The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Kertzer, David I.

Автор: Kertzer, David I.
Название:  The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
ISBN: 9780679768173
Издательство: Random House (USA)
Классификация:
ISBN-10: 0679768173
Обложка/Формат: Paperback
Страницы: 350
Вес: 0.32 кг.
Дата издания: 1998
Язык: English
Размер: 20.42 x 13.26 x 2.24
Поставляется из: США
Описание: Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg.

A National Book Award Finalist

The extraordinary story of how the vaticans imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes worldly power in Italy.

Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortaras six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his fathers arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly baptized by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed.
With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boys kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchants family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state. Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.