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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Elise von der Recke, fictional stories, Count Cagliostro

College

Humanities

Department

Germanic and Slavic Languages

Abstract

In the late 18th century Count Cagliostro, an occult figure and magician, traveled across Europe preaching that he was able to contact the dead, and gaining many followers. In 1787 Elisa von der Recke, a woman with close connections to Cagliostro, wrote a book denouncing him as a fraud and warning others to not be taken in by him. Elisa von der Recke’s book was a huge sensation, first because it denounced one of Europe’s most notorious persons, and second, because it was written by a woman, and at that time women simply did not write these kinds of works. Although some scholarly work has addressed Elisa von der Recke and her connection to Count Cagliostro, one area where little research has been done concerns the fiction which captured the sensational nature of the subject. My project is to co-author with my mentor the introduction to the fictional accounts of the Recke-Cagliostro incident, which will appear in Volume V of the Critically Annotated Collected Works of Elisa von der Recke. The publication of this introduction will help to bring these fictional accounts into the scholarly discourse and show the many levels of cultural, historical and biographical insight that can be gained through a study of the fictional accounts. Most of the research itself has been completed at this time, but further work is needed on analysis before publication. We anticipate completion before April 2014.

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