Mon Plaisir

This book, based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis for the University of Giessen, tells two intertwined stories. One concerns the description and analysis of the eighteenth-century miniature world called by its creator ‘Mon Plaisir’, now preserved in the museum in Arnstadt in central Germany. It consists of eighty scenes arranged in seventeen very large, mostly glass-fronted, wooden cases. The scenes are peopled by 400 figures and accessorised with 2,600 separate objects. The other story concerns the life and circumstances of its creator, Auguste Dorothea of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1666–1751), who on her marriage became countess, then princess, of the little territory of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt. By examining life and work in tandem, Annette Caroline Cremer gives a fascinating insight into what it meant to be a high-born wife and widow in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. Auguste Dorothea was the third daughter of the collector, novelist and cultural patron Anton Ulrich, Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1633–1714), and therefore a member of the oldest German dynasty, the Guelphs. In 1684, at the age of eighteen, she married Anton Günther II, Duke of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt (1653–1716). He, too, was a collector, in particular of coins, and a cultural patron and, though he was raised in 1697 from a count to a prince (Fürst), in marrying him Auguste Dorothea was marrying down. Three circumstances were crucial in her life, the first of which was that she never had children, which adversely affected her standing and marked her out as a failure as a wife. It also meant that, four weeks after her husband’s death in 1714, she was thrown out of the palace at Arnstadt by the heir, her husband’s brother. The second was the failure of her husband to set up proper financial provision for her widowhood during her marriage, even though this was stipulated in her marriage contract. This, coupled with her inordinate expenditure throughout her life, meant that she was constantly and embarrassingly in debt to virtually everyone she knew, whether relatives, friends or acquaintances. On her husband’s death, she had to ask the Emperor to set up an imperial commission to get access to her widow’s pension from her brother-in-law the heir, Christian Wilhelm of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, a case which took six years to settle. The third was her conversion to Catholicism. Her niece, the future Empress Elisabeth Christine, Duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1691–1750), had converted in 1707, her father Anton Ulrich in 1710 and her favourite sister Henriette Christine in 1712; and, though her husband, a faithful Lutheran, strongly objected, she followed suit in 1715. This meant that, among other things, she could, and did, call on the Viennese court for badly-needed financial support for the rest of her life

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