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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Historic Oddities and Strange Events," S. Baring-Gould presents a rich tapestry of peculiar occurrences and fascinating historical narratives that blur the boundaries between fact and folklore. Written in a meticulous yet engaging prose style, Baring-Gould's work draws on a diverse array of sources, including folklore, local legends, and archival materials, offering readers insights into the quirky undercurrents of history often overlooked by conventional historiography. The book situates itself in the late Victorian era's burgeoning interest in the macabre and eccentric, making it a significant contribution to the genre of historical curiosities and the study of societal eccentricities. S. Baring-Gould, an accomplished writer and noted folklorist, was deeply immersed in the study of cultural history and the supernatural, influences that inform his exploration of oddities in this collection. Born into the Victorian society that had an insatiable appetite for the bizarre, his literary pursuits were shaped by a keen interest in the intersection of myth, legend, and empirical historical analysis. His background in theology and his travels throughout England and Europe provided him with a wide-ranging perspective and a wealth of material that enriches this work. This book is highly recommended for those who relish delving into the unusual corners of history, as well as for readers keen to grasp the social contexts that give rise to these strange narratives. Baring-Gould's captivating storytelling, combined with his scholarly rigor, makes "Historic Oddities and Strange Events" a must-read for enthusiasts of history and the strange alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Historic Oddities and Strange Events
Table of Contents
Introduction
Historic Oddities and Strange Events gathers S. Baring-Gould’s single-author selection of curious episodes from the record of the past. Neither a continuous history nor a fictional cycle, it is a cabinet of case-studies assembled to illuminate how unusual people and circumstances crystallize wider social truths. The Preface frames the enterprise as an invitation to examine what is exceptional without losing sight of the ordinary. Across the ensuing pieces, the author brings together incidents that have attracted rumor, controversy, or wonder, and presents them in sober narrative. The result is a purposeful tour through anomalies that, taken together, sharpen historical attention.
The volume is composed of prose non-fiction: historical essays, narrative reconstructions, and compact biographical sketches. Each entry reads as a self-contained inquiry into a person, event, or belief that has left a striking trace. Some chapters follow public scandals or legal tangles, others investigate disappearances, imposture, or technological curiosities. Pieces such as The Disappearance of Bathurst, The Duchess of Kingston, and The Locksmith Gamain exemplify the biographical strand, while The Snail-Telegraph and The Wonder-Working Prince Hohenlohe explore ideas that stirred contemporary fascination. The whole forms a sequence of essays rather than novels, plays, poems, or letters.
A clear unity of theme runs through this variety: Baring-Gould is drawn to the borderlands where fact meets credulity, reputation meets record, and private motive meets public consequence. The disappearance of a diplomat, the fortunes of an adventurer, and the claims of a healer are treated as tests of evidence and character. The Duchess of Kingston suggests how law, status, and rumor collide; The Locksmith Gamain touches the interface of secrecy and statecraft; The Snail-Telegraph shows how invention and illusion can be confused. Throughout, curiosity is disciplined by inquiry, and the extraordinary is used to illuminate the ordinary.
Stylistically, the collection balances narrative momentum with reflective commentary. Baring-Gould writes with clarity and economy, arranging scenes so that causes and consequences are legible without theatrical embellishment. His tone is measured—sympathetic to human oddity, cautious before sweeping conclusions. He favors concrete circumstance and plain statement, guiding readers through tangled episodes with judicious transitions and crisp summaries. The essays avoid gratuitous sensationalism; instead, they cultivate a steady, interrogative pace that invites readers to hold competing possibilities in mind. The effect is that of a guided tour by an attentive observer who values coherence as much as color.
Considered as a whole, the collection remains significant because it models how popular history can be both engaging and exacting. By selecting episodes that once stirred strong feeling—political intrigue, social scandal, visionary cures, and ingenious schemes—Baring-Gould demonstrates how the exceptional clarifies prevailing norms and anxieties. The range is wide, from court chambers to workshops, from salons to byways. Yet the governing impulse is consistent: to sift the memorable from the merely noisy. Readers encounter case after case in which questions of proof, credibility, and motive must be weighed, and thereby glimpse the habits of judgment that history demands.
Another unifying strength is methodological tact. The essays neither credulously endorse every remarkable claim nor reflexively dismiss what the past found persuasive. Instead, they stage the interplay of testimony, context, and likelihood, encouraging readers to examine how stories grow and why some endure. This approach is especially evident in accounts of marvels or conspiracies, where the tension between belief and explanation must be handled with care. The result is not a catalogue of verdicts but a disciplined curiosity that respects the distance of other times while inviting careful, humane evaluation of the actors and their circumstances.
