18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: "Empress Elizabeth" and "Five Empresses" by Evgenii Anisimov - I

[mildred_of_midgard]

Meaning: Peter could have done whatever he wanted with her. And her lover. If she cheats on him, that's awful, but he can kill the boytoy and assume that's it, things can get back to normal at some point. They're both passionate, energetic people, after all. If she refuses to have sex, and/or stays indifferent during it, that would go to the core of what originally brought them together, and might mean to him there's no future for them.

Yep, this. And let me remind you, cahn, that the way to get rid of an unwanted wife in Russia in this period is to have the wife be "voluntold" to join an Orthodox nunnery. The original idea was that there was no divorce, marriage lasted until death. But if a woman had a religious calling, she could leave the secular world behind and become legally dead, at which point her husband was legally widowed.

Of course, it took about 0.001 microseconds for powerful men to realize that here was a giant loophole for divorcing unwanted wives (much like consanguinity in the Catholic west). The Church authorities protested. "That's not what we meant! We meant genuine religious calling!" But Peter had already done this to his first wife, Alexei's mother Eudoxia, who did not want to go into a nunnery, but was eventually pressured into saying that she did.

So if you can keep your husband convinced that you still want to live together as husband and wife, you've got a chance, whereas once you announce you're done with him, he might decide to marry someone else, at which point you need to be made legally dead.