The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro - Hardcover

Biography of the eighteenth century quack, charlatan and murderer who was to the French Revolution what Rasputin was to the Russian. Guiseppe Blasamo was born in the mid-eighteenth century in the slums of Palerno, Sicily, he would rise from obscurity to become the legendary Count Alessandro di Cagliostoro, whose dangerous charm and reputed healing would make him the darling - and bane - of upper-crust Europe. Moving through the period between the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - a time when reason and superstition co-mingled in the minds of even the best educated - Cagliostro earned a reputation for dazzling kings, feeding the poor, healing the ill and, most conspicuously, relieving the careless rich of their money, He tangled with most of the major figures in Europe at that time, including Cassanova, Mozart, Goethe and Catherine the Great. Eventually a lifetime of political intrigue led him to become the key figure in The Diamond Necklace Affair, which many believe precipitated the French Revolution itself, and which would eventually lead to his own downfall and death while imprisoned half insane by the Inquisition.

Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland, Africa, in 1947, did his schooling in Zimbabwe, and his BA, MA and Phd in Canberra and Melbourne, Australia. He is currently Professor and Director of the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and Deputy Director of the Australian Reseach Concil's Centre for Cross-Cultural Reserarch. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has held numerous Visiting Research Fellowships in Britain and the United States, most recently at All Souls College, Oxford.