Read sequentially or singly, the pieces speak to one another. Patterns emerge: the fragility of reputation, the uses and abuses of secrecy, the magnetism of novelty, the long afterlife of contested narratives. A chapter on an inventor’s promise may echo a chapter on a courtier’s gamble; a biographical sketch may illuminate an episode of political maneuver. The Preface orients the reader to this mosaic, and each subsequent essay contributes a facet to the larger design. Together they form a sustained meditation on how history remembers the strange—and how, by attending to it, we better understand the ordinary textures of the past.
Historical Context
Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Anglican priest, antiquary, novelist, and folklorist, wrote Historic Oddities and Strange Events in the early 1890s for a Victorian public keen on documentary curiosities. Educated at Clare College, Cambridge, and later rector of Lew Trenchard, Devon, he mixed parish-based scholarship with wide travel, notably in Iceland in 1862–63. His method—already visible in The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866–68), and Lives of the Saints (1872–77)—combined archival citations, anecdote, and moral reflection. The collection’s cases, drawn from Britain, France, and the German lands, reflect a Europe made legible to readers through newly catalogued state papers, memoirs, and the transnational Victorian press.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815) furnish the climate for several episodes. Claude-François de Malet’s attempted coup in Paris (1812) and the vanishing of the diplomat Benjamin Bathurst near Perleberg, Prussia (1809), illustrate Europe’s administrative strains as armies, couriers, and spies crisscrossed a continent whose Holy Roman Empire had just been dissolved (1806). The monarchy’s secret papers—evoked in the armoire de fer of 1792—shadow figures like the locksmith Gamain, while British–French rivalry set London and Paris as poles of information and rumor. Baring-Gould’s readers, familiar with Waterloo (1815) as a moral watershed, encountered these tales as aftershocks of revolution, empire, and restored legitimacy.
The mosaic of early modern German principalities—Saxony, Württemberg, and Silesian duchies such as Liegnitz (Legnica) and Brieg (Brzeg)—provides the stage for courtly intrigue, confession, and finance. Hans von Schweinichen’s sixteenth-century memoirs (1552–1616) preserve the mores of Protestant and Catholic courts alike, while the fate of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, executed at Stuttgart in 1738, shows how fiscal absolutism and anti-Jewish animus converged. Dynastic scandals associated with countesses and electresses, whether in Dresden, Hanover, or Görlitz, unfolded under legal regimes that still employed torture and public spectacle. Baring-Gould uses such milieus to explore the transition from estate-based politics to bureaucratic states later consolidated by the Napoleonic settlement (1803–1815).
Science, pseudo-science, and religious healing illuminate the nineteenth-century contest over authority. Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst’s widely reported cures in Bavaria and Franconia in the early 1820s drew bishops, physicians, and the curious to Würzburg and beyond. By mid-century, Jules Allix’s “snail telegraph” (Paris, 1850) promised instantaneous communication by animal magnetism even as practical telegraphy advanced—Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain (1837), Morse’s line from Washington to Baltimore (1844). Newspapers amplified marvels and debunkings alike, staging the public sphere in which wonder-working princes, mesmerists, and inventors vied for credibility. Baring-Gould situates such episodes between Enlightenment skepticism and the Romantic appetite for the marvelous.
Legal procedure, media publicity, and gender expectations frame episodes from Westminster to the Continent. The bigamy trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, before the House of Lords in 1776, epitomized Georgian celebrity justice, while continental practice—shaped by dossiers and examining magistrates—produced different theatrics recorded in police archives. The rise of specialized crime reporting, from The Times (founded 1785) to the Gazette des Tribunaux (1825), created pan-European audiences for causes célèbres involving imposture, poisoning, and mistaken identity—matters hinted at in cases tied to Saxony, Denmark, or Silesia. Baring-Gould, reading across court records and memoirs, charts how print transformed scandal into shared moral instruction.
Credit, usury, and the fiscal-military state bind several narratives. Court finance under cameralist regimes in the eighteenth century relied on Jewish and Christian intermediaries operating between Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. Debates over “usury,” reflected in figures like Abram the Usurer and in the career of Süß Oppenheimer, intersected with mercantilist needs, confessional prejudice, and the gradual emancipation of Jews after 1789. The South Sea Bubble (1720) and later speculative waves exposed moral panics about debt that resurfaced in courtroom dramas. By the Napoleonic Code (1804) and subsequent German law reforms, credit relations were regularized, yet social stigma lingered—fertile ground for Baring-Gould’s moralized historical portraits.
