A01=Jeffrey Freedman
Age of Enlightenment
Apothecary
Arsenic
Author_Jeffrey Freedman
Capital punishment
Category=GTM
Category=NHD
Cathedral chapter
Censorship
Christianity
Circumstantial evidence
Clergy
Cloister
Communion table
Conspiracy theory
Correspondent
Criticism
Critique
Deed
Deism
Despotism
Disenchantment
Early modern Europe
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Executioner's sword
Explanation
Frederick the Great
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Friedrich Nicolai
German philosophy
Good and evil
Immanuel Kant
Impiety
Imprisonment
Irreligion
Jews
Lessing
Moral evil
Morality
Moses Mendelssohn
Newspaper
Odor
Pamphlet
Pastor
Philosopher
Philosophy
Physician
Physiognomy
Polemic
Politics
Postmodernism
Predestination
Prison cell
Problem of evil
Protestantism
Publication
Radical evil
Reason
Religion
Rhetoric
Schadenfreude
Scientist
Sturm und Drang
The Newspaper
The Other Hand
Theft
Theodicy
Theology
Thought
Torture
Transubstantiation
Ulrich
Wickedness
Wine cellar
Product details
- ISBN 9780691002330
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A Poisoned Chalice tells the story of a long-forgotten criminal case: the poisoning of the communion wine in Zurich's main cathedral in 1776. The story is riveting and mysterious, full of bizarre twists and colorful characters--an anti-clerical gravedigger, a hard-drinking drifter, a defrocked minister--who come to life in a series of dramatic criminal trials. But it is also far more than just a good story. In the wider world of German-speaking Europe, writes Jeffrey Freedman, the affair became a cause celebre, the object of a lively public debate that focused on an issue much on the minds of intellectuals in the age of Enlightenment: the problem of evil. Contemporaries were unable to ascribe any rational motive to an attempt to poison hundreds of worshippers. Such a crime pointed beyond reason to moral depravity so radical it seemed diabolic. By following contemporaries as they struggled to comprehend an act of inscrutable evil, this book brings to life a key episode in the history of the German Enlightenment--an episode in which the Enlightenment was forced to interrogate the very limits of reason itself.
Twentieth-century horrors have familiarized us with the type of evil that so shocked the men and women of the eighteenth century. Does this familiarity give us any special insight into the affair of the poisoned chalice? In its final chapter, the book takes up this question, reflecting on the nature of historical knowledge through an imaginary dialogue with Enlightenment-era interlocutors. But it does not reach any definitive conclusion about what happened in the Zurich cathedral in 1776. To search for the truth about such a mystery is merely to extend a dialogue begun in the eighteenth century, and that dialogue is as open-ended as the process of Enlightenment itself.
Jeffrey Freedman is Professor of European History at Yeshiva University.
