cahn: (Default)
[personal profile] cahn
:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 02:12 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
OMG, no, I cannot believe this, you cannot be real, you are my new hero!!

We were just admiring your guide to Fritzian siblings that Selena pointed us to and wondering where you were and hoping you would come back. But I wasn't expecting THIS! :DDD

Anyway, I've been to Wust twice this year, once two days ago (what does it say about me that I drove 500km for a dead guy's 291st Jahrgedächtnis...?)

That you are LUCKY and also dedicated and also MY HERO! ([personal profile] selenak, your 45 pictures of Wust taken specifically for me are the best thing that ever happened to me in salon and the only thing that's reconciled me to not having been there myself. <333)

We extremely need your help with the paleographical side of things, and now you're telling us the Wust association does too??! OMG! I have two sets of historical documents (one Fredersdorf, one Peter Keith) that if we can figure out how to get them from the archives, I will legit pay you for a transcription.

ALSO! See if the Wust people can help you get a copy of Martin von Katte's unpublished manuscripts on the Katte family and on Hans Hermann! They form the basis for Kloosterhuis' Katte monograph, but I haven't been able to get them! Tell them I'm writing an article. (I am, probably. :P)

Also also, one of the reasons I've been eagerly waiting for you to come back is that we need some transcription help with this very short record! Top of the right hand page, the one that starts v. Keith. That's Peter's widow's death record, turned up courtesy of [personal profile] cahn!

Felis and Selena were able to read all but a few words. This discussion has what Felis was able to interpret. Can you help?

Speaking of Katte, I got an article about the punishment methods at his boarding school by a Thomas Grunewald, don't know if you've already covered that...? I haven't read the whole thing yet, but what I've seen is very interesting.

We don't know this, please share! Is it online? If not, can you scan a copy?

"wird besonders ermahnt, weil er sich vieles sagen lassen kann, aber nachher so tut als sei nichts gewesen".

LOLOL, oh Katte. Was this Francke's Pietest pedagogium at Halle?

Finally, I made some art during the last few months. I don't remember if I shared my latest comic with you...? It's not even that new, but I sorta forgot... Anyway:

I had not seen this! LOLOL Algarotti, Fritz needs a sex therapist, clearly!

Speaking of constructive criticism, since we know that 1) Andrew Mitchell was one the "tastiest dish" for Algarotti, 2) Fritz showed some of his poetry to Mitchell, Selena has embraced as headcanon my joke that Fritz and Mitchell obviously talked about how their ex Algarotti was hot stuff, and also Mitchell critiqued the orgasm poem for realism wrt Algarotti's orgasms. :'D

Your art is so great. <3 If you'd come back in time for Rare Male Slash Exchange, I would have begged for your help with the flyer in my modern-day Fritzian corporate AU. Instead, I ended up with this ridiculous thing and had the characters mock my graphic design skills or lack thereof in-universe, lol. :'D

Speaking of fic, I read your road-trip fic and loved it! I didn't leave a comment solely because in order to quote my favorite parts, I would have had to reread the fic, and you have to understand that my German, while massively improved over 2 years ago, is extreeeemely slow and painful. I'm working on it and plan to leave a juicy comment with quotes once I can do so without it taking two weeks! (Also, it was super useful for teaching me some modern vocabulary, since all the vocab I have is for things like "fortress" and "bloodletting", not "seatbelt", lol forever, but also takes me even longer than usual to read for that reason.)

Btw, I'm currently reading Kloosterhuis, and once I'm finished, I'm going to try Zeithain again. (Zeithain will be much better German practice, but I wanted to do it in this order, because I wanted to see what Roes fictionalized vs. drew from history.)

The coloured pencil one was gifted to the people in Wust and will apparently end up on some wall there :'D

OMG! Btw, if you're tight with the local historical association and talk Katte portraits with them, do you want to tell them that the Katte portrait they do have on the wall is almost certainly Catt, per our discussion here?

In other news, I'm currently trying to turn some of our historical research into publishable articles! This is why I need help getting materials from the archives and then someone to transcribe them. :D

Article 1: Biographical sketch of Peter Keith. According to the Prussian archives, there's an unpublished correspondence that appears to be between him and Fritz, 1745-1750. (I know you don't know French, but I have someone who can almost certainly help with that part!) Kloosterhuis also gives two different months for his marriage to Ariane, and he gives the citation the marriage record, and I'd love to get a copy of that as well.

