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: Speaking of marriage...

[mildred_of_midgard]

Thank you for clarifying. I had a feeling something like that was going on. It's actually MacDonogh this time, saying that Seckendorff "sent the gossip back to Vienna," without ever stating that Seckendorff didn't believe it or implying any disbelief on his own part other than attributing it to "gossip." He makes it sound like Seckendorff is reporting this as the best source he's got.

Both authors are prone to mis-citing their sources in amazing ways. I would like to blame poor French/German, but Blanning mis-cites Voltaire's memoirs, which have been *translated into English*.

As noted, Asprey gets around this problem by not citing! And when he does, it's a book, not a page number.

All on page 57 of the first Jessen volume.

Just to spare you confusion in case you ever find yourself looking up Jessen in a hard copy: there's only one physical volume. I proactively split the pdfs because you had trouble downloading the large Fredersdorf file back in December.