M Rhinelander McCarl: Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper

7/28/2019 M Rhinelander McCarl: Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper

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Publishing the Works of Nicholas~ u l ~ e p e r , ~ s t r o l o ~ i c a 1erbalistand Translator of Latin MedicalWorks in Seventeenth-CenturyLondonMARY RHINELANDER McCARL

Abstract. This investigation attempts primarily to untangle the complex pub-lishing history of the works of Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54), astrological herbal-ist and translator of Latin medical works. It therefore identifies those workspublished in seventeenth-century London in a detailed appendix. Analysis ofthis publishing record extends our understanding of Culpeper himself, while itillustrates the relationship between author and publisher of medical texts in thebook market of seventeenth-century London: the study indicates that Londonstationers capitalized on the reputation of Nicholas Culpeper to build the wid-est possible market for his original astrological /herbal medical works and histranslations from continental authors.R6sum6. Cette recherche se propose de d6meler l'histoire complexe de lapublication des oeuvres de Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), herbaliste astrolo-gue et traducteur d'oeuvres m6dicales latines. C'est pourquoi on a identifi6 lesoeuvres qui ont et6 publi&s 1 Londres au XVIP siecle dans un appendice d6-taill6. L'analyse de ces conditions mat6rielles de publication nous permet demieux comprendre Culpeper hi-meme, tout en illustrant la relation existant en-tre auteur et 6diteur de textes m6dicaux sur le march6 du livre 1Londres au

I XVIIe siecle: 1'6tude indique que les papetiers de Londres capitalisaient sur lareputation de Nicholas Culpeper pour bhtir le march6 le plus large possiblepour ses oeuvres originale en m6decine astrologique/herbaliste et ses traduc-tions d'auteurs du continent.

The twentieth-century reputation of Nicholas Culpeper rests entirely onhis Herbal, which has been kept in print by the counterculture commu-nity.' Studies of his career stress his adherence to the reforming party,Mary Rhinelander McCarl, 1828 Mission Road, Vestavia Hills, Alabama 35216-2229.CBMH/BCHM / Volume 13:1996 / p. 225-76


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226 MARY RHINELANDER McCARL

whether in politics and war (he served in the Parliamentary Army) or inmedicine (he translated the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the arcane andtherefore monopolistic property of the Royal College of Physicians ofLondon, into English in 1649). The dedication of his own The EnglishPhysician, or, An astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this na-tion: being a compleat method of physick, whereby a man may preserve hisbody in health, or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with suchthings onely as grow in England, they being mostfit for English bodies "forthe benefit of the Commonwealth of England" of 1652, is seen as a markof his fervent nationalism and independence.This article argues instead that Culpeper worked mainly for the Lon-don booksellers, who paid him for the full rights of his work on comple-tion, and that the booksellers both set and satisfied the market for hiseditions. Through the use of publishing records, it examines the thornyissue of what exactly Culpeper translated from continental authors andwhat was attributed to him posthumously. It also looks at authorizedand unauthorized editions of this important author; for example, theedition of the English Physitian2 published "for the benefit of theCommonwealth of England" was a pirated edition, which Culpeperhimself attacked in his prefaces to later editions of the work.3A com-plete list of Culpeper's works, chronologically arranged from 1649 to1700, has been reconstructed in the Appendix to this discussion.This study covers the 50 years from Culpeper's first publication in1649 to the end of the seventeenth century, but concentrates on the be-ginning of this period, from 1649 until his death in 1654. This is that pe-riod of the English Civil War when London was in the hands of the Par-liament, King Charles I had been executed, and the previous restraintson printing and publishing had broken down.4The discussion does not offer a thorough investigation of the contentof medical books published during that period, but focuses on the activ-ities of stationers who built their lists around Culpeper's works-or

I rather the works attributed to Culpeper. It postulates in particular thatPeter Cole and Nathaniel Brookes, and to a lesser extent John Streater,Obadiah Blagrave, and George Sawbridge, used printers' prefaces andbook advertisements printed in Culpeper's works (often the only medi-cal books owned by apothecaries, surgeons and amateur country physi-cians) to whet buyers' appetites to buy more books from their lists.5Of the 158 separate editions of Culpeper's works published between1649 and 1700, Peter Cole published 64 and Nathaniel Brookes pub-lished 16.6Cole and Brookes surrounded Culpeper with books on com-pletely different subjects-in the context of the Interregnum the twopublishers were making two very different statements on religion andpolitics, as well as medicine. Culpeper's name was important enough


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Publishing the W orks of Nicholas Culpeper 227and his works protean enough to lend themselves to this use. At thetime of his death in 1654, Nicholas Culpeper was generally known as aprofessional astrologer. As will be shown, Cole, however, was workingon changing Culpeper's reputation to that of a serious physician, whileBrookes kept the astrological emphasis and added to it an occult and al-chemical dimension.NICHOLASCULPEPERBiographical SketchCulpeper had an unusual background for an astrologer and apothe-cary. He was of a good gentry family, the posthumous only son of aclergyman and grandson of a knight and baronet, Sir Thomas Culpeper.On his title pages he described himself as Nicholas Culpeper, Gent. andalways included his family crest in the engraved portrait frontispiecesof his works. He was raised by his widowed mother and her clergymanfather, William Attersol, to follow in the family profession. He was welleducated in the classics and prepared for Cambridge University.' Theonly contemporary account of his life is contained in Culpeper's SchoolofPhysick, first published by Nathaniel Brookes in 1659.The account is un-signed, but internal evidence indicates that much of the informationcontained in it was supplied by his wife and the self-serving John Hey-don, perhaps his wife's second h ~ s b a n d . ~hile the account of Cul-peper's family and early life may be accurate, a most dramatic episodethat occurred during his university years is almost certainly spurious,or rather allegorical. According to the Life, Culpeper fell deeply in lovewith a beautiful, golden-haired heiress while at university. Theyplanned to elope, but while she was riding to meet him she was struckby lightning and killed instantly. Surely this is an allegory for his over-whelming interest in alchemical researches. Whether he was expelledfrom the university or left voluntarily, he certainly repudiated his pre-ordained career as a Church of England clergyman and at the age of 18

l was formally apprenticed to a London apothecary.According to the Life, Culpeper rejected organized Christianity andthe possibility of a large inheritance and took to the study of astrologyand the occult and astrological physick. He was apprenticed in turn tothree different London apothecaries? yet he was never made a memberof the Society of Apothecaries. Rather, he entered the employment ofSamuel Leadbetter, who was a member of the Society and who hadbeen a fellow apprentice. He became so notorious for practising with-out being licensed that he was tried and acquitted of a charge of witch-craft in 1642, and Leadbetter was warned twice in 1643 not to employhim.


