cover image A Poisoned Chalice

A Poisoned Chalice

Jeffrey Freedman. Princeton University Press, $37.5 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-691-00233-0

On September 12, 1776, the communion wine at a Zurich church service attended by 1,200 worshipers was poisoned. Nobody was killed or even hurt, but the sacrilegious nature of the crime caused a public sensation and a philosophical debate about the nature of evil. In The Poisoned Chalice, Jeffrey Freedman, a professor of European history at New York's Yeshiva University, traces the controversial investigation of this now obscure crime, for which no one had a motive and no culprit was ever found. Freedman shows how the investigation became a forum for a larger battle between ecclesiastical views of the world and secular ones ushered in by the Enlightenment. Drawing on newspapers, court records, scientific reports and literary journals of the period, Freedman weaves together an erudite cultural history with obvious implications for our own age of commonplace random violence. 17 b&w photos.