In this masterful study, Tara Nummedal exposes a previously vilified figure of local German history to sympathetic new scrutiny and in the process, opens a window onto the fantastic worldview of her subject. Anna Zieglerin, known to more modern audiences as Schlüter Ilsche or Schlüterliese, was executed by fire in Wolfenbüttel in the winter of 1575. Five of her associates met an equally grisly death that included breaking on the wheel, beheading, and drawing and quartering, providing a public spectacle that still evokes horror for visitors to the Braunschweig State Museum today. Their supposed crimes, exposed by examination under torture, included illicit entry into the quarters of Duke Julius of Braunschweig and his consort Hedwig in order to poison them with products arrived at by alchemical means. Three of the executed parties, the Lutheran pastor Philipp Sömmering, Anna’s husband Heinrich Schombach (who was Sömmering’s assistant and an erstwhile jester), and Anna herself, had been employed by Duke Julius in various alchemical projects. Along with the forementioned crimes, they were also convicted of alchemical fraud as they had failed to keep their promises to provide their patron with the great agent of metallic transmutation, the philosophers’ stone.