Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier

Detail from MS Ashmole 416, p. 192 showing CASE74713.

This site hosts images of the original sixty-six volumes of Simon Forman’s and Richard Napier’s casebooks. You can leaf through the manuscripts and perform rudimentary searches of their contents. For more powerful searching, comprehensive editorial information, and explanatory material, see the main Casebooks website.

Forman and Napier were English astrologers working in the decades around 1600. They produced one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. The Casebooks Project, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge, has transformed this paper archive into a digital archive — as seen here, on the main Casebooks website, and in the raw XML transcriptions.

The Casebooks Project works in partnership with the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, where these papers are a cornerstone of the Ashmole Collection.