18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 36

[cahn]

Starting a couple of comments earlier than usual to mention there are a couple of new salon fics! These probably both need canon knowledge.

felis ficlets on siblings!

Siblings (541 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Summary:

Three Fills for the 2022 Three Sentence Ficathon.

Chapter One: Protective Action / Babysitting at Rheinsberg (Frederick/Fredersdorf, William+Henry+Ferdinand)
Chapter Two: Here Be Lions (Wilhelmine)

Unsent Letters fic by me:

Letters for a Dead King (1981 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen (1726-1802)
Characters: Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Love/Hate, Talking To Dead People, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Just because one's king and brother is dead doesn't mean one has to stop writing to him.

Comments

Re: Wallenstein and Kepler

[mildred_of_midgard]

Me: OH! THAT Wallenstein! The one Schiller wrote the trilogy about that [personal profile] selenak pointed me to and which I have downloaded the 19th-C [maybe?] translation for somewhere!

Lol! Oh, Cahn, never change. <3

I remember reading in St. Augustine's Confessions a while back that he stopped believing in astrology because he realized that twins with different life paths falsify it!

I remember being impressed by the reasoning in his takedown of astrology in the City of God, but I didn't remember that twins were what led him to this conclusion. (Okay, this is where I admit I'm the only human being I'm aware of who's more familiar with the City of God than the Confessions. I read the latter once and was meh about it, have read the former at least a couple of times and enjoy dipping into it now and again.)

I guess Kepler would have said that free will could cause that

That, or that twins are not born at the exact same time! One comes out before the other. One of the ways in which Kepler accounted for the discrepancies between his initial predictions for Wallenstein and actual occurrences was that he didn't have the *exact* moment of Wallenstein's birth the first time. He asked for the precise hour and minute the second time, and said he was changing his calculations accordingly.

Kepler also pointed out that clocks were not entirely accurate and don't always tell the same time, which is true even in my house today, never mind in the early 17th century! (Remember our guy Harrison, who developed a more accurate timekeeping device in the 18th century with which to calculate longitude.)

After all, astrologers have to have *some* way of excusing their repeated and inevitable failures. ;)

I would be curious if Kepler actually managed to not believe in astrology at all by the end, but was just knocking out horoscopes for the money. The "don't believe this, though I'm not saying astrology isn't real!" rant to the guy who just paid for a horoscope may not contain Kepler's full and complete skepticism toward whether astrology was real or not. On the other hand, it was normal to believe in at the time, and the sunk costs fallacy is real, so Mortimer's one excerpt of Kepler's one letter may actually be representative of Kepler's beliefs.

Re: Wallenstein and Kepler

[cahn]

I remember being impressed by the reasoning in his takedown of astrology in the City of God, but I didn't remember that twins were what led him to this conclusion.

OK, I found the reference to the Confessions, and it sounds like the germ of his deciding not to believe was a friend of his talking about being born at the exact same time as a slave, and surprise! them having very different lives. But he also then realized that twins also falsify it, which was what I remembered :)

That, or that twins are not born at the exact same time! One comes out before the other.

Ah, Augustine thought of that! He pointed out that they're usually born close enough that an astrologer can't distinguish between the two in terms of what is used to produce the astrological reading.

(Okay, this is where I admit I'm the only human being I'm aware of who's more familiar with the City of God than the Confessions. I read the latter once and was meh about it, have read the former at least a couple of times and enjoy dipping into it now and again.)

I'm kind of annoyed that I didn't read City of God at the time (in my mid-to-late 20's) where I would have actually enjoyed it and possibly been really into it. At this point in my life there's no way. Maybe in another ten years I'll be able to read stuff like this again, we'll see.

I would be curious if Kepler actually managed to not believe in astrology at all by the end, but was just knocking out horoscopes for the money.

Me too!