A Poisoned Chalice
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: May 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780691002330
Subjects: European history: c 1750 to c 1900; European studies; c 1700 to c 1800; Modern - 18th Century; History; History - General History; Zurich; History: World; Switzerland; Murder - General; European History; History / Modern / 18th Century; Good and evil; 18th century; Enlightenment; Trials (Poisoning)
First sentence: PERCHED ATOP A STEEP RISE ON THE right bank of the Limmat River, the cathedral with its high bell towers dominated the urban landscape of eighteenth-century Zurich just as it had done two and a half centuries earlier when Zwingli had inaugurated the Reformation in German-speaking Switzerland.
Description: "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 terrifying 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."--BOOK JACKET.