Keele Research Repository

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 1618-1648. 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.