cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

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All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

That is a pretty good summary indeed.

But the question that led to all this: do you know if I was right about Matilda seeing her most important title as that of Empress of the Romans and the English not being too pleased about this, or if I was misremembering? A quick skim of Wikipedia did not enlighten me one way or the other.

why this period is often refered to as "the anarchy".

And unofficially, as the period "when Christ and his saints slept," which is a phrase taken from a contemporary chronicler, and is also the title of that novel to which

selenak refers. If you're looking for historical fiction,

cahn, Sharon Kay Penman is known for some well-received doorstoppers: Stephen & Maud, Llywelyn the Great and other Welsh princes, Richard III, and apparently some about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry, and their sons (including Richard the Lion-hearted and John) that were written after I stopped reading historical fiction of this period.

From:

selenak

o you know if I was right about Matilda seeing her most important title as that of Empress of the Romans and the English not being too pleased about this, or if I was misremembering?

Honestly, I don't know, because I never read a non-fiction book about Matilda specifically (non-fiction biographies of her daughter-in-law didn't cover this), but the impression I did get from a variety of novels was that individual acts aside, what the English (or rather, the Norman barons having holdings in England - Matilda/Maude was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror, after all, and talking about "English" here is a bit misleading) were way more resentful about her second marriage than about her using the title from her first one. This was because Geoffrey d'Anjou, nicknamed "Plantagenet", wasn't Norman. He was Angevin. And of course being a man, her being Queen would mean that REALLY an Angevin would be ruling. Competition! Boo! Never mind that Geoffrey was years younger than Matilda, that her father had forced her to marry him and when she tried to leave him after a miserable first year had forced her to go back. (This was before she'd gotten pregnant with future Henry II.)

Now some of the novels also speculate that since Matilda had grown up and thus been schooled in the HRE (having been married with twelve), she might have been used to the type of deference an Emperor did get and thus was set on a confrontation course with her English (or "English", i.e. Norman) subjects to begin with. But to me that's massive projecting of the idea that anything British was automatically less authoritarian and more proto democratic. Her father, after all, was that charming gentlemen you described earlier who wasn't above blinding his grandkids to make a political point. His court was not one where you messed about with the King. What she probably did imprint on was that in her first marriage, her husband the Emperor despite or because of the age difference actually had included her a lot - German wiki says he had her with him on his various journeys, incuding to Italy when he was duking it out with the Pope in one of those power struggles a great many German Emperors had with a great many Popes, she got crowned as Empress as well, and at one point acted as regent for her husband in Italy when he was in the German speaking territories.

Edited Date: 2019-11-25 02:31 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

I feel like I saw her books around at the library when i was growing up! I... don't think I read any of them, though. (I read a whole metric ton by someone named... Jean Plaidy, I think? I don't remember anything about them, only that she wrote a bunch and I read them, but all the actual historical content seeped out of my head shortly after reading.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, man, that takes me back. I think I read everything by Jean Plaidy back in the day, and yes, it is a metric ton. I'm not surprised they seeped out of your head, they were fairly forgettable as literature goes, but they were super useful for me in retaining history. My MO for history in high school was nonfiction to know what to believe, and historical fiction so I had a hope of retaining it. So it's partly thanks to her that I remember any European history outside the 18th century.

Haha, I read a Stephen/Maud-shipping romance that, while it was full of inaccuracies and implausibilities, was probably responsible for more of my vague memories persisting to this day than the few actual histories I read.

From:

cahn

haha, yes, it would have helped had I actually been interested in any of the people as people at the time! As it was they all kind of blurred together. I think historical fiction only works for me as a memory aid if I really like the book or like the history :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, yeah, if you weren't into the people, they would super all blur together, one queen after another. Her books *were* pretty darn similar.

Jean Plaidy was also only one of the other's several pseudonyms. I happen to know far too much about her and her work because my mother was a fan, and I had so little access to books growing up that I desperately read all my mother's romance novels, even though that's not my genre *at all*. Wikipedia tells me Plaidy (real name Eleanor Hibbert) produced 200 books under her various pseudonyms in her lifetime, which I think has a lot to do with them being so similar.

And now I am glad I have access to other books. :)

From:

cahn

Yeah, I remember reading something by Jean Plaidy writing under another name! I don't think it was Eleanor Hibbert, though. And I don't care enough to look up the other name :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, I don't know that she wrote under that name; that's her real name. Her two pseudonyms that my mom had in the house when I was growing up were Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr, if either of those ring a bell. (I don't care enough to look up her other pseudonyms either. ;) )