ABSTRACT
The Fama and the Confessio (the abridged titles by which we shall continue to refer to the two Rosicrucian manifestos) are printed in an English translation in the appendix to this book, 1 where the reader may study for himself their stirring announcements of a dawn of enlightenment, and the strange romance about ‘Christian Rosencreutz’ and his Brotherhood in which the announcements are wrapped up. The many problems concerning the manifestos cannot all be dealt with in this chapter but are distributed over this whole book. For example, the problem of why a long extract from an Italian work, translated into German, was printed with the Fama will be deferred until the discussion in a later chapter of the slant towards Italian liberals implicit in the German Rosicrucian movement. 2 A simplified bibliography of the manifestos will be found set out in the appendix, with an analysis of what other material was published with the Fama and the Confessio. 3 This is an important matter, for the readers of early editions of these documents, read with them other material which helped to explain their drift.
