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Book Review: Barbara Stollberg-
Rilinger’s Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin 
in ihrer Zeit (Maria Theresa: The 
Empress in Her Time). 
Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2017.  Pp. xxviii+1083.  
 
 
Fabia Weisser 
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 
 
English Translation by James Brueckel (University of Minnesota) 
 
 
A queen-empress out of a picture book, Maria Theresa is remembered as a beguiling 
beauty and kind-hearted, wise regent with constant concern for the wellbeing of her 
court and subjects. She is said to have ruled over her people with the same benevolence 
and warmth as each of her sixteen children. In this comprehensive thousand-page 
biography of the empress, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger makes it clear that, with few 
exceptions, this trope has dominated the historiography in the centuries after Maria 
Theresa’s death in 1780. However, through her use and analysis of a wide-range of 
primary sources and secondary literature, Stollberg-Rilinger succeeds not only in 
reforming the biographical representation of Maria Theresa, but she also offers 
historians and enthusiasts an impressive and meticulously researched view into courtly 
life in the eighteenth century.  
 
In her biography, Stollberg-Rilinger utilizes an underestimated source to clear away 
some old myths about the merciful Maria Theresa. Oberhofmeister Johann Joseph von 
Khevenhüller conscientiously fulfilled his task as court chronicler, and his testimonies 
provide an almost inexhaustible source material, which Stollberg-Rilinger deftly utilizes. 
The image of the nearly supernatural, ever-loving mother of her people put forward by 
great nineteenth-century admirer and biographer Alfred von Arneth in his sweeping 
ten-volume biography was fostered by later historians, who likewise were taken in by 
this carefully crafted image of a compassionate and popular Empress-Queen. Building 
her analysis on a multitude of sources, Stollberg-Rilinger demonstrates how Maria 
Theresa’s behavior and actions owe more to cold political calculation than love for her 
people. Stollberg-Rilinger notes how the popular historical depictions of the empress 
still found today, with even the poorest of the poor asking for an audience, or the child of 
a beggar nursing at her breast out of sheer kindness (as the well-known 1868 painting 
by Alexander von Linzen-Mayer suggested), do not match up with the real empress.  The 
exaggeration or fabrication of these myths does not to deny the fact that the regent acted 
with a comparatively extraordinary steadfastness, modesty and kindness towards her 
subjects. One only needs to look at how Maria Theresa held an unusually large number 
of audiences and received many supplicants.  



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This widespread benevolent image of Maria Theresa is connected to a theme running 
throughout the book, namely her femininity.  Maria Theresa’s enemies viewed her 
femininity as a weakness and as grounds for abuse, contempt, and skepticism, especially 
during the War of Succession. However, the Hapsburg dynasty and the empress-queen 
herself knew how to present Maria Theresa as a fertile and loving mother. According to 
Stollberg-Rilinger, love for her own many children seemed to be a ubiquitous symbol of 
her role as a loving mother of her country, a description Maria Theresa would use 
herself. Stollberg-Rilinger shows that her iconization as the mother of the country was a 
representation that historians have long misunderstood as emphasizing femininity. In 
reality, this symbolizes the relationship between empress-queen and her subjects. Maria 
Theresa's unique ability to separate her role as ruler and her femininity, demonstrated 
for instance by her use of the title Rex, as opposed to the female counterpart Regina, 
illustrates this point. 
 
Stollberg-Rilinger’s biography also provides new insights into Maria Theresa’s 
relationship with Franz Stephan I, who Stollberg-Rilinger rightly describes as the 
“hapless husband.” Historians have considered Franz Stephan’s independent role to be 
minor, partially due to the deliberate destruction of sources by Maria Theresa herself. 
His wife’s significantly superior rank and greater respect at the court meant that he was 
often left in the shadows and his masculine honor was often questioned by the public. 
Being identified as the supposedly more masculine between the two led to a balancing 
act by the empress-queen.  Stollberg-Rilinger shows that the various historical 
depictions of the relationship between the two spouses can be clearly classified as ideals 
typical of their time. For example, historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
tried to portray the regent and her husband as bourgeois, since this corresponded to the 
contemporary ideal. In addition to examining the relationship between Maria Theresa 
and Franz Stephan, Stollberg-Rilinger devotes a large part of the book to the regent's 
sixteen children, of whom only ten survived their mother. In particular, the biographer 
reports in detail about, as the name of one of the sub-chapters reveals, the “unruly 
daughters”: Marie Antoinette, Carolina of Naples, and Amalia of Parma. 
 
A clear strength of the biography is the comprehensive contextualization of all stages of 
Maria Theresa’s life. The detail with which the biographer covers the regent herself and 
does not neglect the context of greater events in all their complexity is demonstrated 
throughout the biography and proves particularly profitable for the reader. Stollberg-
Rilinger succeeds in introducing the reader to the fundamental changes in the European 
world in the eighteenth century. For instance, Stollberg-Rilinger references Maria 
Theresa’s attitude toward the emerging Enlightenment, which the empress-queen 
abhorred not least because of her own legitimation through divine right and Jesuit 
religiosity. The constant secularization driven by the Enlightenment and the increasing 
criticism of belief by intellectuals affected Maria Theresa and led to the Habsburg 
monarchy’s luster being tarnished by the end of the regent's life. Against the backdrop of 
multi-layered relationships, duties, and the everyday challenges and phenomena of the 
eighteenth century, the biography offers the reader an extremely well-grounded, 
multidimensional picture of the regent.  
 
Ultimately, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has managed to cover Maria Theresa’s life and 
reign in—it must be said—just 1000 pages. The biography is richly illustrated with 
various pictures of paintings and other works of art related to the empress. The book 
itself is well organized with clear divisions of the subject matter that enables readers to 



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find information efficiently.  Also noteworthy is the four-hundred-page, comprehensive 
appendix with sources and literature references, which clearly reflects Stollberg-
Rilinger’s meticulous investigation of primary sources and secondary literature. The 
biographer does not neglect a single aspect of the queen-empress and sheds light on the 
broader world of the eighteenth century. These features, among others, make the book 
valuable both for historians and enthusiasts.  