Article 2: Thanks to my persistent detective work, [personal profile] cahn's emotional and financial investment (lol), and [personal profile] selenak's reading and summarizing of books written in German, we have figured out almost all of what's up with Fredersdorf's embezzlement accusation (in Wikipedia as well as Fahlenkamp), and solved another mystery while we were at it! But in order to make this production-grade material, I have one item from the box bills project, from Fredersdorf's successor to him asking about Glasow's embezzlement, that I need to get my hands on the original of, because I'm relying on the box bill project's summary on their webpage. This one will be in German, at least.

Your art is going straight into Rheinsberg!

Meanwhile, if any of our German speakers want to see if it's possible to order online from the Prussian archives, I would appreciate the help. When [personal profile] gambitten checked, there was a form, but also it said the cashier's office was closed due to the pandemic. Every time I check, it still says closed. But maybe there's some way for us to order anyway?

If not, we'll have to wait, and I will let you know, transcription specialist [personal profile] prinzsorgenfrei, when I have more materials for you to transcribe! (Don't forget to ask the Wust people about Martin von Katte's stuff! I've been dying to get my hands on those manuscripts since Selena first told me about them!)

Also, your kattestrophe blog says there's a Fritz & Co. Discord. What kinds of conversations happen there? Is there anyone there who might be interested in joining salon?

We missed you, but you have come back with a bang! Please keep us apprised of your transcription findings!

ETA: Speaking of Rare Male Slash Exchange, I meant to note that Selena wrote me a lovely Peter Keith fic in which Algarotti finds that some Germans, even traumatized ones without a lot of recent experience, are great in bed. :D (Peter, setting a standard that Fritz couldn't live up to? Lol!) But I see from the kudos that you've already found it. :)

In other news, we also turned up Wilhelmine's travel diary from her Italy visit. I'm halfway cleaning up the OCR so we can run it through Google Translate and see if there's anything interesting. So far no, but you never know! There will also be some Fritz & Wilhelmine letters, but I'm not sure if they're ones that have already been found elsewhere by salon or not.
Edited Date: 2021-11-08 02:41 pm (UTC)

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 04:28 pm (UTC)
prinzsorgenfrei: (Default)
From: [personal profile] prinzsorgenfrei
Hiiii! :DD

I have two sets of historical documents (one Fredersdorf, one Peter Keith) that if we can figure out how to get them from the archives, I will legit pay you for a transcription.

I'd love to try! I am by no means infallible (and some handwritings are more hellish than others...), but I'd do my best (and i have more friends who know Kurrent and who could potentially help). Anything to get more stuff on Keith and Fredersdorf. Lots of people have been wanting transcriptions lately, maybe I should just do that full time :'D I've been coddled by the late 19th century and people with good handwriting lately, so I'm still a little sluggish when it comes to the worse parts, but I'll get back into the rhythm of it ^^

See if the Wust people can help you get a copy of Martin von Katte's unpublished manuscripts on the Katte family and on Hans Hermann!

I've been wanting those too and have already asked them about that when I visited in August! They gave me the e-mail adress of Dr. Maria von Katte and I've been trying to construct a proper e-mail since :D I'm an anxious mess though, so i haven't sent anything off yet. Still trying my best not to sound too weird. "Hello, I am emotionally attached to your dead distant cousin and I'd like nothing more than to read his private mail. The brochure from Wust says he wrote a letter to his, quote, "Engelsschwesterken" when he was a child and I just about died and need more context for this." I hoped that she would show up to the thing on Saturday (apparently she does vistit Wust at times) so I could ask in person and use my big shiny student eyes to convince her to help me, but she didn't (show up, that is).
I have not dared to mention that the pic in the church is of de Catt, I'm not sure if we are on that level of friendship yet :'DD It's such an awkward thing to bring up. My friend and i were considering telling them when we visited last year, but alas...

Also also, one of the reasons I've been eagerly waiting for you to come back is that we need some transcription help with this very short record!

