Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Keith baptismal ages

[mildred_of_midgard]

New details I've observed in the process of updating my essay-in-progress:

Carl Ernst was baptized November 29, 1743 (according to a biographical dictionary), and died at 1 am on October 20, 1822 at the age of 79 (according to his burial record). If his burial record is correct about his age at time of death, he must have been at least a month old when he was baptized.

Likewise, Ariane was baptized March 23, 1721 (according to her baptism record) and died October 7, 1791, age 71 (both according to her burial record). If her burial record is correct about her age, she must have been at least 5 months old when she was baptized.

Friedrich Ludwig, you may remember, was baptized only 1 day old, at home (instead of at church) because of illness, and Peter Keith sent the letter to Fritz asking him about being godfather 2 days after the baptism had already happened. And we were wondering if that was normal practice.

Well, I know that in France, at least according to Horowski, it was normal *not* to baptize kids right away. Despite infant mortality, for some reason. And if the death records can be trusted, Ariane and Carl Ernst were not baptized right away. Now, what with my mother being the family genealogist, I grew up inundated in "You can't trust these records completely!", but it also seems unlikely that both are wrong in the same way. I think maybe they were baptized in their first year of life, but not in the first few days.

So I'm thinking maybe Peter and Ariane's plan with their second child was to wait to see if the kid survived birth, then bother busy Fritz with a letter, hopefully get permission to list Fritz as godfather, then baptize the kid once they knew. Then those plans had to be changed on short notice because it looked like the kid might die.

Given that we have the cause of death for Peter, Ariane, and Carl Ernst, I really wish we had it for Friedrich Ludwig! That would allow me to take a guess as to whether he was sickly his whole life, or if he just got smallpox or died in a duel or something unrelated.

Poor Ariane in any case: losing her husband young-ish and then her son. :( But being a researcher hundreds of years later is fun.