Nathan Conder and Dr. Michelle James, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages

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.

To accomplish this, I began by researching and studying the fictional stories which have already been collected as part of the project. While in Vienna this summer, I searched for other fictional accounts which were unavailable in the United States. Then, in collaboration with my mentor, I began analyzing and comparing the fiction with biographical accounts of Recke and Cagliostro. We are also preparing to interview E.J. Barnes, an American illustrator and cartoonist who is currently writing a graphic novel about the Cagliostro affair. After we complete this interview, we will continue to work on analysis and finalize the introduction.

A comparison of the stories we have to Recke’s own account shows that the fictions stay for a large part true to the facts, yet the stories about Recke are transformed into magnificent tales of good versus evil resembling a Grimm’s fairy tale more than a history. Perhaps because of this fantastic transformation, these stories are often overlooked as literature worthy of scholarly inquiry, but through a serious study of these works alongside Recke’s original publication, we gain new insights into her life and 18th and 19th century German culture. We will continue to examine what made Recke into such a sensational figure, and what the process was which, in the popular fiction, transformed her into a type of folk heroine. Through E.J. Barnes’ work, we are demonstrating Recke’s continuing significance and popularity even outside of Germany.