Oh boy, gotta love registries. Not the worst handwriting I've seen, I'll see what I can do :D The currency could/should be Reichst(h)aler I think...? The word in front of Queen is reigning, the first line of the heirs column says "ein Majorenner Sohn, (der)", so "one adult son". I'm reading Steckfluß too; that would be a pulmonary edema, so it would make sense. I'm at work right now, so I'm not in the best headspace to concentrate on this, but I'll get back to it later :D

The article about the Franckesche Stiftungen is here. Apparently it's partially a reaction to Roes' depiction of the school in Zeithain :'D Dr. Grunewald did not like that one, according to the Wust people. The list of crimes and punishments is in the appendix; there's also a list of names that's proof that Katte's friend Holtzendorff really was in Glaucha around the same time (I was wondering, since he's 3 to 4 years older than Katte...), the 19th century book that Kloosterhuis used as a source on him didn't mention that :DD I'd love to find out more about Holtzendorff other than "FW hated him, he was possibly a bit of a ho, and he dropped out of the Gens d'armes to basically become a banker"

I read your road-trip fic and loved it!

Aaah, thank you! :DD I'm still working on chapter 3, getting shit done is not my strong suit. There will be a proper kiss eventually, I promise! :'D If you want more old timey german and more Katte there's the one shot i wrote... :'D aka The Sad Thing I Published as opposed to The Modern AU Where Things Go Less Wrong. Speaking of that oneshot, there was a speaker in Wust who restores crypts for a living (very nice man, super interesting conversation, offered me an internship) and apparently the one in Golzow, where Katte's sister (and her husband, Rochow. The historically relevant of the two.) is buried, has been subject to, uh... incredible violence. I'm talking heads ripped off of mummies. I guess poor Fredersdorf was lucky after all, his coffin may have been destroyed, but at least from what I know *all* of his bones are buried somehwere on the churchyard of Zernikow... Also also one of Katte's nephews on that side apparently got murdered by a servant. Fun times in the Mittelmark :'D

The discord server is a fun bunch of people, they're all very sweet :D Mostly around my age, so early 20s. We talk about pretty much everything, there's proper historical work and discussions as well as a lot of memery and injokes (like Fritz and Voltaire's slightly demonic child, born of a Frev era conspiracy theory: The Hatred of Christianity, Prince/ss of Prussia). And fic writing. And more art. One of us is an animation student and made an animatic staring Voltaire (with appearances from Algarotti and Maupertuis) using his song from the weird musical :D I'll tell them you'd be happy to have new contributors over here. Gotta admit though, the salon is a little intimidating to, I quote, "humble shitposters" :'D

I saw Wilhelmine's travel diary too, thought about buying it :DD Good to see you've got it covered!
I'll keep an eye out for the prussian archives too ^^

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 05:53 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
I'll get back into the rhythm of it ^^

You will if I have anything to say about it!!! :DDD

My face is hurting from all the smiling today.

I've been wanting those too and have already asked them about that when I visited in August! They gave me the e-mail adress of Dr. Maria von Katte

!!!!

You're way ahead of me. Asking for this has been on my to-do list for a while, but...yeah. I know how it feels to be super awkward about asking.

The brochure from Wust says he wrote a letter to his, quote, "Engelsschwesterken" when he was a child and I just about died and need more context for this."

ZOMG, yes, we extremely need this.

[personal profile] selenak sent me a copy of the Hans Heinrich brochure, btw, but not the fuller one, from which she translated the two letters from Hans Heinrich about his struggles to forgive FW.

I hoped that she would show up to the thing on Saturday (apparently she does vistit Wust at times) so I could ask in person and use my big shiny student eyes to convince her to help me, but she didn't (show up, that is).

Oh, man. You know the other thing we need? Apparently at least one painting by Hans Hermann survives and is in the Katte collection and was on display in an exhibition some years ago, but I've never even seen a picture of it so I don't know what it's even a painting of!

But manuscripts come first, definitely get your hands on all the manuscripts and letters you can. :D

I'm not sure if we are on that level of friendship yet :'DD

Ahahhaha, yes, wait until you're interning for the crypt restorer guy. (Doooo iiiit! Although also definitely get a job at the auction house, just in case something comes along! It's still too bad about the book you found online that Katte owned and inscribed. Even with my recent raise and offer to help buy salon books, though, 2000 euros for a book is a bit outside my price range. :'D)

I'm at work right now, so I'm not in the best headspace to concentrate on this, but I'll get back to it later :D

Awesome, thank you!