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228 MARY RHINELANDER MCCARLAfter his difficulties with the Society of Apothecaries, Culpeperseems to have given up the direct practice of pharmacy and made hisliving from prescribing herbal cures astrologically derived, castinghoroscopes, writing almanacs, and lecturing for fees. This was a lucra-

tive business: Culpeper's biographer says that "he hath forty thatwaited on him in a morning." His (alleged) pious last words, "I nevergave the Patient two Medicines when one would serve the turn," didnot mean that he was a proto-modern physician: he diagnosed illnessesby noting the position of the stars at the moment of onset. Despite mod-ern contentions that he was a physician, he did not come to his conclu-sions through clinical examination^.'^Beginning in 1649 he turned to compiling his own astrological andastrological/medical works and translating Latin medical authors forthe booksellers. (During his lifetime he described himself on his titlepages as "student of Physick and Astrology."") As a man obviously dy-ing of tuberculosis, and with a large family to up port,'^ he had nothingto lose, and devoted the prefaces of his translations to brutally frank at-tacks on the medical establishment. He died on 10 January 1654, at theage of 38, from tuberculosis, aggravated by smoking too much tobaccoand by chest wounds received while serving in the ParliamentaryArmy.Biographical StudiesThere is still no satisfactory full-length study of Culpeper, and since hispapers have not survived, it is unlikely that a full biography will be at-tempted. Yet Culpeper deserves to be taken seriously because, althoughin no way an original thinker, his preoccupations spanned the gamut ofapproaches to the most serious questions of social and medical care inthe mid-seventeenth century.Historians of medicine trained as scientists tend to ignore the astro-logical premises that underlay Culpeper's whole medical practice. His-

I torians trained in the newer anthropological approach have had moresuccess in accepting his entire world view. Sir Sydney Lee, author of theentry in the Dictionay of National Biography, stuck closely to the task ofunraveling Culpeper's complicated bibliography and was, on thewhole, positive about his subject. Fielding H. Garrison, author of thestandard An Introduction to the Histoy of Medicine, disparaged him as"the arch herbalist and quack salver of the time" and a "credulous as-tr~loger."'~. N. L. Poynter, who wrote the first article to survey all Cul-peper's publications, reacted against that view and saw him as a proto-modern physician.14Olav Thulesius, author of the only modern biogra-phy of Culpeper, followed Poynter in seeing his translation of the Phar-macopoeia as an independent action-a personal gesture of defiance


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Cu lpeper 229against the College of Physicians. Both Poynter and Thulesius dismisshis astr~logical ractice and see him as a practising pharmacist, dis-pensing herbal medicines to the sick poor.15 The biography by OlavThulesius is most disappointing, however. Although the author, apharmacist by training, diligently combed the sources, he shows littlediscrimination in their use. He has a dismaying habit of confidentlyputting names to characters unnamed in his sources and inventingwhole touching anecdotes. More problematic, Thulesius does not pro-ceed from a secure knowledge of the period.Historians of science, particularly those whose outlook is informedby anthropological concerns, have done better. Allen G. Debus's TheChemical Philosophy contains a stimulating discussion of the intellectualadepts but does not explain the peculiar situation of the Interregnumthat motivated a publisher like Peter Cole to encourage a man like Cul-peper to take on the establishment.16Christopher Hill put Culpeper'scareer into the perspective of the mid-seventeenth-century struggle be-tween the privileged aristocracy and the striving middle classes."Charles Webster considered Culpeper to be a non-collegiate Londonphysician, while, as we will see below, he should be ranked with theapothecaries and quacks.18Keith Thomas's great anthropological study, Religion and the Declineof Magic, demonstrates convincingly how astrology permeated the in-tellectual world of seventeenth-century London, and how it appealedto a failed clergyman and failed apothecary such as Culpeper. Thomasmade use of the papers of many professional astrologers collected byElias Ashmole; the discussion and references in his section on astrology,almost one third of Thomas's book, are a major treatise in themsel~es.'~CONTEMPORARY SOURCES OF INFORMATION O N CULPEPER'S WORKSNicholas Culpeper's death set off a scramble among the booksellers toauthenticate a variety of material as his. His widow was later to claim

l that she had 79 pieces in her custody, while her husband had just fin-ished another 17 pieces which he had handed over to stationer PeterCole. Cole and another stationer, Nathaniel Brookes, squabbled amongthemselves, using all the weapons at their command, from letters byCulpeper's widow to (a rather nice touch) a chatty communication byCulpeper's ghost.For this study, three contemporary sources have been used to showhow important Culpeper's name was to the booksellers: the Stationers'Company records, advertisements in Culpeper's books, and a contem-porary collection of printed materials.


