Mary Elizabeth Ailes. Courage and Grief

In a famous and often quoted article from the 1980s, Barton C. Hacker draws attention to the significance of women in early modern armies (“Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe,” Signs 6, no. 4 [1981]: 643–671). Women, who by their contemporaries were accused of being prostitutes and being a general burden to the armies, were, according to Hacker, in fact crucial for the armies to work. In the long run, women accompanying men on campaigns were a prerequisite not only for the campaigns but also for the military revolution that the military forces of the seventeenth century underwent. Not until the twenty-first century were Hacker’s conclusions followed up in systematic studies that, in various ways and to varying degrees, could confirm and even develop Hacker’s interpretations. Mary Elizabeth Ailes’s book Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden’s Thirty Years’ War is a part of this follow-up. She concentrates on the Thirty Years’ War and on the Swedish war force, which was one of the main actors in the war since 1630. Ailes highlights women’s varied social backgrounds and their accordingly shifting experiences of the war. On an overall level, Ailes contributes to a deeper understanding of the Thirty Years’ War and of the social conditions in which the war emerged.

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