Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England: Richard Napier's Medical Practice by Ofer Hadass (review)

Seventeenth-century healer Richard Napier was many things: physician, clergyman, astrologer, spiritual medium. He was an experimenter and careful observer of natural signs, and he mapped the stars and talked to angels to decipher his patients' health. Ofer Hadass's new book examines the mental world of this enigmatic man. The book reveals the inseparability of Napier's religious beliefs, magical practices, and medical work. Together, Hadass argues, they created a coherent worldview. This portrait of Richard Napier redresses an imbalanced view of the period that pits superstitious magic against rational medicine. Rather, Napier shows that astral magic and conversations with angels could be practical parts of a physician's toolkit. They gave Napier reliable ways of assessing ambiguous symptoms and determining treatments.

Although the book argues for the entwined nature of Napier's magic, medicine, and religion, it walks through each strand separately. The opening chapter on astrological medicine outlines Napier's theory of the body and conception of illness, both of which aligned with nonastrological medicine of the time. Obstruction and flow, as well as balance, were key to health. Excretions provided insights into the inner workings of the body, as well as guides to the body's proper function. Measuring output, for example, allowed Napier to gauge the efficacy of his treatments. The chapter on astral magic likewise begins with an overview of magical traditions and their underlying theoretical frameworks. The focus here is on Napier's use of magical remedies. Healing objects harnessed occult powers and could include rings that patients wore or pieces of metal or wax that patients applied to their ailing bodies. A separate chapter is devoted to Napier's use of magic to acquire information about his patients, namely his unique communications with angels. Hadass covers the practicalities of how Napier accessed and used the wisdom of spirits, as well as contemporaries' accounts of the practice. The book ends with a shorter discussion of Napier's stance on doctrinal matters, to provide the theological underpinnings of his astrological practice. This chapter centers on two debates: citing pagan authors in church sermons and dating Christ's birth.

Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England offers a thoughtful and comprehensive intellectual biography of Richard Napier. The book will be of great use to scholars and students for its clear introductions to complex topics, such as early modern astrology and the occult. The book also illuminates the fascinating mental world of Napier, which offers rich insights into beliefs and practices of the age. Napier was by no means representative, however. To what extent can we extrapolate from this extraordinary man to the period more generally? Perhaps the most admirable aspect of this study is the technical skill needed to make sense of Napier's cases. The extant archive is immense and, as indicated by the handful of images included in the book, rather illegible. The work of transcription had to be painstaking and time-consuming. Moreover, the book's clear prose and structure mask the labor of untangling Napier's abbreviations, charts, and idiosyncratic views.

Given the care and time that went into analyzing Napier's writing, I was surprised to find no mention of the Casebooks Project. The Casebooks Project is a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge who, under the supervision of Lauren Kassell, have devoted the last ten years to creating a digitized edition of the cases of Richard Napier, as well as those of his teacher, Simon Forman: https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/. The project includes scans of the manuscripts, guides to deciphering the astrology, and critical introductions to the cases. The website also invites users to search the cases in a variety of ways—by date or disease, for example—and to analyze cases in relation to one another using categories such as names, topics...