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The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England: Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism

Autor Susan Mitchell Sommers
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 7 iun 2018
Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. The inventor of Dr. Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture, which claimed to restore the newly dead to life, Ebenezer himself died before he turned fifty and stayed that way despite being surrounded by bottles of the stuff. Asked to execute his will, which urged the continued manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name the deceased could not recall, Manoah found his brother's record of financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately resigned his executorship.Ebenezer's death brought a premature conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life, lived on the fringes of various interwoven esoteric subcultures. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Mitchell Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to scholarly accounts of Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Siblys of London provides fascinating insight into the lives of a family who lived just outside our usual historical range of vision.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780190687328
ISBN-10: 0190687320
Pagini: 362
Ilustrații: 9
Dimensiuni: 236 x 160 x 31 mm
Greutate: 0.61 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Seria Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism

Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

Blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued.
Sommers shows us that Ebenezer Sibly matters precisely because he is not as commanding or intellectually significant a figure as most of his previous biographers, taking him at his word, have assumed. In her hands, his
Susan Sommers has unearthed a fascinating cast of characters, largely unknown. She brilliantly integrates the improbable life of Ebenezer Sibly, shoemaker turned publisher, astrologer, quack, forger, bigamist, Swedenborgian, and freemason. With moderate income he traveled the more exotic byways of Georgian England, a con-man who allows us to experience a lost world, one that Sommers' extraordinary research reveals.
In a mesmerising piece of historical detective work, Susan Mitchell Sommers traces the remarkable journeys of three brothers from an artisan family in an esoteric demimonde of lottery fraud, masonic conspiracies, Swedenborgianism, sermon piracy, astrology and quack medicine. A masterpiece of microhistory, The Siblys of London offers a compelling and memorable picture of the colourful esoteric underbelly of late eighteenth-century life.
Historians of esoteric religion and the occult are exploring treacherous waters where deceptions and distortions are easily assumed to be true. The strength of Susan Sommers' book is that she is attuned to deceit, shrewd in her perceptions, and tells the truth about these colourful brothers with verve and colour.
In this fascinating, deeply researched book, Susan Sommers evokes the mercurial careers of the male and female members of the Sibly family, including astrologers, patent medicine sellers, court reporters, Freemasons and a daring con-man. Tracing their rise from obscurity to national notoriety, Sommers shows how they exploited opportunities created by the upheavals of the period. Her work casts new light on the popular culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.
A fascinating work that enriches our knowledge of the "esoteric" milieu in eighteenth-century England.

Notă biografică

Susan Mitchell Sommers is Professor of History at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Sommers is most recently the author of Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry (2012). Her current book project, with Professor Andrew Prescott, is Searching for the Apple Tree: The Early Years of English Freemasonry.