This book is the work of a team of ten historians. In 1977, not long after I was invited by Andrew Wheatcroft of Routledge & Kegan Paul to write a new account of the Thirty Years' War, it became clear that the volume of relevant published work, let alone the quantity and variety of the surviving documents, was greater than any individual scholar could ever cope with alone. Various experts were therefore invited to cover those aspects of the war where the tangle of unsynthesized, unfamiliar material was thickest - the Scandinavian lands, Brandenburg and Saxony, the aftermath of the war, and so on - and their contributions form an integral part of the text, narrating, analysing and explaining in their proper place the events and developments that together made up the conflict. But herein lay a serious practical difficulty. Since all the contributors wrote their sections at the same time, a substantial amount of revising and rewriting was required to ensure that their chapters fitted in with, yet did not overlap, the others. My first, and greatest, debt of gratitude must therefore be to my fellow authors, who graciously accepted more editorial interference than any scholar should be asked to suffer and provided invaluable assistance in ways too numerous to mention.
Another important debt, which it is a pleasure to record, arises from the munificence of the British Academy and the Newberry Library. In 1981 they provided me with a three-month fellowship to work in Chicago and it was there, in America's 'Second City', backed by the resources of several magnificent libraries and surrounded by many distinguished scholars, that I drafted almost all of my sections of this book. Next, Andrew Wheatcroft has offered sympathetic support and helpful advice at all times, for which I am most grateful. Suggestions, references to obscure (and not-so-obscure) works, and assistance also came from Professor Robert Bireley, SJ, Professor Bruce Lenman, Professor Konrad Repgen, Dr Hamish Scott, Dr Lesley M. Smith, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, the late Dame Frances Yates (who was to have been a contributor) and, above all, Dr Simon Adams. Finally, the editor and all the authors are grateful to Nancy Wood, who expertly typed and retyped our text on a word-processor.
In preparing this revised edition for the press, I and most of the contributors have corrected a number of errors that crept into the text and notes. We are most grateful to Professor Dieter Albrecht, Dr Derek Croxton, Professor Konrad Repgen, and Dr Kurt Treptow for drawing them to our attention. We have also thoroughly revised, with the aid of Derek Croxton and John Theibault, the Bibliographical essay in order to reflect the latest scholarship on the subject.
Sadly, Gerhard Benecke could not revise his material, for he died in August 1985. His loss is still felt by scholars everywhere, not only in St Andrews, where he was a student and research student, and at Canterbury and Vancouver, where he taught, but by early modern historians in general. And he is especially missed by his fellow contributors.