The contents range from musings on the effectiveness of the guillotine as a method of execution (one physiologist argues that it's too quick and not shocking enough for the audience!) to a physiologist's gory description of graveside experiments on the body of a guillotined criminal ...

It is likely '[to Creve's experiments] that Percy Shelley referred in his Preface to Frankenstein when he insisted that “the event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence”’ (Mellor, 1978).

It was the basis of Sir Humphry Davy's Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, likely 'the only strictly scientific work Mary Shelley mentioned reading' in her journal on 28 October 1816 whilst working on Frankenstein (Crouch, Davy's A Discourse, 1978).

Pictured here is Creve's 1796 Vom Metallreize, proposed a method of electrocuting corpses to see if they were really dead, citing as case studies those who were buried alive (or narrowly avoided it!).

When Stella premiered in Hamburg on 8 February 1776, it was immediately prohibited. Goethe changed the ending for a performance in Weimar in 1806 (published in 1816), turning the play into a tragedy in which Stella takes poison and Fernando shoots himself.

These delightful doodles were made c. 1896 in northern France by fifteen-year-old Sara Thérèse d’Aurignac, whose sketchbook features humorous vignettes, imaginative anthropomorphism, dancing devils, and scenes of leisure.

There were two published English translations of Estelle, both by women, although the text here is different from both of these: Stella, a pastoral Romance (1791), by Elizabeth Morgan, and Estelle (1798) by Susanna Cummyng. (3/3 🧵 )

Dedicating her translation to one Ellen, our translator signs herself 'M.F.' and asks the recipient to forgive its faults: ‘How could she this translation make / Without a blot or a mistake’ when every time ‘a passage did perplex, / And with its difficulties vex, / Thy image would intrude’. (2/3 🧵 )

Our copy was presented by the author on 1 August 1735, hinting at the his intention of presenting this book as a prompt and instrument for the actual devotion of the Novena of the Assumption, having been delivered well in time for a nine-day commitment ahead of the Feast itself.