Sunday, October 19, 2008

"An impartial representation of the conduct of the several powers of Europe" -Richard Rolt

Click on image to access the book on the Goggle Books site
(you can download the PDF fil
e there)

While looking through the excellent Google Books site, I was very pleased to stumble across this contemporary account- printed in 1750- of the War of the Austrian Succession, penned by someone named Richard Rolt.

In 1750 the conflict had not long been over, and Rolt refers to it as "The Late General War"- obviously the name by which we call the war now was not then universally known.

Once you get used to the different spelling conventions (for example, the printers convention where an "f" stands in for "s") and to its more complex syntactical structure, it provides a fascinating account of the conflict seen through contemporary eyes just two years after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle, and six years before the start of the SYW.

1 comment:

Bluebear Jeff said...

I will have to look this over, I think.


-- Jeff