The article about the Franckesche Stiftungen is here. Apparently it's partially a reaction to Roes' depiction of the school in Zeithain :'D Dr. Grunewald did not like that one, according to the Wust people.

Lololol, that's hilarious! Well, we found indirect evidence that Hans Heinrich had no problem with Hans Hermann playing the flute, so we consider that slander. :'D

Aaah, thank you! :DD I'm still working on chapter 3, getting shit done is not my strong suit.

I can't throw stones! My fic output has been woeful lately. I really just want someone to nag and encourage me about the two nonfiction articles-in-progress. It's sooo tedious looking up tons of references in two languages I barely know, half of them in a font that makes me cry. This is not going to get done unless someone is asking me every week, "Hey, Mildred, when it's it going to be done? The world needs more Keith and Fredersdorf!"

If you want more old timey german and more Katte there's the one shot i wrote... :'D aka The Sad Thing I Published

Oh, right! Also on my to-read list when my German is just a little better. (I couldn't resist the road trip, even though I had to download it and convert it to a pdf to be able to read it--road trips are my jam!)

apparently the one in Golzow, where Katte's sister (and her husband, Rochow. The historically relevant of the two.) is buried, has been subject to, uh... incredible violence. I'm talking heads ripped off of mummies.

Wow. I didn't know where she was buried, thank you! And zomg. Is her head ripped off, do you know?

If you know/find out where Peter Keith was buried, let us know! It's kind of funny we know his even more obscure wife's burial place, but not his.

I'll tell them you'd be happy to have new contributors over here. Gotta admit though, the salon is a little intimidating to, I quote, "humble shitposters" :'D

Hee, but we welcome humble shitposting! We have come up with playlists and sorted them into Hogwarts houses and whatnot!

I'm afraid to go over to Discord both because I'm working 40 hours again these days, and also because I'm of the opinion that all Frederician discussion should take place in salon where we can track it and consolidate it in Rheinsberg. :D

I saw Wilhelmine's travel diary too, thought about buying it :DD Good to see you've got it covered!

Nag me and the digitizing and translating will go faster! I respond well to external encouragement when I have to do super tedious things!

I'll keep an eye out for the prussian archives too ^^

Sweet! You are the best and welcome back! Please don't be intimidated by us and spend as much time here being as frivolous as you want! (And also transcriber, ilu so much, tell us everything!)

Also, get us those manuscripts! I have a very specific point I need to research about whether Katte went to Madrid like Kloosterhuis said Martin von Katte said Hans Heinrich said he did, or not!

(Now that I'm reading Kloosterhuis, researching his sources on Rottembourg is on my to-do list, because I need to compare their reliability to the reliability of the sources that are telling me Rottembourg wasn't in Madrid that year. Also the Schulenburgs, I need to research the contradictions between Kloosterhuis' genealogy and Wikipedia's. So much salon, so little time! My number one priority is I need to finish studying German so I can start studying French!)

Oh, if the Wust people have any definitive proof for the claim that Ludolf von Katte married Mme. du Rosey in 1755, that would be awesome. Lehndorff says his hopes of marrying her are fading in 1753, so if it took her another 2 years to marry Ludolf, that would be super interesting.

Schulenburgs and Rottembourgs

Date: 2021-11-10 05:17 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
(Now that I'm reading Kloosterhuis, researching his sources on Rottembourg is on my to-do list, because I need to compare their reliability to the reliability of the sources that are telling me Rottembourg wasn't in Madrid that year.

I found the book Kloosterhuis cited for this claim. Snippet view shows me it does indeed say 1727-1734 in Madrid, and there's a footnote I can't view. Since the book costs 75 euros, I've put in a request with my local Interlibrary Loan, and we'll see what happens. (I send them such obscure requests that 50% get canceled because they can't find a library willing to lend, but this one seems easier to acquire, so fingers crossed.) It's a 2004 secondary source that seems reputable, but my 19th century collection of instructions to French ambassadors still seems more reliable. But until I see the footnote, I will reserve judgment.

Also the Schulenburgs, I need to research the contradictions between Kloosterhuis' genealogy and Wikipedia's.

