Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618-48 by Geoff Mortimer (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 239 Topographies of Gender in Middle High German Arthurian Romance. By Alexandra Stirling-Hellenbrand. (Medieval History and Culture) New York and Lon? don: Garland. 2001. xviii + 244pp. $70. ISBN 0-415-93009-x(hbk). The review of this book can be short, but hardly sweet. The author writes as a feminist interested in the application of gender studies to medieval literature, an approach that has yielded, and can still yield, valuable insights, not least with regard to the works discussed in this book (Hartmann's Erec and Iwein, Wolfram's Parzival, and Gottfried's Tristan). The attempt is made to link two distinct research topics: space and movement on the one hand (already much worked on) and gender on the other. The result unhappily yields a little on the firsttopic, only scattered observations on the second, with no convincing linkage between the two. The text is little more than a rambling, unsystematic discourse, heavily dependent on selective secondary literature and at times degenerating into a string of quotations from other scholars with a rehash of their views. Much space is given up to a plot synopsis of each of the four works (for whom is this felt to be necessary?) and to frequent and lengthy quotations from the originals, together with translations. After all this has been deducted, what remains is a handful of observations of some use, but with little bearing on the theme of space and movement or on the 'topography of gender', a term which the author has adopted from a German feminist. The book is littered with printing (or authorial) errors and typesetting blunders and infelicities, leading one to question what proof-reading was done. (How can anyone with linguistic sensitivity allow the name 'Gottfried' to be divided regularly at the end ofa line into 'Got-' and 'tfried'?) Given the price of this book, one has a right to hope for a higher quality of scholarship and to expect more efficientprinting. Caveat emptorl Trinity College, Cambridge D. H. Green Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618-48. By Geoff Mortimer. Bas? ingstoke: Palgrave. 2002. x + 2i4pp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-98404-8 (hbk). This remarkable work is based on an impressive sixty-six eyewitness accounts which the author has drawn together forthe firsttime. Although all the accounts have been published, mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few of them have been the subject of any detailed, modern research. Most of them were written by German speakers, and only one of them (by Colonel Robert Monro, published in 1637) appears to have been intended for immediate publication. The texts are personal accounts, written by men and women with direct experience of the Thirty Years War, who present an individual perception of the war, and focus on the war as their principal subject. Eyewitness accounts can be considered on the one hand as historical sources, and on the other as literary texts. Mortimer's valuable study combines both approaches in an interesting way. Early chapters (3-7) use the texts to correct our image of the Thirty Years War, while later ones (8-13) examine individual texts or groups of texts, asking how and why they were written. The popular image of the Thirty Years War is one of 'prolonged devastation', a 'cataclysm' from which it took Germany centuries to recover (p. 1). This image has dominated many fictional and historical accounts of the war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on the most extreme depictions in contemporary accounts. However, eyewitness accounts, whether they are private diaries or officialrecords, do not always represent the war accurately, and none gives the whole picture. Some writers may be embellishing the truth for their own purposes, while others repeat questionable anecdotes which they believed to be 240 Reviews true and which were common currency at the time: Mortimer mentions, forexample, the frequent reports of cannibalism (pp. 99, 173). As Mortimer points out, modern historians of the Thirty Years War present a more differentiated picture, reminding us, for example, that while some areas of Germany experienced war,plague, and famine, others were untouched formany years. However, Mortimer presents a picture which goes beyond that of...