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230 MARY RHINELANDER MCCARLRegisters of the Stationers' CompanyThe Registers of the Stationers' Company cover the registration andtransfer of rights to print Culpeper's works among members of the Sta-tioners' Company of London. The registration of titles simply recordedactions between members of the Stationers' Company, who agreedamong themselves that they would respect a monopoly on a particulartitle for a limited number of years. Although registration is $e ancestorof copyright, the benefits accrued to the stationers, not to the authors,who sold their manuscripts outright. Registration does not mean thatbooks were necessarily rushed into print, nor that they remained inprint until transferred to another member of the Stationers' Company.Neither does it mean that it was necessary for the registrant to re-regis-ter every new edition. Books that actually appeared in print, and werenot simply advertised, can be traced in the Short-Title Catalogues, whichwere compiled from surviving copies.20Between 1649 and 1699,282 titles of books of the medical-chymicaLastrological variety were registered or changed hands. Twenty-eight ofthese, almost 10 percent, were by Culpeper. If we count books pub-lished between 1649 and 1679, of the 194 titles, 28 were by Culpeper, al-most 17 percent of the total. They are clumped into two decades: be-tween 1649 and 1659, Peter Cole registered 19 medical titles: 13 of thesewere by Culpeper. In the same decade Nathaniel Brookes registered 16medical titles: four were by Culpeper. In the decade 1670-79, WilliamSawbridge, who had taken over some of Cole's titles, registered ninetitles, all by Culpeper. Obadiah Blagrave, who had succeeded toBrookes' titles, registered just one medical title during that decade. Itwas by Culpeper. Other men printed real or spurious works by ortranslated by Culpeper during the second half of the seventeenth cen-tury, but these four stationers are responsible for most of Culpeper'stitles, and, of the four, Peter Cole was by far the most important.

I AdvertisementsThe best indicator of the relative importance of Culpeper's works to thebooksellers comes from examining the book advertisements containedin contemporary editions of Culpeper's works. It4s striking that untilthe end of the century every licit edition of any of Culpqper's workscontained long multipage advertisements of books offered for sale, of-ten bound in to follow the preface, then repeated at the end of the vol-ume. (These are extremely bulky works for the period, usually exceed-ing 300 pages in length.) Culpeper's works were the majsr, and perhapsthe only, volumes purchased by the apothecaries and surgeons of Eng-land, and were constantly consulted. Any titles guaranteed by themagic name of Culpeper were sure to have special sales appeal. These


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 231will be discussed further below. The results are summarized in Table 1,where books advertised in Peter Cole's Culpeper titles are broken downby five categories, and Table 2, which shows which of Cole's Culpepertitles carried advertisements for other works by him.George Thomason's Collection of TractsGeorge Thomason, the great contemporary collector of printed materialfor sale in London between 1640 and 1661, bought his first Culpepertitle, the Physical Directory or, Translation of the London Dispensatoy madeby the Colledge of Physicians, on 30 October 1649 and altogether collected24 works by, translated by, or about Culpeper between 1649 and 1660.21Thomason, a stationer who amassed his collection to document theexcesses of the unlicensed press during the Civil War period?2 was par-ticularly interested in and disgusted by a squabble among astrologersand their supporters on the significance of the eclipse of the sun inMarch 1652. William Lilly, the most famous judicial astronomer of theday, published a work entitledAnnus Tenebrosus,and Culpeper, follow-ing him, predicted the fall of monarchy in general in his CatastropheMagnatum. When nothing happened, the Royalists, enemies of astrol-ogy, and rival astrologers had a field day satirizing Lilly and Culpeper.Thomason collected 12 pamphlets about the eclipse alone. WithoutThomason's collection-which demonstrates Culpeper's notoriety-our picture of Culpeper would be incomplete.PETER COLE AS PUBLISHER OF NICH OLAS CULPEPER'S WORKSPeter Cole and the Publishing of Culpeper's Translationof the PharmacopoeiaThe circumstances under which Culpeper published his translations ofthe 1618 version of the official LondonPharmacopoeia in 1649, and the re-vised 1650 version in 1653, differ from accounts provided by earlier stu-

l dents of Culpeper.There were two schools of medicine in seventeenth-century England:

Galenical, based on humoral theory, and alchemical or Paracelsian.Galenical medicine was still the official variety, but it is noticeable that itwas eroding precisely where Culpeper encountered it--on the edges ofthe Pharmacopoeia. The College of Physicians, a tiny group of some 30practitioners in London, had authorized the printing of their Pharmaco-poeia in Latin in 1618. Along with a great number of Galenical-herbalis-tic receipts, it contained some "chymicall" or Paracelsian cures. Despitethe printed prefatory notice that all apothecaries were to use only itsformulas, most of them could not read Latin. In the 16 4 0 ~ ~he Civil Waremergency required that every apothecary and surgeon in the army or


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232 MARY RHINELANDER MCCARLnavy23and every amateur physician be supplied with useful formulasfor compounding medicines. At the same time the Stationers' Companyhad largely lost control of their means to police copyright.The bookseller, Peter Cole, almost certainly with financial backingfrom the apothecaries, hired Culpeper to make the translation, as indi-cated by Culpeper's own testimony in his Life, the records of the Com-pany of Stationers, the advertisement of the book in a Parliamentarynewsletter, and the attack on it in a royalist newsletter. According to theLife, when Culpeper became ill with the tuberculosis that ultimatelykilled him, he sought to cut back his astrological practice but was sur-prised to be chosen to translate the Phamcopoeia. "He being then soun-expectedly taken notice of, as to be put upon the Translation of the Doc-tors Dispensatory.. " (C6). The work, almost 400 pages, obviously tookconsiderable time to translate, according to the hostile notice of it in the4-11 September 1649 issue of the Royalist newsletter, Mercurius Pragma-ticus, "by two yeares drunken Labour."Why was Culpeper chosen to be the translator? The clue again comesfrom Mercurius Pragmaticus. According to the ne~sletter:~he wasbound apprentice to an apothecary but ran away and married before histime was out. "This done, hee turnes Compositor, afterwards a figure-flinger, and lived about Moore-fields merely upon Couzenage andCheating the poore People who had lost their Wastcoats, Aprons,Smocks,&." The clue here is the word "Compositor": Culpeper almostcertainly worked for one of the myriad of printers in London, perhapsPeter Cole himself, who realized that his excellent command of Latincould be put to good use in translating the Pharmac~poeia.~~he transla-tion was finished by August 1649, when it was advertised by Peter Cole,at the end of the 28 August-4 September issue of the Parliamentarynewsletter, The Moderate: Impartially Communicating Martial Afaires tothe Kingdom of England .26

