2020 Yuletide Fandom Promo Post

[crantz]

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

Suggested form to use:

<b>FANDOM NAME</b>:
<b>WHAT MAKES IT GREAT</b>:
<b>WHERE CAN I FIND IT?(optional)</b>:


For reference, last year's promo post!


This post on LJ

Comments

[raspberryhunter]

FANDOM NAME: Circle of Voltaire RPF
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT:
Voltaire was A Personality. He decided he was going to become the greatest writer of the age, and he did. He also invited a large amount of drama, involving literature, natural philosophy (science), money (he also decided he was going to become wealthy, and did), feuding with people, and various campaigns for justice. He was always there for the underdog, although if you weren't an underdog you were likely to feel the sting of his pen!

Basically, this meant he was surrounded by a soap opera a bunch of really interesting and engaging characters.

My favorite is Émilie du Châtelet, who was super awesome. She was Voltaire's lover, but she could run circles around him in terms of science and mathematical prowess. One of her mathematics tutors wrote to a friend when he first began giving lessons to her and to Voltaire that she was 'altogether remarkable,' while he could not even make the other understand what mathematics was. She couldn't find a good textbook to teach her son physics, so she just wrote her own! She wrote a translation/analysis of Newton's Principia (and was correcting the proofs while recovering from childbirth, and sent them off a day before she died) that was so great that it is still the standard in France today.

Other people in the Voltaire circle: Émilie, when starting her maths studies, tutored for a while and (may have?) had an/off affair with Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, geometer and writer. (Both also wrote philosophical treatises.) (Voltaire and Maupertuis eventually got into an extreme feud.) Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, later Marquise du Pompadour, was an important patron (and from her pre-mistress of Louis XV. days old acquaintance) of various Enlightenment writers, including both Voltaire and Émilie.

Francesco Algarotti was a jetsetting polymath and in his day Europe-wide known intellectual (with a knack of making people everywhere fall in love with him which could get messy). Like Émilie, he worked and published on Newton and stayed with her and Voltaire at Cirey for a while, though Maupertuis had invited him at the same time to join his Lapland expedition (Algarotti: much in demand). Then, when Algarotti was in England, he got into a convoluted love triangle with Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu (whose own long term friendship somehow survived this). Both Hervey and Montagu were society wits, poets and pamphleteers, but Lady Mary was also the person mainly responsible for first introducing inocculation against small pox in England after her experience with it in Turkey. Her "Embassy Letters" with their description of her journey through various European country to Turkey and of Turkey itself became an international bestseller of their day, making her one of the most widely read women in 18th Century Europe. (Virginia Woolf also modelled part of Orlando's life in Orlando on her.)

Hervey, whose secret memoirs of the reign of George II. would largely form historians' impression of it for the next centuries, was also friends with Voltaire since Voltaire's own time in England and had visited him and Émilie in Cirey later. Algarotti saw Lady Mary again years after the dust had settled over their triangle mess during her years in Italy. We don't know whether Lady Mary and Émilie ever met, but it's possible and just the kind of thing fanfiction is there for.

Finally, Richelieu (not the Cardinal, his great-grand nephew) was an old lover of Émilie's who managed to become a live long friend afterwards; he was also an old school friend of Voltaire's, an important patron for writers and supposedly the original for Valmont in Les Liasons Dangereuses. Marie-Louise Mignot Denis, or Madame Denis as she's commonly referred to, was one of Voltaire's nieces and also an amateur actress and writer; in the 1740s when the relationship with Émilie went through a crisis, he started an affair with her. What Émilie and Madame Denis made of each other is another thing not really covered by biographies due to lack of data and thus a gap that's possible to fill with fanfiction.

WHERE CAN I FIND IT?(optional):
This is a video that does not work in the US, but may work outside it: Émilie du Chatelet: ~twelve minutes vid about Émilie and why she's cool!
Clips from the play about her, "The Marquise du Chatelet defends her life tonight".

Posts about our heroes (also check the tags in the rheinsberg community for even more!):

This post writes up the magnum opus Voltaire biography by Jean Orieux: Voltaire ou la Royauté de l'Esprit (dt: Das Leben des Voltaire)
This post writes up two books about Émilie and Voltaire: David Bodanis' Passionate Minds (quite romanticized but a lot of fun) and Judith Zinsser's Émilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (better sourced but biased in the other direction).
This is a write-up of Mary Terrall's biography The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment.
This is a write-up of Robert Halsband's biography Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier and this is a writeup of his malicious and extremely entertaining memoirs.)
This is a writeup of Francesco Algarotti as featured in someone's dissertation.
This is a write-up of Isabel Grundy's biography Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment.
This is a writeup of Lady Mary's memoirs/letters.

[many thanks to selenak for providing text and links!]