Gentileschi was the most prominent female artist of the period, and is referred to in the novel 1634: The Galileo Affair, and appears earlier in the overall series timeline when she sends her daughter to Grantville in "Breaking News" in the anthology Grantville Gazette V. The Biblical episode involving Judith and her maidservant killing the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes was an immensely popular theme for painters and sculptors of the Renaissance and the early modern era.

This story might well be considered a continuing serial by Eric Flint, as it follows the trend set from the outset in Grantville Gazette I's "Portraits" wherein Anne Jefferson is cast as the common model for five seventeenth century master painters as Stearns hatches a plan to count another subtle-coup under the radar screen of the down-timer political opponents with their willing co-operation.

Meanwhile, Special Forces Captain Harry Lefferts appears in a scene suggesting skulduggery and underhanded dealings with a specific reference to Frans Hals need for money and a Frenchman willing to outbid others in the Netherlands.

These stories feature a down and out down-timer musician, Franz Scylwester, a maestro violinist whose left hand had been deliberately mutilated by a rival, leading to the loss of his position with the orchestra of the Archbishopric of Mainz.

The crippled former maestro violinist Franz Scylwester ekes out an existence writing correspondence letters for the illiterate and gradually wends his way across western Germany to Grantville.

In this tale, the musician is writing a lengthy letter encouraging and entreating various colleagues from the Mainz music establishment to make haste to Grantville and its marvels.

The story set within the businesses, schools, homes, and pubs of Shakespearian England as word of Grantville's appearance in far off Thuringia reach the English academic and mercantile circles.

When this crisis unfolds, the cities upper, university and merchant classes are meeting and collaborating on forming and funding a fact finding mission to Grantville, to see what they can learn and what is just wild rumor.

By sending Brother Johann, a German librarian from the region, to Grantville, they hope to arrive at a long-term survival strategy and to discern a pattern in the two divergent histories.

This important tale by Danita Ewing establishes canon for the series as Grantville's understaffed medical capabilities struggle to create training and advanced care institutions and begin out-reach to nearby down-time communities in matters bearing on public health and medicine.

Soon after the release of 1633 internet buzz on Baen's Bar showed a heavy concentration of surprise and queries because the Confederated Principalities of Europe armed forces of Gustavus depicted in the novel had been given less advanced firearms than readers had projected, the muzzleloading SRG rifle.

[5] Roland Green of Booklist wrote that this book "boasts the same combination of charm and intelligence as its predecessors" and that "Flint's 1632 universe seems to be inspiring a whole new crop of gifted alternate historians.