Style and Fictionalisation in Eyewitness Personal Accounts of the Thirty Years War

Eyewitness personal accounts of the Thirty Years War are of interest not only for their overt content, but as examples of how the process of writing itself can shape both the resultant text and the meaning derivable from it by the reader. Techniques adopted, probably unconsciously, by writers seeking to give force and point to their narratives, here collectively termed ‘fictionalisation’, add to well‐known problems of eyewitness testimony to affect the historical evaluation of such sources. ‘Natural narrative’ style, akin to oral story‐telling, leads many of these authors – and their readers – to focus on one or a series of lively and anecdotal stories, often at the expense of the overall perspective. In other cases, more structured narrative accounts likewise suggest selection and ordering of the material in order to create the desired impression, possibly at the expense of strict representational accuracy

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Art · Content (measure theory · Epistemology · Eyewitness testimony · Focus (optics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Natural (archaeology · Order (exchange · Perspective (graphical · Point (geometry · Style (visual arts · Visual arts · Writing style · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Communication · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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