‘Causing misery and suffering miserably’: Representations of the Thirty Years’ War in Literature and History

Abstract

This article examines a range of fictional literature – poetry, prose, play and song produced between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries – that represents aspects of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict fought in Europe from 1618 to 1648. Depiction of the Thirty Years’ War in literary works is compared to that found in empirical historical evidence and historians’ analyses. It is concluded that historical fictions offer a different, but equally valid, account of the conflict to academic histories, and that by using historical fictions and empirical evidence together, a more holistic picture of events is offered than academic histories alone provide.