“I had previously stumbled across book curses when leafing through manuscripts and, as an avid fan of folk horror literature, was interested in the intersection of the macabre and book history.” -Dr Eleanor Baker Modern libraries do not suffer fools gladly. To protect their collections from ambitious thieves, they frequently rely on a multipronged strategy,…
“David Lazzaretti…his doctrines were a strange medley of Christianity and Socialism. He proclaimed the advent of the Divine Republic, the death of tyrants, and the triumph of eternal justice.” -From “Death of a Fanatic”, in The Cincinnati Evening Star, 26 November 1878 It’s been said that a prophet never achieves fame in his own homeland,…
“She was the first woman in the history of crime in Russia to create a well-coordinated criminal group, which she ran for decades…” –from “Women in Organized Crime in Russia” by Yakov Gilinsky (2007) From 1880 to about 1905, newspapers around the world were abuzz with a sensational tale about the comeuppance of a Russian racketeer….
“They hang people for poisoning your body, but no law can touch them when they inject poison in your mind.” -from Witchcraft: its Power in the World Today by William Seabrook (1941). Sorcery, it’s been argued, is both a composite art and an acquired taste. In all ages, the prototypical sorcerer or witch has been…
ODD TRUTHS: THE CAMISARDS, REBEL PROPHETS OF LANGUEDOC “…the sect of the Inspired became so numerous that the valleys swarmed with them, the mountains were covered with them, and the dioceses…were overspread with such a number of prophets, that in the Cevennes and the lower Languedoc only, they were computed at eight thousand souls.” -from…
ODD TRUTHS: JOHN EVANS, THE SINISTER ASTROLOGER OF FETTER-LANE “He was the most saturnine person my eyes ever beheld…” -from History of His Life and Times by William Lilly (1715) There is a guilty pleasure in picturing the early modern era as a time of taboo-defying dynamos and charismatics. Personalities like Giovanni Pico, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, and John Dee…
“A single man sometimes frightened a whole population.” – Brigand Life in Italy, vol. 1 (1865) by Count Alberto Maffei di Boglio. The origins of Ciro Annicchiarico (“Don Ciro”) are obscure, but most authors agree that his criminal career started with a blood feud, possibly in the Mezzogiorno village of Francavilla. Don Ciro, then a priest…