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Brennan C. Pursell. The Winter King. Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. xviii + 320 pp. $89.95. Review by MARK CHARLES FISSEL, THE AUGUSTA ARSENAL.
This is a most auspicious inaugural monograph from a young scholar. Brennan Pursell begins by committing the sin of writing a biography for his first book. The personality under scrutiny is the star-crossed Elector Palatine, Frederick V, whose election to the throne of Bohemia by Protestant rebels in 1618-1619 prompted the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the Elector from his territorial possessions and thus ignited three decades of warfare. The author is then guilty of the heinous crime of suggesting that classifying the Thirty Years' War as primarily a war of religion is a misnomer, despite contemporary descriptions to the contrary.
One might conjecture that in place of religion, the author would ascribe a greater causal role to blind and overpowering forces such as social change and economics. Instead he resuscitates a pair of factors from nineteenth century historiography: constitutionalism and human free will (144). If the paradigms sometimes appear to be Victorian and Edwardian, however, the breadth of research is of twenty-first century caliber. The Winter King reflects a maturity characteristic of the work of a distinguished senior scholar.
Pursell demonstrates facility in languages, palaeography, and diplomatic. He discloses what manuscript collections were most useful and where he has used microfilms in place of the original sources. When discussing Czech sources, the author acknowledges that these came with German language summaries, and that he used the latter. In short, he is forthright about the evidential basis of this book, which is impressive in its scope. Resting securely upon these foundations, The Winter Kings succinct introduction outlines Pursell's argument. The narrative that follows is punctuated with subheadings and analyses that are mostly of a political nature.
The author sees constitutional issues at the heart of the Thirty Years' War. The "constitution" of the...