The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, Volume I

Karl Ludwig Freiherr von PöllnitzProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
871K words
Chapters
88

Tags

English Originals General Biography Historical ReappraisalPortrait GalleryLegendary LivesMemoirAge of EnlightenmentExotic CultureSocial ObservationEuropean CourtAristocratic LifeCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, Volume I by PöllnitzAuthor: Pöllnitz, Karl Ludwig, Freiherr von, 1692-1775,Language: English, Class: D: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere, Release Date: Jan 5, 2012

Editor's review

This memoir is a firsthand record of an eighteenth-century European nobleman's travels. Baron von Pöllnitz moved constantly among the German states and the major courts of Europe, and his account offers close observation of court etiquette and aristocratic sociability while preserving details of political life and daily routine. For the general reader its value lies not in tight narrative but in historical texture: it lets us hear the voice, prejudices, and curiosity of someone who lived through the ancien régime. The Project Gutenberg edition is easy to search and cite, making it useful as supplementary material for comparative literature, modern history, or translation studies. Read it as essayistic source material rather than a continuous autobiography, and with notes and maps at hand, the payoff will be more concrete.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction and chapter headings first to establish a chronological and geographical framework before entering the text.
  2. Keep a map of Europe and a short list of people and relationships at hand, marking courts and principalities as you go.
  3. Read by theme: court etiquette, political observations, and travel incidents can be taken in separate blocks.
  4. Mark unfamiliar titles and events, look them up together, then return to the relevant passages.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88

FAQ

Is this book a complete autobiography or a fragmentary memoir? It is a memoir of the author's travels and court experiences, closer to essayistic source material organized by episode than to a complete autobiography running from childhood to old age. Read it as a window onto ancien régime Europe rather than expecting a linear coming-of-age narrative.
How difficult is the English original? The text is in English and involves many eighteenth-century names, titles, and places, with period sentence structures. Readers with university-level English who are willing to look things up can manage, but historical background material and notes are recommended to avoid getting stuck on dense proper nouns.
Is the Project Gutenberg edition suitable for citation? This free electronic text is convenient for searching and excerpting, and suits course reading and preliminary research. For formal academic citation, verify edition information and page numbers, and check key quotations against an authoritative print or scholarly edition.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz Author · German · 1692–1775

Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz (1692–1775) was a German adventurer and memoirist born in Issum. He spent his youth at the electoral court in Berlin, later served as a soldier in Austria, Italy and Spain, and traveled through the courts of Europe. Returning to Berlin in 1735, he served the Prussian kings Frederick William I and Frederick the Great, and died in Berlin in 1775. He is known for his French-language memoirs, notably the four-volume Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, which record his military and court experiences, and for his scandalous chronicle of Saxony. His firsthand, anecdotal writings offer lively material on eighteenth-century European court life; public information on his early years and writing details is limited.