Cagliostro ; Savant or Scoundrel?: The True Role of This Splendid, Tragic Figure

New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1961. xxiii, 311 pages, 1 unnumbered page: illustrations (plates); 24 cm; bibliographical references (pages xxi-xxiii) and index. Solid, tight copy with minor wear to board tips and mild dampstain affecting a bit of top edge of first few leaves only. . No jacket; no markings. . Hardcover.

The Sicilian adventurer, healer, alchemist and Freemason, generally identified with the Palermo-born Giuseppe Balsamo. He toured the courts and lodges of Europe with his wife Serafina, selling elixirs and séances, and promoted his “Egyptian” Freemasonry, a rite that admitted women. His Lyon mother lodge was founded in 1784. Acquitted in the Diamond Necklace Affair after nine months in the Bastille. Later arrested in Rome and condemned by the Inquisition for Freemasonry, heresy and magic; the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Died in the fortress of San Leo in 1795. Inspired Goethe’s Der Gross-Cophta and novels by Dumas, and became a byword for charlatanry after Carlyle branded him the “Quack of Quacks.” Trowbridge (1866–1938), a popular biographer of eighteenth-century figures, set out to revise that “false judgment of history,” rejecting the view that every book on Cagliostro must be a book against him. Working from contemporary records rather than recycled hostile accounts, he argues that no authenticated case shows Cagliostro profiting from his supposed impostures. He also treats the necklace trial and the London blackmail attempts against Cagliostro in detail. He casts doubt on the Balsamo identification, which rested heavily on the Inquisition’s own biography of Cagliostro. Admirers of the occult welcomed the book as a vindication, while skeptics found it too credulous. Still the standard sympathetic account in English. ¶ Cagliostro, Alessandro, conte di, 1743-1795.