cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

You're viewing

cahn's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

I'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Whereas if you tell FW you think that someone is gay, let alone that he's made a pass (or several) at you, he'll have that person executed. By fire, if male, by sword, if female, going by actual events.

Remind me if he did this for gayness? Huh, looking through the sodomy article again, it looks like if you were a noble, FW would just lock you up and let you go after a few years. I mean, that is still an excellent reason not to tell him!

His 1725 edict says "if you do it with a cow", and the author says that this is because the vast majority of cases in Brandenburg-Prussia, as opposed to Hamburg, were bestiality and not homosexuality cases.

Okay, yeah, here's a case where the woman who dressed up as a man and married her lover and penetrated her with a dildo was executed by FW's "You're letting her off too easy!" order, while the "seduced" partner was locked up for 3 years.

So, yeah. If you were a noble, you might get locked up for being gay, if you were a member of the lower classes, execution. Though apparently FW went along with the recommended milder punishments for the first 10 or so years of his reign, then decided that wasn't enough of a deterrent and too many people kept doing it, so he started insisting on death for non-nobles.

This remains a really interesting article, I should reread it.

tells you something about Visconti (a straight man) expecting gay men to be only interested in teenage boys and young beardless men in their early 20s, while the Marquis de La Valliere evidently finds men of all ages attractive.

Yeah, that is really interesting. That is definitely a stereotype that persists to this day.

Edited Date: 2023-02-04 02:20 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Remind me if he did this for gayness?

For female gayness, there's indeed poor Rosenstengel, and for male, I was thinking of the 1730 "sodomite" who did it with both animals and men (or am I misremembering?) according to the pamphlet I found and got burned. Neither was a noble, though.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I was thinking of the 1730 "sodomite" who did it with both animals and men (or am I misremembering?) according to the pamphlet I found and got burned.

I think you are misremembering, at least given your write-up:

But I can tell cahn now that poor Lepsch had a go at the sheep courtesy to the pamphlet you uploaded. Well actually, I don't know which animal(s) he had a go at, but it wasn't humans. The giveaway is "viehische Vermischung" again

From:

felis

You might be mixing up the Lepsch case - which was bestiality only IIRC - and the Ephraim Ostermann one (see towards the end of this comment), which was indeed both, although it was complicated by the fact that one of the guys he had sex with died, and that it's a bit unclear on which grounds he actually got the death penalty (which was sword first, then burning the dead body, as per FW's addition to the verdict).

From:

selenak

Yes, that's it, I was mixing up the two! Thank you for clearing this up.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Our sodomy expert to the rescue, thank you! :D

(Selena is our orgy expert: "But Philippe's orgies were well lit!")

I found a good essay on sodomy as a crime in Prussia...whose author...wrote his whole dissertation on the subject, i.e. sodomy as a crime in the 18th century

Damn, I went looking for the dissertation just now, and Google books shows it was made into a book, but I can't find it for sale anywhere, nor even in the Bavarian Stabi. :( Oh well.