TY  - BOOK
AU  - Freedman,Jeffrey
TI  - A Poisoned Chalice
SN  - 9780691221557
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - HISTORY / Modern / 18th Century
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - American Revolution
KW  - Augsburg
KW  - Baptism
KW  - Blood libel
KW  - Chemistry
KW  - Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)
KW  - Deism
KW  - Diderot, Denis
KW  - Eberhard, Johann
KW  - Eternal damnation
KW  - Evil: diabolic
KW  - Faust (Müller)
KW  - French Revolution
KW  - Geneva
KW  - Gessner, Johannes
KW  - Göttingen
KW  - Halle
KW  - Hitler, Adolf
KW  - Holocaust
KW  - Iconoclasm
KW  - Koller, Johann Jakob
KW  - Lavoisier, Antoine
KW  - Leipzig
KW  - Lucerne
KW  - Marx, Karl
KW  - Medicine
KW  - Möser, Justus
KW  - Neology
KW  - Nihilism
KW  - Original sin
KW  - Physics
KW  - Predestination
KW  - Public sphere
KW  - Public use of reason
KW  - Reading cabinets
KW  - Reading societies
KW  - Riesbach
KW  - Semler, Johann
KW  - Small Council
KW  - Statistics
KW  - Stuttgart
KW  - Theodicy
KW  - Transubstantiation
KW  - Ulrich's wife
KW  - Vienna
KW  - Voltaire
KW  - Weber, Matthias
KW  - Wiedikon
KW  - Wirz's sister
KW  - Zwingli, Huldrych
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; List of Illustrations --; Preface --; Introduction --; CHAPTER ONE. Murder in the Cathedral --; CHAPTER TWO. Proof and Persuasion --; CHAPTER THREE. "Not Wirz, Not the Gravedigger" --; CHAPTER FOUR. The Enlightenment in German-Speaking Europe --; CHAPTER FIVE. "And God Fell Silent": The Enlightenment on Trial (I) --; CHAPTER SIX. Radical Evil: The Enlightenment on Trial (II) --; CHAPTER SEVEN. The Sword of Justice --; CHAPTER EIGHT. The Search for Truth --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - 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 célèbre, 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691221557?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691221557
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780691221557.jpg
ER  -