technologies of the 16th-17th centuries. In relation to the Danish period, the concept that evaluates the war as a catalyst for further changes in the Danish political structure seems to be the most relevant. In general, the historiography of the Thirty Years' War can be characterized as successive, using many of predecessors' achievements; on the other hand, there is a high degree of openness in British and American scientific community for foreign researchers and the emergence of a sufficiently large number of fundamentally new areas of research. At the same time, unfortunately, the Thirty Years' War is still not the most demanded topic of military history, substantially inferior to the national English and American, as well as Modern History, topics. The Danish period of the war turned out to be the least interesting for historians. Its chronological arrangement between the issues of religion and the alignment of forces at the beginning of the war and the Swedish “military revolution” leads to the fact that the Danish period remains a rather poorly studied stage of the Thirty Years' War.