War and Society in Europe, 1618-1648

The Thirty Years War was the central political and military encounter of the seventeenth century. It drew in virtually all of Europe, with the exception of England, and by 1650 no European country had entirely escaped the experience of violent conflict. Since the end of the Second World War historians in western and eastern Europe have been engaged in the task of reassuring the significance of the seventeenth century in general and the Thirty Years War in particular. They have formulated questions and attempted to answer them by using fresh sources. One especially rich depository is the archival system of Czechoslovakia. The seventeenth-century generals and diplomats of the Imperial side preserved masses of papers which usually found their way into family archives, many of them housed on Bohemian and Moravian landed estates. With the transfer of private archives into public hands after 1945, much new material became available to scholars. This volume surveys the process of historical rethinking and revision.