A last outing

This being the very last outing for the splendid book at reference 1, having just got through all 700 pages of it.

Following the long chapter on the alchemists, we had modern prophecies, fortune tellers, magnetisers (a species of medical quack), fashions in hair length, crusades, witches, poisoners, haunted houses, fashions in urban slang, admiration for thieves, duels and relics.

With the common thread being our collective ability to believe the most arrant nonsense or to get involved in the silliest - not to say deadliest - fads and fashions. With Mackay trawling up all kinds of strange facts about all it. I dare say some of it would not stand scrutiny by a modern historian, but I offer a few nuggets none the less.

Another common thread was the opportunity offered by some of these delusions to make money. How all  kinds of chaps rose to the occasion to make a lot of money out of the credulous.

Mackay claims that the church was bitterly opposed to duelling, not because it thought that it was wrong, but because it was removing a lot of lucrative business from courts ecclesiastical, with lots of fighting men preferring to take their chance on their sword arm than with the priests.

And that the phrase 'flare up' is derived from a huge fire, raised in Bristol in the course of riots about the non-passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Tory lords do it again!

Lastly, I had not realized  that catching witches was very much a commercial activity, with some of its practitioners being on both retainer and commission. So much for a burning, so much for a hanging and a token payment for a conditional discharge. But I am pleased to be able to report that some of these people got lynched by an eventually exasperated common people.

I suppose the strange fever which gripped the nation on the occasion of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was a modern example of much the same sort of thing.

Another being the business of satanic rituals, with earnest social workers turning up satanists under every bed. Getting on for thirty years ago now?

A fine read. I recommend it to anyone who can do 700 pages.

PS: this picture by Alexander van Bredael of the Ommegang in Antwerp was a very suitable choice by Wordsworth for the cover of their edition of this book, although they attribute it to his father Peeter. An artistic family. Perhaps they knocked out a lot of paintings from the family factory and there is much academic debate about who exactly painted what. I recall that I once went to a whole exhibition devoted to copies of a picture by the elder Brueghal turned out by the factory of a younger Brueghal. At the very least, I have the book of the exhibition. Faking has been around for a long time.

Reference 1: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=mackay+delusions.