Katte Execution, Round 1 Analysis: Introduction

[mildred_of_midgard]

What I'm going to do in the next several posts, tagged "textual criticism", is present an analysis of the sources we have for Katte's execution. First, I'll paste the raw source material: Wilhelmine, Pöllnitz, Thiébault, Fontane, Catt, Voltaire, Münchow, and Friedrich Wilhelm, one in each post. Because Wilhelmine includes large amounts of detail that aren't in any other source and therefore aren't relevant to the discussion, large chunks of her content have been omitted. I will use brackets to signal omitted text.

Next, I'll give a brief overview of the comparative method and how I'm applying it.

Then we get to the meat of the discussion: three posts analyzing the relationship of the texts to each other. In this part, I'm not concerned with which sources are more reliable. I’='m trying to figure out how many independent versions of events we have.

In the final post, I'll talk about my conclusions, and use my findings to speculate as to what really happened, and how our different authors may have arrived at certain elements of their various accounts.