Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20

[cahn]

Yuletide signups so far:
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D

(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)

Comments

Re: Fredersdorf: The Dirk Fahlenkamp Version (I) - Generalities

[felis]

The book, btw, should be side-eyed heavily

Heh, not least because Fredersdorf's youngest sister is called "Anna Christiane" here (which is apparently his mother's name), "Anna Cath." in the literal quote from his will (unsourced as you note, why doesn't she say where she got that from?), and "Anna Christina" a couple pages down, which might be closest, because there's a facsimile signature attached that seems to say just that. But hey, the author also calls Fredersdorf's noble benefactress "Susanna" and "Susanne" in turns, so who cares about names?
(She also links the nephew to some letters in the secret state archive, but searching their digital data bank for "Fredersdorf", I only turned up entries for our guy.)

That said, even if the names and maybe even the dates are to be taken with a heavy grain of salt, if at least the gist of the will is correct, it seems like all but the youngest of his siblings are dead by 1755, so he doesn't seem to be an outlier when it comes to his dying age.

Re: Fredersdorf: The Dirk Fahlenkamp Version (I) - Generalities

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, man, I didn't notice the "Cath."/"Christiane" difference! Despite typing both repeatedly into google hoping to turn them up. I did notice the daughter had the mother's name and the oldest son got the name and job of his father, which of course was quite typical.

To play devil's advocate, Christiane/Christina and Susanne/Susanne are the kind of name interchange that happened among contemporaries (they *didn't* care about names the same way we do), so they're often represented differently in our sources, and it's possible Anna had three names (swapping the order of names was common as well), but definitely this author doesn't inspire confidence that they're not just being sloppy with their source material.

Also. If you're going to quote verbatim from Fredersdorf's will, CITATIONS OMG. *headdesk*

if at least the gist of the will is correct, it seems like all but the youngest of his siblings are dead by 1755, so he doesn't seem to be an outlier when it comes to his dying age.

I did notice that!