Why would a pious, learned rector of the early seventeenth century conduct a daily practice of astrological medicine in order to help a swath of people—rich and poor, male and female—who asked for his help with their medical problems? Reconciling the apparent cognitive dissonances within the mental world of Richard Napier (1559–1634) between orthodox religion, illicit magic, and the practice of everyday medicine is one of the central aims of Ofer Hadass's Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England.

Napier's casebooks, on which Hadass's book is based, survive in a complete chronological run between 1597 and 1634. He dealt with—and recorded—multiple cases a day, leaving an archive of some seventy thousand consultations. While the vast majority of these consultations are about medical matters, a small proportion are diary entries, and some relate to other mundane issues such as the death of livestock, suspected witchcraft, or marriage prospects. These are currently accessible online, partially transcribed and fully tagged, as the Casebooks Digital Edition (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/), but Hadass's research was largely conducted before the first batch of Napier's cases was released in October 2013. The edition is the work of the Casebooks Project, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge, on which I worked as a research associate in its final phase, beginning in October 2014. I transcribed more than twelve of Napier's volumes, an experience that affords me a unique insight into the astrologer-physician's daily life and changing practice.

Hadass organized his book into four chapters. Chapter 1, “Astrological Medicine,” deals with Napier's daily astrological practice. Here, Hadass offers a very detailed reading of a year in the life of Napier's practice, 1602–03, examining some five thousand astrological consultations made during that time, which aims to place his medical philosophy in the broader context of early modern cosmological thought. Chapter 2, “Astral Magic,” centers on Napier's frequent use of sigils—talismans designed to capture celestial influences and worn on the body. Sigils were thought to retain the powers they had gained for many months, thus having a positive effect on the wearer and his or her health. Chapter 3, “Converse with Angels,” focuses on Napier's practice of consulting Raphael and other archangels in order to gain prognostications for his clients. And chapter 4, “Religion and Knowledge,” is a discussion of Napier's non-casebook writings—tracts and letters—which help to place his daily chronological records in the wider context of the theological, philosophical, medical, and scientific debates that took place in early Stuart England.

One difficulty in verifying the central thesis of this book is Hadass's reliance on a single year's worth of Napier's records, 1602–03, at least for the first chapter on Napier's medico-astrological practice. He claims (15) that the sample of records on which this chapter is based is representative of Napier's practice as a whole. But the data from this one year is less than ten percent of the overall total number of cases. However, as one might expect, Napier's practice evolved over time in many ways. Whether or not Hadass's extrapolations from his chosen set of records hold true for the entirety of Napier's casebooks is yet to be tested as further scholarship needs to be carried out on this extraordinary archive.

A second, more minor, issue is Hadass's assumption that patients always visited Napier in person at his home at the rectory in Great Linford, Buckinghamshire. He paints a picture of a bustling medical practice, crowded with patients (4). However, as the Casebooks site shows, we only have data for the method of consultation for about 10 percent of Napier's cases. From either explicit or implicit evidence, we know that about five thousand cases were “in person” and about three thousand were definitely sent by messenger. We simply have no idea about the other sixty-two thousand or so cases. It is quite possible, then, that Napier did not see the majority of his clients in person, which changes the dynamic of the practitioner-patient encounter quite significantly. A more nuanced approach to how Napier conducted his rural medical practice needs to be taken.

Has Hadass achieved his aim of reconciling Napier's modes of thought, or are there other interesting ways to interrogate these records? The separate categories into which the book's structure is organized—medicine, magic, and religion—might make sense to the modern reader, but are they applicable to these early modern casebooks? Hadass even makes reference to Alexandra Walsham's discussion of the cognitive dissonances present within individual minds in the introduction (12). It is maybe more interesting to see Napier's cosmology as one that was perhaps full of contradictions and inconsistencies, rather than try to untangle this seemingly Gordian knot into separate strands. Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England's most useful contribution to the field of early modern history is its chapter on medical practice. Sitting alongside earlier studies of Napier by Michael MacDonald and Ronald Sawyer, Hadass provides a microhistorical study of a single year in the evolving practice of an early modern doctor.