This one I tracked down, and it really looks like Wikipedia is right and Kloosterhuis is wrong! (Oh, how the mighty have fallen. :P)

Kloosterhuis:

Über seine Großmutter väterlicherseits, Eva Auguste von Stammer, war Hans Hermann von Katte mit dieser altadligen Familie verwandt, denn deren Schwester Anna Elisabeth hatte den brandenburgischen Kammerpräsidenten Gustav Adolf von der Schulenburg geheiratet. Von dessen Kindern war insbesondere Matthias Johann von der Schulenburg...berühmt geworden; nicht minder seine Schwester Ehrengard Melusine unter dem Titel einer Herzogin von Kendal.

Through his paternal grandmother, Eva Auguste von Stammer, Hans Hermann von Katte was related with this old noble family, since her sister Anna Elisabeth had married the Brandenburg chamber-president Gustav Adolf von der Schulenburg. Of their children, Matthias Johann von der Schulenburg especially became famous; not less his sister Ehrengard Melusine under the title Duchess of Kendal.

He cites Georg Schmidt, Das Geschlecht von der Schulenburg, II. Teil: Die Stammreihe, Beetzendorf 1899, 416 – 418.

I tracked that down on FamilySearch, and the page in question says his first wife was Petronella Ottilie Schwenken, and his second wife was Anna Elisabeth von Stammer. The children of the first marriage include Matthias Johann and Ehrengard Melusine. The children of the second marriage do not. The fact that Melusine's mother was the wife named Petronella is also way more consistent with her daughter being Petronella than her being descended from the other wife.

So in this case, Kloosterhuis' source doesn't say what he says it does.

There's also the part where he might be right, but he's not telling me where to find the info that Anna Elisabeth and Eva Auguste were sisters. Schmidt says Anna Elisabeth's parents were Jürgen Arnd auf Wörmlitz, Wedelitz, and Ballenstedt, and Anna Elisabeth von Königsmarck. Schmidt says nothing about Eva Auguste's parentage, but this other 19th century, possibly wrong, source (Nachrichten zur Geschichte des Geschlechts derer von Rochow und ihrer Besitzungen, by Adolph Friedrich August von Rochow, 1861) says Eva Auguste's parents were Hans Heinrich von Stammer and Margarethe Judith von Benningsen.

So even now that I've gotten away from Wikipedia and online genealogy sites that probably draw on Wikipedia or vice versa, I'm still not seeing how Eva Auguste and Anna Elisabeth were related. And all evidence points to Melusine and Katte being related by marriage, not blood. Evidently they kept close enough ties for him to call her "Aunt", but that kind of thing happens in families.

(And yes, I will get to the Melusine write-up at some point, now that I'm winding down on the Great Northern War. Also SDC!)

Melusine

Date: 2021-11-10 08:16 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Oh, what the heck, I'll do the "best of" for Melusine now, and the rest only if I get inspired and have time.

Of most interest to salon:

Melusine was apparently a stickler when it came to proper behavior. We've seen that she was a regular churchgoer, and increasingly devout in her later years, and Hatton speculates that her breaking the silence about her illegitimate daughters in her will is because of the religious context of the will, where she didn't feel she could tell a lie.

New examples have emerged: G1 appears to have been more forgiving than Melusine of their eldest daughter, who took lovers and was divorced when her husband caught her in flagrante. G1 granted the divorce and gave her a title (Gräfin von Delitz). In later years, he gave her a small palace, and in a record in which he's drawing a money order from the Hanoverian treasury for her use, George asks that this 'be done without the knowledge of the Duchess of Kendal' (i.e. her mother Melusine).

Moreover:

She disapproved so strongly of the gambling habits of Philip Dormer Stanhope 4th earl of Chesterfield, who married young Melusine, that he was too scared to confess his losses at cards during a visit to Bath: he pretended he had not played at all.

In her will:

The sums donated to nephews and nieces were quite modest (£300 to each); and the somewhat straitlaced attitude of Melusine as she got older (which we have already noticed in her dislike of gambling for high stakes) is evident in her leaving out one nephew from the list of bequests with the explanation that she did so because he had married against his parents' wishes.

Why is this relevant? Well, Selena pointed out that historical Katte was obviously willing to brave (relative) poverty in exile for Fritz, since he had to know Aunt Melusine might not be willing to host/bankroll him indefinitely.

But now that I've read these examples, I'm not convinced she would have given a deserter and flouter of his father's wishes anything! Remember, Hans Heinrich didn't want his son leaving Prussian service for British even without it being desertion. (And Hans Hermann was reprimanded for overstaying his leave.)