I There is come forth an exact translation of the London Dispensatory, made bythe Colledge of Physicians inLondon,being thatBook,by which all Apothecar-ies in England are strictly commanded to make all their Physick; with 'ZtYelvehundred Additions, wherein is shewed, the vertue and operation of everyMed-icine, and every Simple. Printed forPeter Cole,at the Printing Press inCorn hill.The 4-11 September issue of Mercurius Pragmaticus contained the vitri-olic review quoted above. George Thomason acquired a copy on 30Oc-tober 1649.Bolting the barn door after the horse had been stolen, the College ofPhysicians acted. They had in train for some time a new edition of thePharmacopoeia, corrected by prominent practising physicians in London,including refugee French Protestants who were more advanced in prac-tice than the English physicians. This contained still more chemical re-


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 233ceipts than the 1618 version. As mandated by the Parliamentary Ordi-nance of 12 June 1643, "The President and foure Sensories" of the Col-lege of Physicians were to license all medical books, and this time theywanted to make sure that all the forms were followed.27On 28 No-vember 1649, Stephen Bowtell, b~okseller?~under the hands of thePresident and censors of the Colledge of Phisitions of London" enteredthe Latin version with the Company of Statione~-s;29n 12 DecemberBowtell entered the t ran~lat ion.~~

The College of Physicians could not control sale of copyright betweenmembers of the Stationers' Company, and it was clearly to Peter Cole'sadvantage to secure this title for himself. It only made sense to put Cul-peper to revising his previous translation. On 18 October 1650, PeterCole recorded the sale of the rights from Stephen Bowtell to himself:Entred . .by vertue of a bill of sale under the hand & seale of STEPHENBOWTELL,subscribed by Master STEPHENS warden [of the Stationers' Company] thesethree bookes or copies (vizt)Dispensatoriu Collegii Londinensis &c, PharmacopoeiaLondinensis Collegarum hodie viventium studiis ac symbolis ornatior, 8 and Phar-macopeia Londinensis, or the London dispensatoriefurther adorned by the studies &collations of the fellowes now liveing in this yeare 1649, in English. The wch saidthree bookes stand severally entred to the said Stephen Bowtell in this Register.It took three years for Culpeper to complete his translation of the newedition. It appeared in 1653 as Pharmacopoeia Londinensis: or the LondonDispensatory Further adorned by the Studies and Collections of the Fellows,now living of the said Colledg. . . .All the Medicines that were in the Old LatinDispensatoy, and are left out of the New Latin one, are printed in this fourthImpression in Eng1ish3l with their Vertues. . . . What is added to the Book bythe Translator, is of a dzgerent Letterfrom that which was made by the Colledg.By Nich. Culpeper Gent. Student in Physick and Astrology; living inSpittle-fields neer London . . .Printed for Peter Cole .. 1653.The preliminary section of books was, in the seventeenth century asnow, printed after the text, since tables of contents and indices could not

I be prepared until page numbers were known. There was never any hintthat Culpeper's translation itself was defective. But did Culpeper letanyone see his preface? In "The Translator to the Reader" prefaced tothe 1649 edition, Culpeper came out swinging, and never backed down:. . . he Liberty of our Common-Wealth (if I may call it so without a Solecisme) ismost infringed by three sorts of men, Priests, Physitians, Lawyers; (yet I accusenot all of those Faculties, Trades, or (if I may be so bold without offence) Mo-nopolies, for that were a devillish trade that had never an honest man in it) Theone deceives men in matters belonging to their Souls, the other, in matters belonging totheir Bodies, the third in matters belonging to their Estates. Amongst these, Physi-tians walk in the Clouds, their waies being not so discernable to a vulgar viewas the waies of the other two are; and that's the reason men are led by their


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234 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLnoses (worse than beasts, as though oppression had already made them mad)by a company of proud, insulting, domineering Doctors, whose wits were bornabove five hundred years before themselves.. . . [Physicians object to his trans-lation] because thereby ignorant fellows will be induced to the practice of Phy-sick, and therefore they say they wrote it only to the nurslings of Apollo. But 1.IfApollo had served thenine Muses soas they serve theApothecaries, viz. Hid all hisart from them, they would have no more wit than nine Geese. 2. All the Nationare already Physitians, If you ay1 any thing, every one you meet, whether manor woman will prescribe you a medicine for it. Nor whether this book thustranslated will make thek more ignorant or more knowing, any one that hathbut a grain of understanding more than a horse, may easily judg. .. "

"To the Impartial Reader" in the 1650 edition began: "Wdliam the Bas-tard having conquered this Nation and brought it sub iugo, brought in theNorman Law written in an unknown tongue, and this laid the foundationto their future, and our present slavery.. . I1 In this preface he took onestablished religion, particularly the London Presbyterian clergy.32 Hecriticized the College of Physicians for setting the price of "GerrhardsHerbal, and Parkinsons which is an hundred times better" so high thatthe common people cannot buy them and so identify the plants that areusefully medicinal. The third edition (1651) is dedicated to the College ofPhysicians; his mock diagnostics must have made them squirm:The Diagnosticks are these. Ipse dixit, seven miles about London, Lay him inPrison: five pound a Month for practising Physick unless he be a Collegiate;make a couple of crutches of the Apothecaries and Chyrurgions;Be as proud asLucifer; Ride in state with a Foot-cloth;Love the sight of Angels; Cheat the Rich;Neglect the Poor; Do nothing withoutMony;Be Self-conceited;Be Angry; For Im-pedit ira animum ne possit cernere verum;BeWitless, and so die."He continues in the ~ a m e v e i n . ~ ~

