Frederick the Great and Other 18th-C Characters, Discussion Post 31

[cahn]

And in this post:

-luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!

-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, and selenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!

-mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War

(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)

-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D

Comments

Re: Alessandro de Medici: The Defense

[cahn]

(Though Alessandro had a long-term mistress, too, but Alessandro didn't parade Taddea in front of her, or direct everyone else to treat Taddea as the true wife.)

Yeah, I mean, I could see that I might not myself (as a twenty-first-century woman) necessarily want to be married to Alessandro, but she could have done a lot worse :P

I'm currently reading very good German biographies of Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary by the same biographer,

I can't imagine why :D

and her husband, who was a few years older (so he'd been a child when they married but was grown up before her) had no trouble getting that marriage annuled when he wanted to marry Anne de Bretagne instead.

Ooh, I read that bit in Game of Queens! But I'm just at the edge of history-understanding where things in that book don't stay in my brain unless I get them reinforced, so thank you for reinforcing it :)

and we also know when Catherine of Aragon stopped menunstrating (which wasn't so coincidentally shortly before Henry became serious about Anne Boleyn.

...oh! Huh! (Haven't gotten there in Game of Queens yet!)

Mind you, you can fanwank that a sympathetic, well-paid washerwoman would be relatively easy to come by for young Margaret, especially since while pissing the Duke of would have been bad, doing a favor for the Duke would have been good for the woman and her family.

All right, this is now my headcanon :P

Catherine Fletcher, wondering as to what was Alessandro thinking to either comission or at least granting this particular masque (and he did have to okay it, it wasn't snuck past him), comes up with the theory based on the fact he also (on other occasions, not his wedding, at other masques) dressed up in costume as a Turk or a slave, that this was a kind of "I know exactly what you're all thinking, so there, haters!" black humor.

Yeah, I buy that.

Re: Lorenzino's own death, while it was always known he died in a vendetta for Alessandro, it was usually assumed Alessandro's successor Cosimo ordered the hit, and the discovery it had been Charles instead is relatively recent, as in, 2015, according to this article.

Huhhhh! That sounds like it might be an interesting book.