Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi there is a painting attributed to an anonymous Flemish painter of the 17th century depicting a theatre scene in Piazza Pasquino, whose iconography differs from the usual depiction of this subject spread by bamboozling painters in the 17th century. Instead of being crowded at the foot of a raised stage – as was typical in works depicting charlatans accompanied by the comedians of the Commedia dell’arte – the spectators are arranged in a circle around them. And, above all, the character in the centre of the scene has the physiognomy and costume typical of the actor Tiberio Fiorilli (1608-1694) as Scaramuccia. This identification is based on iconographic comparisons with printed works and two paintings by Pietro Paolini. Fiorilli’s presence in Rome and the social context in which he is documented are intertwined with the history of the urban space depicted in the painting, taking into account architectural, iconographic, and literary elements. On the basis of these elements, the work can be dated to between the 1630s and 1640s, a little-known period in Fiorilli’s life. Before conquering the stages frequented by the aristocracy and kings, the young actor may have begun to build his character in the street theatre made up of Commedia dell’Arte masks and charlatans with which the city was teeming.

This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term “charlatan” as a multivalent actor’s category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying “the charlatan,” I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of “the charlatan” expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine. The title of the article, “Charlatan Epistemology,” indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan’s embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology.

This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador – cundurango – that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements – including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles – played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded “the public interest” in a possible cancer cure.

A fun, fast-paced, and evidence-informed exploration of outrageous claims, \"alternative\" therapies, and \"miracle cures\" such as juice cleanses, detoxes, ear candling, raw water, and more. In a world filled with misinformation and twisted science, this is a must-read.

In the works of anthropologists, ethnologists and sociologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, we may notice their efforts to distinguish magic, on the one hand, from religion, and on the other, from science. One of the criteria, which set the boundaries between these field was the way, in which a community understood god/divinity. This, among others, enabled the identification of the three ‘ideal stages’ in the development of human culture: magical, religious and metaphysical-philosophical. This article is an attempt to analyse to what extent modern definitions of religion and magic can be applied in regard of ancient Greek culture. The surviving literary sources and other artefacts, which provide us with information on this culture, suggest that these stages, distinguished by modern researchers, never seemed to exist in ‘pure form’ in ancient Greek culture, but rather they intermingled and, at times barely noticeably, switched from one stage to another. Religion, magic and science not only functioned side-by-side, but they permeated and complemented each other.

In Canada, a number of public figures have made the front pages for one reason: each has been alleged to be a ´Pretend Indian´. In other words, someone who claims a distant Indigenous identity but upon deeper scrutiny has been accused of stealing jobs and opportunities from real natives. But why would someone fake an indigenous identity? That question is the premise of The Pretendians, as we cross Canada revealing what really lies behind this explosive issue. We go on the hunt for knock-off west coast Indigenous art, witness an explosion of dubious Status Indian Claims to get cheap fuel, and unpack where the claims of blood-quantum come from (that idea that one drop of Indian blood is enough to claim Indigeneity). We meet people truly seeking, and asking if they are Indigenous or not and meet a university teacher fighting Pretendian persecution.

This paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian “hunger artists,” Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on the “scientific” explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors’ professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between “orthodox” and “heterodox” knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti’s contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans.

During the late nineteenth century, Spanish physicians had few chances to observe how hypnosis worked within a clinical context. However, they had abundant opportunities to watch lay hypnotizers in action during private demonstrations or on stage. Drawing on the exemplary cases of the magnetizers Alberto Santini Sgaluppi (a.k.a. Alberto Das) and Onofroff, in this paper I discuss the positive influence of stage magnetizers on medical hypnosis in Spain. I argue that, owing to the absence of medical training in hypnosis, the stage magnetizers' demonstrations became practical hypnosis lessons for many physicians willing to learn from them instead of condemning them. I conclude that Spain might be no exception in this regard, and that further research should be undertaken into practices in other countries.

Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars, natural disasters, and the great systemic changes of an expanding Europe, vagabond strangers and others out of place found their way through the turbulent history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. As shadowy characters inspiring deep suspicion, fascination, and sometimes charity, they prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals. The vagabonds and impostors of colonial Mexico are as elusive in the written record as they were on the ground, and the administrative record offers little more than commonplaces about them. Fugitive Freedom locates two of these suspect strangers, Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo, both priest impersonators and petty villains in central Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule. Displacement brought pícaros to the forefront of Spanish literature and popular culture-a protean assortment of low life characters, seen as treacherous but not usually violent, shadowed by poverty, on the move and on the make in selfish, sometimes clever ways as they navigated a hostile, sinful world. What to make of the lives and longings of Aguayo and Atondo, which resemble those of one or another literary pícaro? Did they imagine themselves in literary terms, as heroes of a certain kind of story? Could impostors like these have become fixtures in everyday life with neither a receptive audience nor permissive institutions? With Fugitive Freedom , William B. Taylor provides a rare opportunity to examine the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the margins of an unfinished colonial order that was coming apart even as it was coming together.