And this is of course relevant to any AU in which he shows up in England in 1730. :D (As an out for the author who needs one, there's always Petronella/young Melusine, whom he was infatuated1, and who might have found a way to get him some money.)

Speaking of Petronella/young Melusine, Hatton tells me that she and her mother were inseparable, and that they continued living together even after young Melusine married Chesterfield. And that young Melusine seems not to have lived with her husband:

Young Melusine's marriage seems to have made little difference: there is hardly a mention of her in Chesterfield, Letters, and her husband's biographers have concluded that, though he behaved towards her with great politeness in society, they lived more or less apart. The duchess of Kendal could not have approved of him; in her will of 1743 she makes sure that he cannot touch any of the money left to the younger Melusine.

Things you would not have guessed!

1. The original Selena summary said "had a fling with", but the text reads "umschwärmte". I take it to mean he was admiring her, with no implications as to whether or not she reciprocated. And while my German admittedly misses a lot of nuances like this, summarizing from memory is also a feature of Selena summaries (just like Mildred summaries), so I'm asking. Do we know from "umschwärmte" whether they had a fling?

Tangent: Oh, and this is interesting. Rereading that passage, Kloosterhuis describes Petronella Melusine as a relative ("Verwandte") of the duchess of Kendal, not a daughter. He cites Schmidt again, who, remember, is writing in 1899. And remember that Hatton told us that the equation of the "nieces" of Melusine with her illegitimate children by G1 was recent as of 1978.

Ooh, Schmidt is saying that that the ADB erroneously says that she was the illegitimate daughter of G1 and Melusine. And Kloosterhuis seems to be going along with this. Okay, guys, but Hatton cites evidence and you don't, so...Schmidt might be 19th century whitewashing and Kloosterhuis might be trustingly following him. Evidence or it didn't happen!

(I may not be able to read entire books or even essays in old-fashioned German font yet, but I can do detective work like this now, which is a huge step forward in terms of my productivity!)

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 06:11 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Lots of people have been wanting transcriptions lately, maybe I should just do that full time :'D

I endorse this career choice! I can't employ you full-time, but I can pay you ad hoc for specific projects dear to my heart (once I get the actual documents). :D

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 06:13 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
The article about the Franckesche Stiftungen is here. Apparently it's partially a reaction to Roes' depiction of the school in Zeithain

Oh, yey. I haven't read it yet (see really really slow German), but I glanced at the first couple pages, and I notice Claudia Jarzebowski is cited! Selena read us one of her essays on Wilhelmine!

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 06:15 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
I saw Wilhelmine's travel diary too, thought about buying it :DD

How much did you find it for? Because I paid $150 to snag it while I could, because the next cheapest copy I could find was like $500 for the full 3-volume set. Do you use book-finding sites that I could be using?

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 07:40 pm (UTC)
prinzsorgenfrei: (Default)
From: [personal profile] prinzsorgenfrei
I don't think I am, I found a German translation that's being sold by a tiny publisher from Bayreuth (and has an atrocious cover) for about 15 Euros. Didn't necessarily look like something I'd cite for a paper. I didn't get it, so I don't know if it's abridged in any way either... My usual book finding sites don't have it at all right now. I don't think the auction house's sites for book auction records had it either, I remember looking for Mine's works there... I wish my internship wasn't over, maybe I could find something about different editions with their ressources

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 08:17 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Oh, a German translation! That's what I get for wanting the original, lol. Can you link me to that? It would be a whole lot easier than OCR cleanup!

And lol, I was a bit surprised at your apparent willingness to spend $150 or more on her diary. ;)

Re: A mixture of stuff, mostly Katte related

Date: 2021-11-08 08:25 pm (UTC)
prinzsorgenfrei: (Default)
From: [personal profile] prinzsorgenfrei
Original is best, obviously. I just found this one by chance.
here
Like I said, it's a super tiny publishing house and the cover is an affront to good taste. Also it only has 104 pages which seems odd considering the version in three parts...? I'm really not sure what this is. I actually don't remember how i found it either :'D

Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-08 11:10 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Thank you! I've used the contact form on their site to ask if they accept any forms of payment from the US. If so, I will send it to the royal reader and she can let us know if there's anything interesting. And I've uploaded the scan of the original French in two parts to the memoirs + diaries and the correspondence sections of the Frederician library.

