#btw katherine howard is my fav wife

[archduchessofnowhere]

Relating to that gifset you posted lately - who is your favourite child of Maria Theresa? Do you even have a favourite? Because people on tumblr constantly asks stuff like "favourite wife of Henry VIII", when clearly, THIS is the all-important question we should be asking instead.

You're absolutely right, this is what we should all be asking.

I don't think I have a "proper" favorite, mainly because all I know about the children I know it either through a Maria Theresia biography, or through cultural osmosis. I'd say I have more of an "inclination" for some of them? A "yeah this one seems like blorbo material an interesting historical figure to study in more detail later" sort of thing.

I think if I have to name one that would be Maria Carolina, mainly because I have a weakness for Deposed Queens of Naples. Plus she's the ancestor of over half the people I talk about here (by the 19th century the Bourbon-Habsburg family tree was a circle). She's the one that lived the longest and the daughter that played the most active role in history, yet she's strangely not really known outside the Habsburg/Napoleonica connaisseurs sphere? Which I find actually weird to be honest. So I want to learn more about in the near future.

Maria Christina would be another one, because somehow she managed to be the favorite child out of a group of sixteen people, which is admirable. She was a bicon, convinced her mother the Queen of Arranged Marriages to let her marry for love with Some Guy, was Governor of the Austrian Netherlands; and this is just the tip of the iceberg, I def want to learn more about her too.

On the opposite end I also find Maria Amalia interesting because somehow she managed to be the hated child out of a group of sixteen people, which is admirable.

While reading Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger's biography of Maria Theresia one of my biggest surprises was how much I enjoyed Joseph's chapters. I don't know what I thought about him before, but the book reintroduced him to me as a man full of contradictions, and now I actively want to know more about him.

And finally bit of a hot take but I'm more interested in Archduchess Maria Antonia than in Queen Marie Antoinette. We've been exposed to the "teen queen" and the "queen of excesses" dozens of times, and to a lesser extent to the "martyr queen", but her actual childhood remains almost unknown, which makes me want to know more about it. Also I'm just more into Habsburg history in general, so while the affair of the necklace puts me to sleep, any small interaction between Marie Antoinette and her family has all my attention. Also as a side note, I think it's really interesting that today she is remembered as a French queen (to the point some people even think she was born and raised in France) when during her lifetime she could never shake off being "Austrian".

Thank you for your question!