Frederick the Great discussion post 11

[cahn]

In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

Comments

Re: Catt's reliability

[mildred_of_midgard]

"obsessed with What Exactly Happened with Katte's Death, And Who Knew What When?"

Also LOL. It's an odd thing to be obsessed with, but I just remembered the last time I was working on an academic paper, interrupted by the advent of chronic pain, I was obsessing over the statistical distribution of the number of hair tresses on Greek statues of a particular type, so...academic progress is made of such mini-obsessions. ;)

maybe they're just not quite as obsessed with Katte

Lol, you'd think, but you know, if you glance at the Katte: Ordre und Kriegsartikel monograph, Kloosterhuis is pretty darn obsessed! Check out those footnotes. (I looked the guy up, he's an archivist by profession.) I can't claim to be half that obsessed. And yet. He cites Catt at face value for the Katte conversation, with no caveats. (Which I actually think is real, but I've only arrived at that conclusion tentatively and after assembling much indirect evidence.)