Haleking

John Bossy

• The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman by Barbara Howard Traister
  Chicago, 260 pp, £19.00, February 2001, ISBN 0 226 81140 9
• Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician by Judith Cook
  Chatto, 228 pp, £18.99, January 2001, ISBN 0 7011 6899 4

Twenty-five years ago A.L. Rowse, whose memory becomes more blessed in an age of research assessment exercises, made known to the world the riveting personality of the Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer, private-enterprise medical practitioner, counsellor, sexual athlete and compulsive writer Simon Forman. Forman’s voluminous papers, case-notes, diaries and all sorts of other writings had been in the Bodleian Library since Elias Ashmole presented them in the late 17th century. They contained a vast amount of anecdote about all sorts of people, mainly in Elizabethan London: a treasure of knowledge which historians have found hard to place in their reconstructions of the Elizabethan soul and body.