One of the most heartening features of recent decades has been the slow scholarly rediscovery of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy during the sixteenth century. Long neglected, it now attracts an increasing volume of publications in German and in English, and its salient features are becoming clearer. Joseph F. Patrouch's bulky contribution to this is a detailed study of the 1550s and 1560s from the perspective of the future Empress Maria, wife of Maximilian II (1564–76) and her daughter the Archduchess Elizabeth. Based upon wide reading in the printed authorities and the secondary literature, leavened by some research on manuscript material, its principal contribution is to add much useful detail to a picture that is already familiar in outline.

The text is divided into four extended chapters. These focus upon the female courts of the Austrian Habsburgs, primarily in Vienna but also—unusually and revealingly—in Wiener Neustadt. Professor Patrouch establishes the importance of these households for the wider interests of the imperial family within the Reich and demonstrates how they functioned as “a site of amalgamation for the Habsburgs in central Europe” (395). His study provides a helpful counterpoint to the established emphasis upon the male side of the family. The overwhelmingly religious nature of court life and ceremony emerges more clearly than ever from his pages, as does the orthodox Catholic education that the Archduchess Elizabeth received: This is particularly interesting in view of the heterodox and possibly even Lutheran sympathies of her father, the future Maximilian II. The long account of the marriage negotiations that preceded her betrothal to King Charles IX of France in 1569 is interesting on the conduct of such discussions in the mid sixteenth century. There are also revealing insights into the role of intermarriage in integrating the Castilian nobility with that of the Archduchy of Austria and on music at the Habsburg court. Yet all Professor Patrouch's efforts cannot bring mother and daughter out of the shadows in which they seem destined to live forever.

The central problem, which the author recognizes and honestly admits, is the lack of sources and especially personal correspondence bearing upon the lives and opinions of the two figures around which his study is organized. This forces him to bring the context into the foreground and to substitute picturesque detail and frank speculation for analysis and explanation. There are too many sentences such as “[t]he women of the imperial court at Augsburg surely had much to discuss” (329) or “[i]t is not unimaginable that the duke paid a courtesy call” (350) for comfort. The determined reader will emerge little the wiser about the personalities or attitudes of the ostensible subjects of this monograph and with relatively few new insights into the world they inhabited.