104 pages sounds about right, actually; the three volumes include 2 unrelated volumes and only the third is Wilhelmine. Which is why I really, really didn't want to pay $500 for two books I didn't want and one I did. The Wilhelmine diary is only about 50 pages long, plus there are about 100 pages of letters between her and Fritz. I'm guessing the German translation doesn't include the letters, although there is a lot of blank space in the original volume, so the German publishers might have condensed the 168 pages down to 104.

If the German translation doesn't include the letters, [personal profile] selenak and/or [personal profile] felis can take a look at the original letters in French and see whether they look like letters we already have in other places (Trier, Volz, the Italy trip website etc.) or if they're new to us. If they're new to us, I'll work on getting them translated into English. But for now I'm holding off on all OCR cleanup until someone has a copy of the German translation of the diary.

Re: Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-16 02:19 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
Confirmed: the German translation of the diary is *only* the diary, and doesn't include the correspondence that the French volume has. (I went ahead and splurged on a copy that would ship to me from within the US, so it arrived yesterday, instead of 2 months from now. Have now spent a total of $200 on her diary. :P)

I will get the diary digitized asap, and at some point I or someone else can look into whether the letters are ones we already have access to or not. (The editor says they hadn't been published yet in 1891, so they're not in Preuss. But major candidates still include Volz and the Italy trip website.)

Re: Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-17 08:20 am (UTC)
selenak: (Wilhelmine)
From: [personal profile] selenak
I do suspect the letters are at the Italy Trip Website, which after all wants to document Wilhelmine‘s Italian (and French) journey as detailed as possible, but what mystifies me is why they didn‘t put the diary up while they were at it - presumably copyright again, like with Lehndorff‘s diary (first volume) cunningly republished just when the copyright for Schmidt-Lötzen‘s translation runs out.

Anyway, I very much look forward to reading the Italian diary!

Re: Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-24 12:38 am (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
I was reading Blanning, and I ran into this observation on European visitors in Italy on their Grand Tours:

They came equipped with a yardstick against which contemporary conditions were almost certain to be found wanting, namely a classical education. Most famously, the contrast between the classical past and the Christian present inspired one of the greatest historiographical and literary creations of the eighteenth century, as Edward Gibbon recorded in his Memoirs: 'It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter [the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli], that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.'

I knew that it was a trope to go to Italy and complain, (I think [personal profile] selenak said women were more likely to accept current-day Italy on its own terms?), but this instance particularly struck me, since I've read (and liked) The Decline and Fall, and I didn't konw that this was how he got his inspiration.

Re: Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-24 08:35 am (UTC)
selenak: (Wilhelmine)
From: [personal profile] selenak
I think [personal profile] selenak said women were more likely to accept current-day Italy on its own terms?

Yes, after reading the Anna Amalia biography, because that's something she, Wilhelmine and Fanny Mendelssohn - travellling at very different points from each other - have in common. Whereas, Goethe excepted (who loved it there), you're far more prone in male visitors to get to that passage where they complain about how low Italy has sunk since the Roman days. Mind you, after having read what Gian Gastone's Dad did to Florence during his 53 years bigotted reign, I would empathize for Florentine visitors during that era, but not looking back to Rome, looking back to the Renaissance!

Re: Wilhelmine travel diary + Italy letters

Date: 2021-11-28 10:38 pm (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard
I've now done a comparison of the first few letters, and I've found that there's very little overlap between what's in the Italy Trip Website and what's in the volume I procured. The website definitely uses the diary + letters volume as a source, but:

1. Most of the letters in the volume aren't in the diary and vice versa. This makes sense, since the letters in the volume start from January 1756, and Wilhelmine was back in Bayreuth starting in August 1755. Burrell, the editor, seems to be very interested in Wilhelmine's advice to Fritz on the war.
2. The letters that are on the website are heavily excerpted with ellipses.
2a. If you're up to 18th century handwriting and French, the facsimile of the few letters that are on the website is the whole thing, but the transcription + German translation is a fraction of the whole.
3. The readings of the letters that are in both website and book aren't always the same, according to the website.

So it seems there *is* some value in the manual labor of doing the OCR cleanup so these can be put through Google translate, unless they're in Volz or Solange wir zu zweit sind (which I don't own).

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