Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to existing scholarly accountsof brothers Ebenezer and Manoah, while locating the entire Sibly family in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Susan Mitchell Sommers is Professor of History at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Sommers is most recently the author of Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry (2012). Her current book project, with Professor Andrew Prescott, is Searching for the Apple Tree: The Early Years of English Freemasonry.

• Preface


• Introduction


• Chapter One: Dramatis Personae


• Chapter Two: A Portsmouth Interlude


• Chapter Three: A Bristol Bookseller


• Chapter Four: The College for Instruction in Elementary Philosophy


• Chapter Five: Nicholas Culpeper Redivivus


• Chapter Six: Father Noah


• Chapter Seven: Dr Sibly's Re-animating Solar Tincture


• Chapter Eight: The Good Doctor?


• Chapter Nine: The Plagiarist


• Chapter Ten: Manoah's Songs of Experience


• Chapter Eleven: A Political Age


• Chapter Twelve: Manoah's Songs of Innocence


• Chapter Thirteen: Ebenezer Sibly's Wondrous Library


• Chapter Fourteen: The Doctor's Daughter


• Conclusions


• Appendix One: Ebenezer Sibly's Library


• Select Bibliography