Are these prefaces not proof that Culpeper was a rebel against theestablishment? To understand them, it is helpful to look at another sen-tence from the attack on the Pharmacopoeia printed in the 1649Mercuriusl Pragmaticus:

Then he commenced the several1 degrees of Independency, Brownisme, Anabap-tisme; Admitted hirnselfe of John Goodwins Schoole (of all ungodlinesse) in Cole-man-street. After that he turn's Seeker, Manifestarian, and now hee is arrived atthe Battlement of an absoluteAtheist; and by two yeares drunken Labour, hathGallimawfred the Apothecaries Booke into non-sense, mixing every Receipttherein with some Scruples, at least of Rebellion or Atheisme, besides the dan-ger of PoysoningMens Bodies: And (to supply his Dronkennesse and Leacherywith a thirty shillings Reward) endeavored to bring into obloquy the famousSocieties of Apothecaries and Chyrurgeons... .He goes on to say that his stationer (Peter Cole) had supplied him with afancy cloak, "to hide his knavery." The attack on Culpeper was cer-


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 235tainly exaggerated, but it had a grain of truth. He certainly followed thefirst step of religious dissent from the Church of England and favoredthe independent^.^^ In the 1650s this was precisely the clientele thatPeter Cole sought through his advertisements.

Those historians of medicine who follow Charles Webster's The GreatInstauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 have tended tolump all "Puritans" but in order to understand Culpeper'scareer it is vitally important to realize that the sober Puritans of London(not the wild fringe) were sharply divided between the Presbyteriansand the Independents. It is not clear whether the Presbyterians hadtheir own favorite publisher and bookseller; it is perfectly clear thatPeter Cole functioned as such for the Independents.The Independents were the men who in 1643, at the foundation of theWestminster Assembly of Divines, staked out a position as the "Dis-senting Brethren." In the complicated spectrum of reformed clericalopinion, they were Congregationalists, having rejected both episcopacyand the Scottish Presbyterian model. Their leader was Thomas Good-win; the others were Philip Nye, William Bridge, and Sydrach Simpson.These four, with Jeremiah Burroughs, issued the "Apologetical Narra-tion," their manifesto, in 1643. Cheering them on from the other side ofthe Atlantic were the ministers of New England, particularly ThomasHooker, the founder of Hartford, Connecticut.Why is this important to understand Culpeper? Precisely becauseCole, in his advertisements printed in Culpeper's titles for more than 20years, listed works by all of these men, as well as old standard titles inthe Puritan vein. Using the lists of books advertised in Culpeper titlesbetween 1649 and 1663, we can see that he carried books by the sameauthors year after year. The only non-clerical, non-medical work thatCole advertised throughout the period was Barriffe'sMilitary Discipline,a do-it-yourself introduction to the rules of warfare, much utilized bythe Parliamentary Army during the Civil War.

Was Culpeper a Leveller or a Digger? His sentiments can certainly beI found in the writings of William Walwyn and Gerrard Winstanley, par-ticularly the idea of the "Norman Yoke."36 Yet many of the ideas that headvocated were adopted, or at least discussed, before society closed inagain at the Restoration. The legal language, for example, was officiallychanged to English on 22 November 1 6 5 0 . ~ ~

On the medical side, Culpeper's was by no means the only voice ofprotest. Peter Chamberlen (1601-83), of the famous family of obstetri-cians, was expelled from the College of Physicians in 1649. In 1634 hehad urged that the midwives be incorporated in the same way as thephysicians, surgeons, and apothecaries; in religion, during the Interreg-


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236 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLnum, he became first an Independent, then an Anabaptist. The anony-mous Lex Exlex: or The Downfall of the Law and the Gospell. Being a Warn-ing-piece to the Colledge of Physicians by Dalepater Menedemus (1652)was not written by a physician, but certainly reflected contemporarycriticisms; it laid open for criticism the same trio of professionals as Cul-peper had attacked in his prefaces. Part of the title page to MetaeotechniaMedicinae Praxds. The Vanity of the Crap of Physick. Or, A New Dispensa-toy. Wherein is Dissected the Errors, Ignorance, Impostures and Supinities ofthe Schools, in their main Pillars ofPurges, Blood-letting, Fontanels or Issues,and Diet, &. And the particular Medicines of the Shops by the alchemistNoah Biggs sums up the attitude of the Paracelsians.There were, of course, many more criticisms such as these. GeorgeThornason, who had collected no medical works prior to September1649, picked up 82, of which only five were in Latin.38Other Works by Culpeper Published during His Lifetimeby Peter ColeAs we have seen, the first edition of Culpeper's translation of the 1618edition of the Pharmacopoeia was published in early September 1649.In1650, a second edition with "seven hundred and eighty four additions,"and in 1651 a third edition, both published by Peter Cole, appeared. Thethird, 1651 edition, contained A Key to Glen's Method of Physick. Cul-peper's Ephemeris for 1651, his first, and the only one prepared for PeterCole, contained an introduction to medical astrology, a treatise on the"Humane Vertues." Cole also published in 1651, a translation "en-larged, corrected and very much amended" by Culpeper of Armin'stranslation of Glisson, Bate and Regemorter's Latin Treatise of Rickets.Probably Culpeper's most popular work, after his herbal, first ap-peared in 1651. It was his Directoyfor Midwives: or, A Guide for Women.The prefatory letter to the Directoy for Midwives is of interest, for in itCulpepef attacks the physicians for keeping the midwives, whodelivered literally all the babies in this period, ignorant of the finer

l points of their craft. He says that if they follow the advice in the bookthey will not have to call upon the help of a Man-Midwife "which is adisparagement, not only to yourselves, but also to your Profession."Culpeper claimed this as an original work, but William Johnson, actingas spokesman for the College of Physicians, denigrated it as mostlytranslated from "Papius" and other obsolete obstetrical writers.39Meanwhile, also in 1651, Nathaniel Brookes published the overtlyastrologicalSemeiotics Uranica, or an Astrological Judgement of Diseases,advertised as translated by Culpeper from Aden Ezra, Duret, and Hip-pocrate~.~OThe next year, 1652, revealed Culpeper as a true disciple of the astrol-oger William Lilly. Culpeper's Ephemeris for 1652 (published by Na-