Religious reform and associational life supply connective tissue linking Germany, Britain, and Russia. Ignaz Aurelius Fessler (1756–1839), a Hungarian-born cleric active in Berlin around 1798–99 and later in St Petersburg, embodies the Enlightenment’s passage into Romantic-era ecclesiastical and Masonic controversies. In Prussia, the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg (1807–1815) reshaped church–state relations, while the Catholic revival after 1815 provided a receptive audience for Hohenlohe’s cures. In Britain, the Evangelical and Oxford Movements (from 1833) influenced Baring-Gould, whose Lives of the Saints mingled with folklore collecting. The crosscurrents of rational critique, pietism, and ritualism inform his tone toward miracle, superstition, and reforming zeal.
Mobility, communication, and memory underwrite the collection’s preoccupations. The Thurn und Taxis postal network—absorbed by Prussia and the North German Confederation in 1867—once knit together posting inns like those near Perleberg, where travelers vanished or reappeared by rumor’s grace. Passports standardized under Napoleon, and later railways, altered the scale of disappearance and pursuit. Marriage customs and household rites—wax candles, honeyed feasts—circulated through the same print and scholarly channels that preserved diaries like Schweinichen’s. Nineteenth-century historicism, from Ranke’s seminar to the Royal Historical Society (1868), furnished Baring-Gould with tools; parish registers at Lew Trenchard and continental state papers supplied sources for his late-Victorian appetite for oddity.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE.
Sets out the aim of collecting well-documented but little-remembered historical curiosities, outlining sources, scope, and the author’s method.
The Disappearance of Bathurst.
Narrates the 1809 vanishing of British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst in Germany, tracing the baffling circumstances, searches, and competing explanations.
The Duchess of Kingston.
Recounts Elizabeth Chudleigh’s rise at court and sensational 18th‑century bigamy trial, centering on her secret first marriage and the legal battle that followed.
General Mallet.
Details General Malet’s 1812 Paris coup attempt, built on a forged proclamation of Napoleon’s death, and the swift unraveling that led to his arrest and execution.
Schweinichen's Memoirs.
Draws on Hans von Schweinichen’s 16th‑century recollections to portray the excesses, scandals, and daily texture of Silesian court life.
The Locksmith Gamain.
Explores Louis XVI’s fascination with locks and his ties to the locksmith François Gamain, culminating in the disclosure of the Tuileries ‘iron cabinet’ and its consequences.
Abram the Usurer.
Follows the career of a notorious early modern moneylender known as Abram, his entanglements with nobles and townsfolk, and the backlash that precipitated his downfall.
Sophie Apitzsch.
Profiles an audacious adventuress and impostor who insinuated herself into high society through forged identities, and the exposures and prosecutions that ended her schemes.
Peter Nielsen.
Relates the lurid legend and capture of the German bandit Peter Niers (often rendered Nielsen), whose alleged crimes and ‘black‑art’ notoriety shocked contemporaries.
The Wonder-Working Prince Hohenlohe.
Surveys the faith‑healing claims surrounding Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe, presenting celebrated ‘cures’ alongside the controversies and skepticism they provoked.
The Snail-Telegraph.
Examines the mid‑19th‑century ‘sympathetic snail’ telegraph scheme, its public demonstrations and press buzz, and the exposure of its pseudoscientific basis.
The Countess Goerlitz.
Tells of a Silesian countess entangled in marital and dynastic intrigue, tracing the rumors, lawsuits, and political cross‑currents that shaped her fate.
A Wax-and-Honey-Moon.
Recounts a bizarre nuptial episode tied to beekeeping and wedding customs, in which a literalized ‘honey‑moon’ custom leads to unforeseen complications.
The Electress's Plot.
Unpacks a court conspiracy attributed to an Electress—centered on clandestine correspondence, romantic intrigue, and a thwarted bid for leverage—and its repercussions.
Suess Oppenheim.
Charts the rise of court financier Joseph Süß Oppenheimer under Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg, the charges leveled after the duke’s death, and his notorious trial and execution.
Ignatius Fessler.
Traces the turbulent career of Ignaz Aurelius Fessler from monastic life to reformer and Freemason, highlighting his religious shifts, Masonic reforms, and intellectual disputes across Europe.
