A poignant, thought-provoking study of religious warfare

Magdeburg by Heather Richardson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To far too many English readers, the Thirty Years’ War is a hazy shadow in the middle distance of history. We are aware of its presence but it has no direct significance or importance. And yet it shaped the balance of power in Europe for the following three hundred years, and was as critical a juncture for the continent as the Napoleonic Wars or the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain. It is against this momentous backdrop that Heather Richardson sets her novel.

The book opens as Magdeburg, proud bastion of Lutheran faith, is under siege by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. Richardson draws a painstaking portrait of the domestic, commercial and spiritual life of a prosperous merchant city; of the cheerful hand-to-mouth existence of the soldier and the mercenary; of the claustrophobia of the era; of the fragility of life. It is an intimate pen-and-ink portrait on a human scale; a compassionate yet clear-sighted portrait of ordinary people, of their intelligence and determination and anxiety and fear, their courage and cowardice and venery.