Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Catherine the Great: Hanbury-Williams
Date: 2021-09-15 08:18 am (UTC)Hmm, yeah, seems like another mistake by the guy who thought Fritz's wife Sophia was the sister of G2.
:) To be fair, his specific focus and forte is Russian history, hence his most famous books being the one about Peter the Great, the one about Nicholas and Alexandra, the last Romanows, and the one about Catherine, and I imagine given the sheer wealth of material means he thought taking shortcuts with the international supporting cast is okay. But then you get such glitches.
Massie's making a less broad and thus slightly more likely to be accurate (though I still have doubts), but effectively they're both saying so nearly the same thing that I swear one has read the other, or they talk to each other a lot
It does sound like this, though yes, Montefiore's phrasing is way too general not to be disproved at once even remaining within the same century. Given that all-powerful Queens are far rarer in history than plain old gender neutral "monarchs", Massie is trickier. Hm. I take it he didn't come across the previous Czarinas (plus Regent) writing anything of the sort? Going back a few centuries or several, there are a few mighty Byzantine Empresses around (like Irene) and some West Romans, too, but we don't have those kind of personal letters for them, and certainly not from the few female pharaos, including Cleopatra. Though we do have the letter from Antony to Octavian where he writes, only slightly paraphrased: "What's it to you that I have sex with the Queen? How about your own sex life? I'd be very surprised if between the time I write this and the time it arrives in Rome, you had sex only with Livia Drusilla and not X, Y., and Z (here Antony listed several Octavian girlfriends)." (This letter is quoted by Suetonius, the old gossip, who as Hadrian's secretary did have access to the Imperial archives.)