Talk:Maximiliane Brentano

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Brentano throws a snowball at Goethe

• ... that Goethe used his unrequited love to Maximiliane Brentano (both pictured) as inspiration for his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther? Source: [1]: "verliebte sich Goethe sofort in ihre Tochter", "In den „Leiden des jungen Werthers“ verschmolz er Maximiliane mit einer anderen frühen Geliebten zur dunkeläugigen, kinderlieben und charakterschönen „Lotte“."
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/1971 Swiss women's suffrage referendum
  • Comment: Other hook ideas welcome. As mother of Clemens Brentano and Bettina von Arnim, Maximiliane is "the mother of German Romanticism" but I don't want a hook focussing only on her children.

Moved to mainspace by Kusma (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 55 past nominations.

—Kusma (talk) 10:36, 28 July 2024 (UTC).

• Page is long enough, was moved to mainspace recently enough, and QPQ is done. WP:EARWIG says "Violation Unlikely". Hook is interesting. I cannot read German, so I will assume good faith on the source. Overall, seems good to me! Di (they-them) (talk) 12:23, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Maximiliane Brentano/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Kusma (talk · contribs) 10:37, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 10:57, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Not much to say here -- a lovely little article.

Thank you for the detailed and helpful comments! I haven't been getting much wikitime lately, but I have made a start. —Kusma (talk) 19:08, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

• The short description is longer than ideal -- suggest cutting "German woman", starting with "Friend", and moving the dates to the end.

  done.

• Maximiliane Brentano (4 May 1756 – 19 November 1793) was a German woman: can we do better than woman: we wouldn't say "Goethe was a German man who...". "Aristocrat", if nothing else?

  That's not an easy one. Technically her father didn't have the "von" of nobility by the time she was born. Happy for suggestions.

• Can we say roughly where Ehrenbreitstein is? It's got an enWiki article, so we should convert the ILL into a regular link.

  The enwiki link is about the fortress. The family lived in the town below it (which was essentially the capital of the Electorate of Trier at the time), next to Schloss Philippsburg, the residence of the Elector. I have changed the link so readers are not presented with the redirect to the fortress anymore.

• the dark eyes of the female protagonist Lotte refer to Brentano: not quite the right idiom: are based on those of Brentano, or simply are based on hers? This occurs in the body as well.

  Done.

• The underscore in the SFN for Hessische Biografie is a bit unsightly.

  removed.

• Can you bundle up some of the multi-cites (particularly on the date of birth) to improve readability?

  done

• a high ranking court official: hyphen in high-ranking.

  Added.

• Make sure that all German text (such as "Stadioner Hof") is in lang templates; you can set |italic=no if you wish.

  not sure I got all, but I tried

• he became Geheimer Rat: I think we mean a member of the Geheimer Rat or became a Geheimrat -- but in either case, I would explain what this means.

  "Geheimer Rat" can mean either (rarely) the council of all Geheimräte or an individual councillor, but the enwiki article makes an unnecessary distinction so I went for "Geheimrat" and explained slightly.

• I'm getting quite a lot of MOS:SANDWICH: very slightly between the second and third images and more seriously between the other set of three. Perhaps shifting one of the latter set down into the "Legacy" section would solve the problem?

  I use Monobook, a wide screen and large thumbnail size, so I find it normal to have left-aligned and right-aligned images at the same height. In the default settings, I see that the images are too small for the font size used in the captions, so the Goethe image and the Goldener Kopf image have a bit more overlap (something I find pretty normal). Neither of the images seems appropriate for the "Legacy" section, so I do not want to move them there. (I believe the most important rule about image placement is that the images should be in the section where the thing depicted is discussed; moving to a later section means that people on small screens or on the mobile interface will not see them at all).

  As Vector 22 is the default, particularly for users who are not logged in, I think we should design at least with that in mind. MOS:SANDWICH isn't strictly a GA criterion, so doesn't have to be met here, but the current approach has caused an accessibility hit. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:57, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  I moved the Goldener Hof image to the bottom of the section, so it is still in a place that makes sense semantically. In Vector 22 (private browsing on Safari) I do not see any sets of images on the same line.

• In the caption, should Haus zum Goldenen Kopf have a "the" in front of it, as it does in the body?

  OK.

• In general, MOS:BIO says that we shouldn't give birth and death dates to people in body text -- there's an argument to keep them for the children who died young, but almost everyone else in the last paragraph of "Marriage and children" could have them removed. The birth dates of her children can be written out in prose; if they died after her, they're probably not relevant here.

  I removed the life dates for all but the last three.

• Johann Georg Jacobi and his brother, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the educational reformer Johann Bernhard Basedow, the poet and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater and the authors Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse, Franz Michael Leuchsenring and Johann Heinrich Merck.: with compound lists like this, use a semicolon after each entry: so Johann Georg Jacobi and his brother, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi; the educational reformer Johann Bernhard Basedow; the poet and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater; and the authors Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse, Franz Michael Leuchsenring and Johann Heinrich Merck.

  Done.

• Can we explain, or at least link, what a Sylph is? In English, don't capitalise it.

  Linked.

• According to a letter written by Sophie von la Roche to Lavater after 1791, the dean of St. Leonhard, Frankfurt, Damian Friedrich Dumeiz, an old family friend, had already in 1771 arranged a later marriage between Maximiliane and his nephew von Strauß; however, this was cancelled for reasons of politics and to further von Strauß's career when Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal, who later became Elector of Mainz, heard about the planned marriage.: this is a long and winding sentence -- can we cut it up a bit and make the syntax a little clearer?

  Untangled.

• If we're going to give the title of Dichtung und Wahrheit, we should translate, as we have for most other non-English works.