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 237thaniel Brookes) was subtitled as "prognosticating the mine of monar-chy throughout Europe," and Brookes also published Culpeper's Catas-trophe Magnatum, which carried on in the same vein. When nothing as-tonishing happened on 29 March, the date of the solar eclipse that wasmeant to bring ruin to the world, the astrologers' rivals and enemiespublished rude comments. Lilies Ape Whipped was a direct attack onCulpeper; A Faire in Spittle Fields linked Culpeper, Lilly, and JohnBowker (Booker); William Brommerton's Confidence Dismounted at-tacked Culpeper and Lilly as did The Astrologers Bugg-beare and Mercu-rius Phreniticus, a mock newsletter, which accused Culpeper of falling inlove with the stars when seeing their reflection in a piss-pot. The mostamusing is theFaire at Spittle Fields which describes Culpeper asThis man indee's the Vicar of St.Fools,Yet contradictsPhysitions and theSchoolls,And with a handful of conceited knowledge.Dare challenge all the Doctors in the Colledge . . .What lack ye Gentlemen, come buy thisSpell,Twill fetch grandPluto from the netherHell.Buy this Conjuring Circle which of latePreservd th' Exorcist . . .Culpeper had his defender in a fellow astrologer, John Gadbury. Gad-bury sets out to prove that "Philastrogus," the author of Lilies ApeWhipped, was "a Crokodile or Serpent, venting your trenome, against theservants of Christ, viz. Mr. Litly,Mr.Culpeper, and the rest of that nobleand Christian-like Art."41 In 1652, as well, Peter Cole published Cul-peper's translation of GalenlsArt of Physick.

Culpeper's herbal, the only work of his that is still being reprinted,was first published in 1652 in folio by Peter Cole as The English Physitian:or an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation. It isalso his only original work. In it, Culpeper demonstrates real evidenceof being a keen botanizer; occasionally he explains precisely where on

' his travels he has found certain plants growing. In this, of course, hewas a successor to Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson, but he criticizesthem for training up novices in the "School of Tradition" and teachingthem to parrot back what they had been taught. He says that he con-sulted the best authors, but they gave him no satisfactory explanationwhy certain herbs healed men's body, "I consulted with my twoBrothers,Dr. REASON and Dr. EXPERIENCE, and took a Voyage to visit myMother NATURE, by whose advice together with the help of Dr. DILI-GENCE, I at last obtained my desires, and being warned by Mr. Honesty, astranger in our daies to publish it to the World, I have done it."

Culpeper intended the English Physitian to be used with the SemioticaUranica (which had been taken from some of his lectures) and, for the


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real novices, the brief introduction to the "Humane Vertues" printed atthe back of his 1651 Ephemeris. His main point was that it was necessarythat every physician be an astrologer. The book was not illustrated, andalthough the first edition was in folio, the second, published the nextyear, was in the less expensive octavo format. The book pirates, sensingits potential popularity, brought it out immediately in the smaller duo-decimo format in minute print.In 1653, Peter Cole published three important works by Culpeper: thetranslation of the new official Pharmacopoeia as The London DispensatoyFurther Adorned by the Studies and Collections of the Fellows now living, anew edition of the Directoy for Midwives, and a new edition of the Eng-lish Physitian "enlarged with three hundred sixty, and nine medicines."In the preface to this last, Culpeper gives very precise directions on de-tecting the counterfeit editions.42He also completed ephemerises for1653 and 1654, for the benefit of the Company of Stationers.In 1653, too, Cole published his translation of the Anatomy of JohannVesling of the University of Padua. In the prefatory "To the Reader,"dated 12 November 1653, of Culpeper's translation of Partlitz, A NewMethod of Physick: or, A Short View of Paracelsus and Galen's Practice, Cul-peper states that he had completed the translation when he was well,but was now too ill to write the accompanying treatise.43These books are all that can confidently be ascribed to Culpeper.In anundated letter by Culpeper prefacing his Last Legacy (published inMarch 1655), he lists his works as the Dispensatoy, the English Physitian,Semiotics Uranica enlarged, Catastrophe Magnatum, and the Directory forMidwives, not claiming the translations of foreign works.Peter Cole's Publications of Culpeper's Works Immediately after His DeathOn 22 August 1654, seven months after Culpeper's death, Peter Coleregistered with the Stationers' Company seven translations from Latinworks by important continental medical writers: Lazare Rivi&re,Prac-

I tice in 17 books and Observations in three, with an appended book oftranslations by others; Jean Riolan's Anatomy; Daniel Senectus [Sen-nert], Works; John Jonstonus, Idea of Practical Physick in 12 books;Thomas Bartholin's Anatomy; and Jean Fernel's Works. The first four,said Cole, were translated by Culpeper and William Rowland; the lastthree by Culpeper a10ne.~All through the seventeenth century, these works appeared with Cul-peper's name on them. Did he in fact translate them? John Heydon in-sisted more than once that Cole put Culpeper's name on books thatwere not his.45Riviere's Practice, as we shall see below, may be the onlytitle on the list that Culpeper did complete, although it was only regis-tered in Latin with the Stationers' Company by the College of Physi-


