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

Anyone who has dug about in manuscripts relating to magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has eventually encountered the notes of Richard Napier. I am sure my reaction to them was not unusual. Napier is a key link between sixteenth-century practitioners like Simon Foreman and John Dee and seventeenth-century figures like Elias Ashmole. Just as significantly, his notes are rare documents of magico-medical practice rather than theory. Finally, as a Protestant clergyman, Napier’s use of magic might offer perspective on the status of magic within Protestantism and the theological controversies of the period. Somewhere underneath the informal and idiosyncratic hand and the abstruse and abbreviated notes lay a really interesting and important story. But it was clear that making sense of the documents would be difficult if not impossible. Hadass’s book is thus not only a welcome and important contribution to scholarship but also an impressive and skillful reconstruction of Richard Napier’s medical practices.

The first chapter concerns Napier’s practice of astrological medicine, arguing that his use of horary charts provided a level of clarity not achievable through the even more ambiguous methods of conventional astrological medicine. In Chapter 2 he turns to Napier’s medical applications of astral magic, in particular the curious technique of impressing sigils on specially prepared mixtures of materials. This he contextualizes in the larger world of astral medicine and magic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chapter 3 concerns Napier’s consultations (largely with the archangel Raphael) and how he employed them in his work. Hadass argues that this practice was consistent with his religious ideas, as his view of angels was not soteriological but rather hierarchical or Neoplatonic. The last chapter describes how Napier’s practice must be understood in the context of his Christian Neoplatonism and his moderate Protestantism that allowed for the use of ancient wisdom in addition to scripture as part of the search for truth.

Hadass grounds his discussion heavily in Napier’s notes and other writings, transcribing significant portions of the text as he does so. He is also not afraid to highlight areas of ambiguity in interpretation where they arise. This approach makes his argument convincing but also gives a strong impression of the sources upon which it is based. The second chapter relies more heavily for its approach on the use of other writers, particularly Foreman and Ashmole, to interpret and explicate Napier’s practice “on the reasonable assumption that manuscripts, eventually owned by Napier, were used as guidelines in his practice, and that both took part in one and the same practical tradition, later studied and analyzed by Foreman” (65–66). This does seem reasonable, although it would have been desirable to signal this a little more centrally in the chapter.

One notable absence from the last chapter is worthy of note. Napier’s ideas about magic, authority, and cosmology in the context of Protestant theology could have been fruitfully compared with those of Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Both men negotiated the complex, and by some accounts contradictory, relationship between Protestant scripturalism and ancient authority. For both, the way they resolved this question was wound up intimately with their interest in magic. Perhaps more interestingly, the cosmographic arc of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia is built around the divisions between natural, celestial, and religious magic. More critically, Agrippa argued that magic had to involve a combination of magic from all three levels. Although Napier did not employ Agrippa’s terminology, his magical practices also involved a blended and integrated mobilization of elements from each of these cosmological levels. A comparison of Napier and Agrippa would thus have been useful to help set Napier more firmly in the history of magic and magic practice, Christian Neoplatonism, and the relationship of...