Barbara StollbergRilinger
Miles Pattenden reviews 'Maria Theresa: The Habsburg empress in her time' by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, translated by Robert Savage
Miles Pattenden
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Few Australians today will have heard of the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). And yet this queen of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, ruler of Mantua and Milan, who was also grand duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress by marriage, bestrode the eighteenth-century stage like a dumpy colossus. The mother of some sixteen children, she styled herself as matriarch for a nation, while the marriages she arranged for her children saw her emerge as a Queen Victoria-like figure: the central node in contemporary Europe’s game of thrones.
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Published in
June 2022, no. 443