Entity

Simon Forman

Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer-physician of London (1552–1611) whose voluminous casebooks survive as a uniquely detailed record of magical and medical consultation.

Simon Forman was an English astrologer, physician, and practitioner of natural magic who built a large and contentious practice in late-Elizabethan and early Jacobean London. He is remembered less for any doctrine he advanced than for what he left behind: thousands of pages of casebooks, dream records, and working notes, which together form one of the richest windows surviving on how magic, medicine, and astrology were actually done, day by day, in the period. Other figures of the age built systems; Forman kept a ledger. The ledger turned out to matter more.

Portrait of Simon Forman, English astrologer-physician (1552–1611) Portrait of Simon Forman, the Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer-physician of London. — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A learning pieced together

Forman was born in December 1552 at Quidhampton, near Wilton in Wiltshire, to modest circumstances, and his early life was a long improvisation against the grain of how learning was supposed to be acquired. He was apprenticed in Salisbury to the cloth-and-drug trades, spent some eighteen months around 1573–4 at Oxford as a poor scholar — at Magdalen, in attendance on wealthier young gentlemen who left him little time for study — and never took the orderly university road to a profession. What he became, he made himself. He pieced together a learning in astrology, alchemy, and physic from books, from copying manuscripts, and from his own trials, in the way a self-taught man assembles a craft: unevenly, stubbornly, with gaps papered over by confidence. By the late 1570s he was already casting figures and treating the sick; by the mid-1580s he was at the furnace, distilling medicines and working the metals; and by 1587, on his own later account, he had begun to call upon angels.

The plague years drove his trade. An epidemic that emptied a town of its licensed physicians — the wealthy fled, the learned with them — left the people who remained to the cunning men and the astrologer-healers who stayed, and Forman stayed. He practiced through outbreaks in Salisbury and later in London, treating where the more cautious would not, and built on the strength of it a reputation that the epidemics, paradoxically, made. He set himself up in London and from 1599 settled across the river at Lambeth, where he passed the last decade of his life as a busy, prosperous householder — orchard, genealogical ambitions, a late marriage, a hope of children — and where the practice that generated the casebooks reached its full volume.

The casebooks

The casebooks are the center of everything. They are the daily working record of an astrologer-physician’s consulting room: a client comes with a question, the practitioner notes the moment to the hour, erects a chart for that instant, and reads the answer from the heavens. This is horary and judicial astrology — the art of resolving a posed question by the figure of the sky at the time of asking — and the questions Forman fielded run across the whole texture of ordinary early-modern anxiety. Would a voyage prosper. Would a marriage hold, or a suit at law. Where was the lost purse, the strayed horse, the absent husband. Was the sickness mortal, and if not, what would cure it. For the ill he cast the decumbiture — the chart for the moment of taking to bed — and prescribed on the same astrological basis, the planets governing parts of the body, herbs, and metals alike. The architecture of the method, the houses and aspects and significators by which such a figure is read, belongs properly to the astrology and divination that Forman inherited rather than invented; what is his is the relentless, dated, named application of it to real lives.

For the record is astonishingly granular. It carries the names of the clients — servants and apprentices, tradesmen and their wives, sailors, gentry, the occasional grandee — together with their complaints, their ages, their fears and the outcomes, set down with a candor that has made the volumes indispensable to social historians of the period. They preserve the voice of people who otherwise left no trace at all: the maidservant wondering whether her sweetheart was true, the merchant’s wife afraid of poison, the apprentice who thought himself bewitched. Forman recorded his own life with the same unguarded completeness — his dreams, his quarrels, his money, his illnesses, his erotic encounters logged in a thin private shorthand, the verb halek standing in for the act so that the diary could be both a confession and a cipher. Few documents of the English Renaissance are at once so vast and so intimate.

The scale is the second astonishment. The papers of Forman and of his protégé Richard Napier, the Buckinghamshire rector who carried the practice on after him, together fill some sixty-four volumes — on the order of thirty thousand manuscript pages, recording roughly eighty thousand consultations between 1596 and 1634. They are the earliest such systematic medical case records known from London, and since the completion of the Cambridge Casebooks Project — the decade-long digital edition directed by Lauren Kassell — they have become one of the most thoroughly excavated archives in the history of early-modern medicine. What makes them rare is not that an astrologer kept notes, but that these notes survived in bulk, were never tidied into the polished treatise their author might have wished, and so preserve the practice in its working disorder rather than its presentable shape.

The war with the College of Physicians

Forman’s practice ran into sustained conflict with the College of Physicians of London, the chartered body that licensed and policed learned medicine in the city, and that regarded an unlettered, unlicensed astrologer-healer drawing crowds across the Thames as exactly the abuse its charter existed to suppress. For the better part of two decades it pursued him — summons, fines, spells of imprisonment — on the charge of practicing physic without its license; it dismissed his remedies, and forbade him the title of doctor. Forman held that his results answered for him, and that the College’s hostility was the self-interest of a guild defending its monopoly against a man the sick actually came to. In 1603 he secured from the University of Cambridge a license to practice medicine, proceeding to a degree the College never accepted as binding, and that did not stop its officers continuing to summon him for years afterward. The quarrel is one of the things the casebooks document so richly: the contested frontier, in this period, between the licensed learned medicine of the universities and the working astrologer-physician who operated beyond its edge, with the patients distributed across the line according to who would see them and who could be afforded.