  Done.

• where he had been in love with Charlotte Buff and a friend of her fiancé, Johann Christian Kestner.: it sounds from this like he was in love with Buff and Kestner, but isn't clear whether he loved Buff and one of Kestner's friends.

  Clarified.

• groom was Peter Anton Brentano [de], an Italian-born merchant who had moved to Frankfurt at the age of 18.: how old was he at the time? Sounds like there was a bit of an age gap?

  Born in 1735, so more than 20 years older (but not "40 year old" as some sources say).

• close to the Goethe House: would it have been called that at the time?

  Went for "Goethe family residence".

• the French correspondence with her father: not totally clear: suggest her correspondence with her father, which she conducted in French...

  Done.

• Brentano has been described as "literally the mother of German Romanticism": quotes should be attributed in text -- by whom?

  Added. There are a few more places where her mother is called "grandmother of German Romanticism".

Image review

• Alt text should be added for MOS:ACCESSIBILITY.

  Added.

• File:Frankfurt am Main Haus Zum Goldenen Kopf.jpg: needs US PD tag.

  Added, and also a guess to who the artist is (looks very much like a finished version of [2]).

• File:Goethe ice skating by Wilhelm von Kaulbach.jpg: as above.

  Added.

• File:BrentanoFamilienbild.jpg: I'm not sure the US PD license is right, but in any case there's a simpler one -- it seems to have been published in the C18th, so it's surely PD-expired by a long way?

  I'm not sure it was "published" before 1932, so I'm trying to be precise

• File:Die Gartenlaube (1868) b 348.jpg: checks out.
• File:Stadioner Hof.jpg: Germany has (invented!) Freedom of Panorama, so all fine here.
• File:Maximiliane von La Roche.jpg: Suggest formally adding the PD-US tags: the Free Art licence tag is a little moot, as it's PD everywhere in the world anyway.

  Added.

Source review

To follow once the above is concluded.

@UndercoverClassicist: thank you for the review so far. I think I have addressed almost all of your points, so I hope we are ready for this section. If you want to check the offline books (Schultz and Strohmeyr), just let me know, I am happy to provide quotes or scans as needed. —Kusma (talk) 13:21, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree: as follows:

• Ancestry.com is generally considered unreliable, per WP:RSP, as a user-generated source. It's also being used to critique/contradict a secondary source, which is very dodgy indeed. Any way around it to the original document?

  I agree that most of the content on ancestry.com is garbage, but they do also host many original documents, as in the case at hand. The document in this case is the top hit for the search here: [3] (viewer link if it works). This is a handwritten index card, probably a 20th century copy of the original church book. In case you can't read the handwriting: "Name: Franck (von Lichtenfels, genannt La Roche). Vorname: Maximiliana Euphrosina. Vater: Georg Michael. Stand: Amtmann des Grafen von Stadion. Mutter: Maria Sofia. Paten: Gräfin von Stadion in Buchau u[nd] Euphrosine von Onold". The "Pfarrei: E." means that the parish is St Emmeran. The * for birth says 1756, 4.5. (but this could easily be the date of baptism) The index cards are held by the city archives of Mainz, where they say they are accessible via ancestry. Anyway, there is a secondary source that explicitly discusses the date of birth and explicitly says that 31 May is wrong, which is Böhm 1973. Böhm says that he saw the original church book entry (he quotes it in Latin) and it says 4 May, which also is what he gets from analysing a letter from Goethe to Sophie von La Roche where he mentions Maxe's birthday in relation to the Alesina golden wedding anniversary, which was celebrated in the first week of May 1774. So the primary source is here only to complement the secondary sources.

• What makes www.sabinehock.de a reliable source?

  This is a text she wrote for the "Wochendienst", a weekly publication of the city of Frankfurt (that the German Wikipedia article is based on). Infuriatingly enough, the archives I can find for it do not include the time in question. Anyway, we could drop her, but that means getting rid of the "literally the mother of German Romanticism" quote, which is kind of cute. What do you think?

  I have taken out the Hock references. I am sure this is the same as a proper citable publication, but I can't prove it.

• Note 1 checks out.
• Note 11b checks out.
• Note 27: could you provide the text to support The painting is probably a copy made for Maximiliane on the occasion of her wedding.?

  Sure. p. 162: "Ausschnitt aus einem größeren Familienbild mit den vier jüngeren Geschwistern der hier alleine zwischen ihren Eltern sitzenden Maximiliane von La Roche. Die Kopie wurde wohl angefertigt, damit sie die älteste Tochter bei ihrer Verheiratung 1774 als Erinnerung an ihr Elternhaus mit nach Frankfurt nehmen konnte." ('Extract (from a larger family painting with the four younger siblings) of Maximiliane von La Roche sitting between her parents. The copy was probably made so the eldest daughter could take it to Frankfurt with her upon her marriage in 1774.')

• In English, you only put a space after a colon in a work's title: so Aesthetic vision and German romanticism: writing images.

  Tell archive.org :) Fixed I hope.

• One or two MOS:DASH issues to look at in work titles (don't use a hyphen where an endash is intended).

  Fixed two.

• Optional, but consider using |trans-title= for non-English work titles.

  Added, hopefully with internally consistent use of title case for books and sentence case for chapters/journal articles.

@UndercoverClassicist: Ready for more input from you I think. —Kusma (talk) 14:50, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist: made a few more edits, do you think there is anything else? I'll be travelling from Monday to Saturday, so I might respond slowly after tomorrow. —Kusma (talk) 15:22, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I think we're OK. I still have some discomfort around the use of Ancestry, but I think we're OK for where we are. Passing now -- good work on the article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:01, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.