Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 48

[cahn]

Some awesome historical RPF candyheartsex stories for meeeeee (or by me, in one tiny case) with historical characters! I'm just going to note whom the stories are about here. They are all so good!!

Anne Boleyn/Catherine of Aragorn
Frances Howard and Frances Coke (or: James I's court was basically a HOTBED of scandal, omg)

And two that are also historical RPF but also consistent with the Jude Morgan novel The King's Touch, which is an excellent historical novel narrated by James ("Jemmy") Scott, Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son.

Princess Henrietta of England (Charles II's sister and wife of Philippe I duc d'Orleans)
James of Monmouth/William/Mary

Comments

Re: "He, too, is Alexander?": Mildred and Methodology

[mildred_of_midgard]

Good news: the BLHA is totally happy to digitize all 2000 pages of requested Kiekemal material for me!...for 650 euros. :/

I can afford it, and I do think it will greatly improve the quality of the essay/chapter on Fredersdorf and Pfeiffer, I'm just hesitating over whether I want it 650 euros badly. (I was hoping for something less than 500 euros.)

In other good news, I'm getting close to having my first pass at Meinerzhagen's second (looong) report done. I might even make time for du Moulin's reports!

Essay writing continues, just slowly. Keep nagging!

Re: "He, too, is Alexander?": Mildred and Methodology

[cahn]

Essay wriiiiiiting! Do it! :)

Re: "He, too, is Alexander?": Mildred and Methodology

[selenak]

Dittoing this. Also, personally, I wouldn't spend the 650 Euro on 2000 pages of Kiekemal material, because: seriously, do you intend to go through 2000 pages of this kind of writing, most of which is going to be very dry material? Mind you, I'm selfish and looking at the prospect of translating this much of this kind of material with horror. We lucked out with the post Glasow scandal letters to Fredersdorf, most of which were actually interesting.

Re: "He, too, is Alexander?": Mildred and Methodology

[mildred_of_midgard]

No, of course not! But I spent the same amount of money on the same amount of pages of Peter Keith material in a single order from Aurich, and I skipped most of them, because the point is not to read all 2000 pages, the point is to find the 20 pages that are relevant to strengthening my argument.

I've never asked you to translate 2000 pages of Peter Keith material, or any of the other reams of archival material in Kurrent that I've ordered and have been deciphering/skimming on my own behind the scenes (maybe I haven't made it clear just how much I've been doing? because most of it *is* dry and irrelevant), and I've no intention of asking you to translate this. The only reason I'm asking you to translate the Fredersdorf material is because it *is* so interesting that I'm trying to see if we can publish these letters in their entirety, and having your translation is helpful to me in clearing up some of my uncertain handwriting readings.

Yes, ideally I would travel to Berlin and flip through the Kiekemal material in the archives and only copy the 20 pages I needed, but 1) I would have to be a hell of a lot faster at reading Kurrent to identify those 20 pages on the spot, 2) I would have to have substantially less back pain, 3) it wouldn't actually be cheaper. ;)

So not to worry, this task of translating will not land on your plate either way!

Which still leaves me with the question of how badly I want to identify those 20 pages relevant to my argument...

The decipherment quest continues

[mildred_of_midgard]

Good news: the 2000 pages written by the Kurmärkische Kammer are in beautiful handwriting. The confiscated Anderson correspondence isn't, but it's plenty doable, I'll just need time to transcribe it by hand (and it's only about 40 pages, which is less than Du Moulin and Meinerzhagen). The 2000 pages I can easily sight read, and with practice I might even be able to sight-read easily enough to simultaneously keep track in my head of 3-page sentences of bureaucratic prose, because that's what this is. (omg)

First discovery: so remember when I was looking at 18th century biographical dictionaries with accounts of Pfeiffer's life, to try to track down where the "he was innocent" claim came from? And one of them said he was accused of embezzlement in the timber trade, whereas Wegfraß said nothing of the sort? So I took that to mean that this author was particularly ill-informed?

Well, reading just the first 10 pages of the Kurmärkische Kammer write-up tells me that he was accused of cutting down more trees than he needed for the colonization project, despoiling the countryside, and--I think--selling the surplus via Hamburg (but I'll need to reread for that last one; the 3-page sentences, bureaucratic prose, and Kurrent (even clean) is overloading my working memory).

I retract my slander, late 18th century biographical dictionary author! You knew what you were talking about!

I think it's also saying he was found guilty, but again, will need to do a reread. For now, I think I'm going to press on with reading more and more, hoping to find new material and improve my sight-reading skills, and once I've identified the interesting parts, come back to them with improved skills. (This is always better than trying to get a perfect read in the first pass-through.)

All I *really* need for the purposes of this essay/book is to look with my own eyes at some text saying he was found guilty, with preferably some clarification on the chronology, but 2000 pages of clean text is too good to resist: I'm going to use this for reading practice. I still want to go back to some of the Keith family material that's less cleanly written, and it would help if I were better at Kurrent. Even if every hand is different, any practice is good practice!

(I'm super annoyed that all my time in college and grad school did was teach me that I'm bad at learning to read other writing systems, and that I shouldn't bother trying for anything more complicated than the Greek alphabet. I'm bad at it if you force me to produce a perfect transcription on the first day of class, which they always did. And I'm fighting off a headache as we speak (hence the break I'm taking right now). But I'm actually pretty good at acquiring the skill if you let me go at it my way!

I don't understand why the standard is "Can you produce a perfect transcription by the second day of class?" and not "Can you learn this script well enough to read texts written in it?" But that's why, as soon as I'm done with historical research, I'm going to get together with some colleagues from grad school to see what we can do about making the teaching of dead languages suck less.)