Description
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Maria Theresa (1717-1780) who inherited the Austrian throne in 1740 at the age of 23. Her neighbours circled like wolves and, within two months, Frederick the Great had seized one of her most prized lands, Silesia, exploiting her vulnerability. Yet over the next forty years through political reforms, alliances and marriages, she built Austria up into a formidable power, and she would do whatever it took to save the souls of her Catholic subjects, with a rigidity and intolerance that Joseph II, her son and heir, could not wait to challenge.
With Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford; Martyn Rady, Professor of Central European History at University College London; and Thomas Biskup, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull. Producer: Simon Tillotson.
READING LIST:
Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa 1741-1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Tauris, 2005), especially ‘Love and the Empire: Maria Theresa and Her Co-Regents’
Edward Crankshaw, Maria Theresa (Bloomsbury, 2012)
Elfriede Iby, Martin Mitschlechner, Werner Telesko and Karl Vocelka (eds.), Maria Theresa 1717-1780: Strategist, Mother, Reformer (Amalthea, 2017)
Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 2019)
C. A. Macartney, Maria Theresa and the House of Austria (Hodder, 1974)
Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs: Rise and Fall of a World Empire (Allen Lane, 2020)
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit. Eine Biographie (Beck, 2017)
Alfred von Arneth, Briefe der Kaiserin Maria Theresia an ihre Kinder und Freunde (Wilhelm Braumüller, 1881)
Thomas Wallnig, Elisabeth Lobenwein, Franz-Stefan Seitschek and Vanda Anastácio (eds.), Maria Theresia: neue Perspektiven der Forschung/Maria Theresa: new research perspectives/Marie Thérèse: nouvelles approches de recherche (Verlag Dr Dieter Winkler, 2017)
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