What he collected, and what he did

Forman pursued alchemy and the study of magic alongside his consultations, copying, compiling, and composing manuscripts on both, and the question of how far he practiced ritual magic — as opposed to gathering, transcribing, and theorizing it — is one the surviving record leaves genuinely unsettled. In Lauren Kassell’s reading, his magic was not an idle sideline but a structured field with four departments: the spiritual, the angelic, the astral, and the pharmaceutical. The astral and pharmaceutical shade directly into his medicine, and stand in the lineage of the Renaissance astral-talismanic magic that Marsilio Ficino had made respectable — drawing down the powers of the planets into wax seals and talismans inscribed at elected times with images or words, sometimes steeped in medicines, sometimes carrying a spoken charm. The angelic reaches toward the kind of spirit-conjuring associated with his older contemporary John Dee, and it is precisely here that the evidence thins: Forman claimed, from 1587, to summon angels, yet left no working record of any such operation, no diary of the conjurations themselves. The man who wrote down nearly everything did not write down that. The honest account is that he stood deep inside the textual world of Renaissance magic — the world of Cornelius Agrippa and the Paracelsian medical chemistry of Paracelsus, the astral and natural magic that ran through learned and unlearned hands alike — and that the boundary between possessing those books and performing what they describe is, in his case, where the documentary trail goes quiet.

The poisoner’s astrologer

Line engraving of Simon Forman, published 1776 by Richard Godfrey after a portrait by John Bulfinch — the image that fixed his popular likeness long after his death. — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

After his death in 1611 his reputation darkened, and it darkened around an event he did not live to see. In 1613 Sir Thomas Overbury died, poisoned in the Tower of London, and when the affair came to trial in 1615 it emerged that Frances Howard — at the heart of the plot to remove Overbury from her path to a second marriage — had years earlier sought out Forman, in the company of Anne Turner, for charms to cool one man’s love and kindle another’s. Love-magic, wax images, and tokens linked to the dead astrologer were produced in court. Forman, five years in his Lambeth grave, became the affair’s resident sorcerer — the sinister conjuror who had armed a great lady’s intrigue — and the role stuck. Turner was hanged; Frances Howard, condemned, was pardoned and confined; and Forman’s name passed into the popular memory of the next two centuries less as a physician than as a dabbler in deadly enchantments, the cunning man behind a notorious crime.

The papers, and a second afterlife

Much of what can be known of him rests on the survival of his manuscripts, and they survived by descent through hands that valued exactly what they were. They passed from Forman to Richard Napier, and from Napier’s heirs into the great seventeenth-century gathering of English occult and astrological papers made by Elias Ashmole — the antiquary who, in the same collecting passion, saved the manuscripts of John Dee and corresponded with the astrologer William Lilly, into whose hands some of Forman’s magical books also strayed. The chain of ownership is itself a small map of the English esoteric tradition keeping its own records: a working astrologer’s papers passing to his successor, then to the century’s foremost collector of such things, then partly into the library of its most famous public astrologer. Through Ashmole’s bequest they reached the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where they remain, the Forman and Napier volumes forming a cornerstone of the Ashmole collection — the same antiquarian deposit that has preserved so much of what survives of English alchemy and astrology from the age before the new science sorted the cabinet into separate rooms.

The texts and the scholarship

For most of three centuries Forman was a footnote — the poisoner’s astrologer, the diarist of his own appetites — and his manuscripts lay largely unread in the Bodleian, mined by occasional antiquaries and theater historians for the Bocke of Plaies but never taken whole. The recovery is recent and is the work chiefly of two scholars. Barbara Howard Traister’s The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was the first study to read the manuscripts in their entirety, recovering from them the man’s life, household, and career — his astrology and alchemy, his gardening and his theater-going — and restoring the vivacity of a record long flattened into scandal. Lauren Kassell’s Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford University Press, 2005), an Oxford Historical Monograph shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize, reconstructs the intellectual world behind the consulting room — the place of astrology in his medicine, the four-fold structure of his magic, the contest with the licensed profession — and argues for the coherence of a practice that contemporaries and later debunkers alike were content to dismiss. Her earlier essay How to Read Simon Forman’s Casebooks (Social History of Medicine, 1999) set out the method by which a modern reader can move from the cryptic astrological shorthand of a single consultation to the medicine and the gender relations it encodes.

The casebooks themselves have now been published whole. The Cambridge Casebooks Project, a Wellcome-funded edition directed by Kassell with Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young and others, has transcribed and made freely searchable the surviving astrological records of Forman and Napier — the full sixty-odd volumes, page images held in parallel by the Bodleian and the Cambridge Digital Library — turning a paper archive readable only by specialists into one of the most heavily worked corpora in the social history of early-modern medicine. Read against this scholarship, Forman emerges not as the relic of a charlatan but as the evidence of a coherent, if unorthodox, working world, in which astrology, physic, alchemy, and magic were not four pursuits but one continuous practice answering to a single view of how the heavens governed the body and the fate.

One incidental detail has given Forman a second afterlife entirely his own. Among his notes is a small section he called the Bocke of Plaies — eyewitness accounts of performances he attended in London in 1610 and 1611, with the morals he drew from them, and including plays of Shakespeare seen at the Globe: Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. First brought to notice in 1836 and long shadowed by a suspicion that it was one of John Payne Collier’s forgeries, the section is now generally accepted as authentic — which makes the astrologer, by sheer accident of his note-keeping habit, one of the earliest recorded members of a London theater audience, and one of the very few who left an account of what it was like to sit through a Shakespeare play while Shakespeare was alive to write the next one.