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 239cians on 26 November 1653 when Culpeper was on his deathbed.46Byadding these works, by Vesling, Riviere, Riolan, Prevost, and Glisson,Bate and Regemorter on rickets, to Culpeper's translations, Peter Colehad covered practically the entire English-language medical market. Hewas to add still more in the next decade.The Ghost and Mrs . Culpeper: Peter Cole ClaimsLater Translations as Culpeper'sAlthough Culpeper did not translate most of the works that Peter Coleregistered posthumously, Cole protected his investment by using thismagic name. What he needed from Culpeper's widow was a certificateof authentication for these works. He got this and a right to claim thatCulpeper left 79 titles in his wife's hands and 17 more at Cole's shop. Inreturn, she gained free advertising space for the elixir, Aurum Potabile,which she and an alchemist named Dr. Freeman were brewing up at herhouse in Spittle Fields.47

Peter Cole's quest for authentication of his publications was only re-solved after the infamous squabble between the Ghost and Mrs. Cul-peper. On 12 March 1655, Abraham Miller registered Culpeper's LastLegacy. . . out of Barrough's Method of P h y ~ i c k . ~ ~n 15 March, Millertransferred the copyright to Nathaniel B r o o k e ~ . ~ ~he title page (whichdoes not mention Barrough) reads, "Culpepers Last Legacy Left and be-queathed to his dearest Wife for the publicke good, BEING The Choicest andmost profitable ofthose Secrets which while he lived were lockt up in his Breast,and resolved never to be publisht till after his Death. . .." It opens with a firmletter (undated) by the widow testifying that the writings within wereauthentic, and a note from Culpeper (also undated) listing his authenticworks and declaring these to be "the reserve of all the rest." Most of thematerial is strongly Galenical-scraps and pieces, probably taken fromcommonplace books, being cures alphabetically arranged by herbalremedies. It contained two treatises, on fevers50 and the pestilence.

I Brookes also re-registered an enlargement of Culpeper's Semiotica Uran-ica.During his lifetime Nicholas Culpeper was an ardent believer in as-

trology, but by and large a Galenist, and certainly not devoted to Para-celsian medicine.51Once he was safely dead, the practising alchemistsbegan to use his name. In August 1655, Thornason purchased a tract by"Philaretes," Culpeper Revivedfrom the Grave, to discover the Cheats of thatgrand Impostor, Call'd AURUM POTABILE. Printed in the moneth of August1655."52 The author, who had a shrewd idea of what was going on in thehouse at Spittle Fields, criticizes Alice Culpeper "not much unlike the[whore] of Babylon who with her curious golden Potion, hath en-deavoured the delusion of many people." She is assisted by "a Gentle-


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man Physitian and another "by the name of F." who is the alchemist.These three "are now obtruding upon Culpepers name their perniciouslibel to gain credit upon the people, whereas there is nothing more falsethen that he made it, as is manifest by the copie, which was never writby his hand, though it were the custome of that laborious Authoralwaies so to do." He obviously expected Cole to print the advertise-ment: he accuses Cole "the Stationer not fame from Leaden-hall" of"obtruding printed papers into the world which he never writ."The adverti~ernent~~which may well have once existed as a hand-bill) reads: "Vertues, Use, and Variety of Operations of the True andPhylosophicalAURUM POTABILE, Attained by the Studies of Doctor Free-man, and Doctor Culpeper, and left with his Widdow, and admin-istered by a Physitian in her House neer London. . " It cured apes, pu-trid fever, gout, "causeth Women subject to Abortion or Miscarriage, togo their time." It was an infallible cure for the French Pox, green sick-ness, jaundicein short "an Universall Remedy for all Diseases, for itschief aime is to exhilarate the heart and vital spirits, which supply theMicrocosme, as the Sun doth the Macrocosme." It is not dated, but aswe shall see below, Mrs. Culpeper was to claim that her husband wroteit in January 1653 [1654]."Philaretes" must have been surprised when the treatise was pub-lished, not by Peter Cole, but for George Eversden in 1656 as Mr. Cul-peper's Treatise of Aurum Potabile. Being a Description of the Three-jioldWorld. Elimentay, Celestiall, Intellectual, Containing the Knowledge neces-sary to the Study of Hermetick Philosophy. (The 1657 edition, also pub-lished by Eversden, adds Faithfully Written by him in his Gfe-time, andsince his Death, published by his Wife.)Within a letter by Alice Culpeper,dated 9October 1655, there is a testimonial by Nicholas Culpeper, dated1January 1653 [1654], 10days before his death. It can hardly be a sur-prise that it is in the exact word of the advertisement, with the date andthe notice that a treatise "Shall shortly be published on this subject."

1 "To the Reader" is a strong attack by Alice Culpeper on NathanielBrookes, whom she accuses of publishing "an undigested Gallimof-fery," "a hodge-podge of undigested Collections and Observations ofmy dear husband deceased, under the Title of Culpeper's last Legacy"as well as forging letters in the names of herself and her husband. Sheridicules the author for making her husband whine like the hero of aballad in his farewell. She goes on to say that her husband left 79 booksof his own making or translation, which she has deposited into thehands of Peter Cole, as well as 17 books completely perfe~ted,~~orwhich he was paid by C01e.~~he ends by recommending both the Trea-tise on Aurum Potabile and the "Universall Medicine" itself. She pub-lishes the advertisement as it appeared in the sixth, 1654, edition of the


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 24 1Dispensatory (of which the first surviving copy is dated 1659).56Cole,then, had got what he wanted from the widow-a certification that hehad a huge number of authentic Culpeper titles in reserve.

