{"title":"Jeffrey Freedman","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"poisoned-chalice-book-jeffrey-freedman-9780691002330","title":"A Poisoned Chalice","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 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50408827289873,"sku":"GOR003762091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691002339.jpg?v=1751432341"},{"product_id":"books-without-borders-in-enlightenment-europe-book-jeffrey-freedman-9780812243895","title":"Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe","description":"Though the field of book history has long been divided into discrete national histories, books have seldom been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them—least of all in the age of Enlightenment when French books reached readers throughout Europe. In this erudite and engagingly written study, Jeffrey Freedman examines one of the most important axes of the transnational book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and the German-speaking lands. Focusing on the critical role of book dealers as cultural intermediaries, he follows French books through each stage of their journey—from the French-language printing shops where they were produced, to the wholesale book fairs in Leipzig, to retail book shops at locations scattered widely throughout Germany. At some of those locations, authorities reacted with alarm to the spread of French books, burning works of the radical French Enlightenment and punishing the booksellers who sold them. But officials had little power to curtail their circulation: the political fragmentation of the German lands made it virtually impossible to police the book trade. Largely unimpeded by censorship, French books circulated more freely in Germany than in the absolutist monarchy of France.  In comparison, the flow of German books into the French market was negligible—an asymmetry that corresponded to the hierarchy of languages in Enlightenment Europe. But publishers in Switzerland produced French translations of German books. By means of title changes, creative editing, and mendacious advertising, the Swiss publishers adapted works of the German Enlightenment for an audience of French-readers that stretched from Dublin to Moscow.  An innovative contribution to both the history of the book and the transnational study of the Enlightenment, Freedman's work tells a story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of texts in an age in which the concept of World Literature had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon already existed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51080971387153,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51080972697873,"sku":"NIN9780812243895","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812243897.jpg?v=1752316380"},{"product_id":"prena-s-eye-book-jeffrey-freedman-9781710986877","title":"Prena's Eye","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51679177310481,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51679177933073,"sku":"NIN9781710986877","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1710986875.jpg?v=1750993756"},{"product_id":"cultural-history-of-death-in-the-age-of-enlightenment-book-jeffrey-freedman-9781472537539","title":"A Cultural History of Death in the Age of Enlightenment","description":"When the field of death studies emerged in the mid 1970s, the Age of Enlightenment was identified as a major turning point. The pioneers in the field traced back to the late eighteenth century the principal themes characteristic of death in modernity—medicalization, de-Christianization, privatization, sentimentality, avoidance, the growing physical separation between the living and the dead, and the actual decline in mortality during peacetime. Fifty years on, those themes still shape the research agenda, but the direction of historical change seems less clearcut.  Reflecting the new perspectives of recent scholarship, this volume explores the ambiguities and contradictions in Enlightenment cultures of death while expanding the focus to include Jewish as well as Christian communities and emphasizing gender as a category of analysis. The topics range from attitudes toward death among Enlightenment intellectuals and the placement and design of cemeteries to the origins of demography as a field of study, the practice of autopsying in forensic medicine, the decriminalization of suicide, the role of print in Jewish death culture, the invention of the vampire, and the symbolism of the corpse in the French Revolution. The contributors are attentive to the reversibility and mutability of historical trends. Growing repugnance at the odor and sight of decomposing flesh was accompanied by macabre fascination with putridity and mortal remains. The Enlightenment project to liberate humanity from the irrational fear of postmortem punishment produced new fears of death that were all the more powerful for being grounded in scientific reason.  A Cultural History of Death is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries as a tangible reference copy or as part of a digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access, individual volumes are available in print or digitally.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53201474715921,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53201475633425,"sku":"NGR9781472537539","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781472537539.jpg?v=1772637366"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-jeffrey-freedman.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}