Peter Cole reinforced this treatise with Mr. Culpeper's Ghost. GivingSeasonable Advice to Lovers of his Writings. "The Printer to the Reader" isone of the more charming examples of the genre. Cole solemnly ex-plains that the Ghost had trouble getting through to his wife andfriends, "the Connexion seems in some places faulty" but that theGhost's message is perfectly clear: buy Culpeper's books and his Au-rum Potabile. Cole obligingly lists "The Names of Mr. Culpeper's Eightseveral Books of Physick that thou art advised in this Discourse to buy":Riverius' Practice of Physick in Seventeen Several Books, [Vesling's] Anat-omy of the Body of Man, the translation of the Dispensatory, the EnglishPhysitian Enlarged, the Directory for Midwives, Galen's Art of Physick,[Partlitz]New Method, and [Glisson, Bate, and Regemorter]Treatise of theRickets. (Note that these are all works that we know Culpeper publishedor completed in his lifetime. None of them, except perhaps the Rivierewere listed in Cole's registration of August 1654.) The Ghost, who reallydoes sound a lot like Culpeper, warns that when the Royalists comeback again all books of physick in the English tongue will be burned bythe hangman. He amuses himself by recounting how Dr. Fludd, the fa-mous Paracelsian, could only be cured by a Galenist, and how pompousphysicians in general get their comeuppances in the Elysian Fields. Hecriticizes Brookes for having printed the Last Legacies and suggests thathe take down the shop sign of the Angel and substitute that of the Devil,or the Cloven-Hoof.John Heydon, always the spoiler, printed the recipe for the AurumPotabile in his self-published 1662 work The Holy Guide, Leading the Wayto Unite Art and Nature: In Which is Made Plain All Things Past, Present,and to Come, Book 5, pages 16-20. It contained almost no gold, but a fairamount of the urine of a healthy young male drinker of white wine, dis-

I tilled down. While he gave his address as "next door to the Red Lion" in1658, and entered Culpeper's School of Physick in the Stationers' Com-pany Register in September of that year, by 1662 he had fallen out withAlice Culpeper.

Peter Cole's Editions of Culpeper's Works after the RestorationPeter Cole, a substantial businessman, could not be as blunt about theRoyalists as the insubstantial Ghost. In 1657 he had dedicated his edi-tion of Culpeper's translation of Riolan's Anatomy to Henry Lawrence,Lord President of Cromwell's Council, but when Charles I1 was re-stored to the throne and the Royal College of Physicians was restored topower, he took the unheroic way out. The Ghost was banished.


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242 MARY RHINELANDER MMcCARL

In 1661 Cole brought out a new edition of the Dispensatory in an ex-pensive folio with corrections and additions by members of the Collegeof Physicians. The format deliberately paralleled that of the LatinDispensatorium and was keyed to the pages of the Latin text. (This was apolite way of enabling physicians with somewhat shaky Latin to use thetranslation as a crib.) The publishers, for Peter Cole was now joined byhis nephew, Edward Cole, said in their Letter to the Reader that theycould not have persuaded physicians to make corrections unless theydeleted all Culpeper's scurrilous remarks about medical worshipers ofMammon."At the end of the work appeared an undated (supposed) oint letterfrom another member of the family, Abdiah C0le7~ nd Culpeper, be-ginning "Courteous Reader, If thou ever intendest to study Physick,and turn neither Fool nor Knave in that famous Science, be well skilledin all our Books Printed in English:Which Containe all things necessaryto be known by a Rational Physitian." The list is of six categories ofworks: natural philosophy, anatomy, the speculative part of physick,the practice of physick, chyrurgery, and rare cures. All the works arelisted as original pieces by Culpeper and Cole. If we look at the 17 worksadvertised at the back of the book as the "Rational Physician's Library,"four are Culpeper's old standard^,^^ nine were translated after hisdeath,6O and the remaining four had never before been attributed toCulpeper.In another change at the Restoration, the Coles split their market forCulpeper titles. They regularly advertised the LatinDispensatorium, theEnglishDispensatory and the English Physitian in both folio (for the phy-sician) and the inexpensive octavo (for apothecaries, laymen, andwomen.)61 n 1663 they advertised, in Ruland's %o Treatises: The First ofBlood-letting . ..The Second of Cupping and Scarifying, a "Physician's Li-brary" still further removed from Culpeper.On the title page, Cole stilllists Culpeper as "Nich. Culpeper Gent." and Abdiah Cole as "Doctor

1 of Physick," but in the advertisement Culpeper has become "Physitianand Astrologern-and so he would remain for the rest of the century.The featured work isA Golden Practice of Physick by Felix Plater; the ma-jority of the works listed are by Daniel Sennert. TheEnglish Physitian istwenty-seventh and last. From that year until his death in 1665, PeterCole did not add to the number of titles that he carried under Cul-peperrsname.An Analysis of Peter Cole's Book AdvertisementsWe have seen that Peter Cole's market for the Culpeper titles paralleledthat of works by Independent divines. Before he published any of Cul-peper's works, he had been specializing in theological works. In the


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Publishing the Worksof Nicholas Culpeper 243back of the 1649 edition of Culpeper's translation of the Pharmacopoeia,he advertised 16 religious books, but no medical works. In the 1650 edi-tion, obviously realizing the marketing potential of the work, he in-serted advertisements for works by Ambroise Par6 and AlexanderRead, published by other booksellers. In 1651, he began to feature hisown editions of Culpeper's works at the beginning of his book lists. Thenumbers mount steadily, from 3 of 19 works in 1651, to 18 of 99 works in1661, and 27of 88 in 1663.62The only other medical works that Cole ad-vertised consistently over many years were William Clowes Chyrurgery,1652-61,~~hich he had first published in 1637, his first year as a book-seller, and the Latin Pharmacopoeia, usually offered in both folio and oc-tavo.

Table 1breaks down Cole's advertisements, 1649-63, by topic: medi-cal by Culpeper; medical by others; religious, sometimes shading topolitical; mathematical/scientific; and other. Except for 1659, whenthere were 36 medical titles, 35 by Culpeper and one by another, and 28religious titles, the religious titles were more numerous. Culpeper, how-ever, was the single author with the most titles and was placed consist-ently at the head of the list.64

Table1Peter Cole's Book Advertisements in 16 Books byor Translated by Culpeper, 1649-63Year Med. Med. Rel./ Math./Cul. Rest Pol. Sci. Other Total1649 Phys. Dir., tr. 16181650 Phys. Dir., tr. 16181651 Dir. Midwives1651 Phys. Dir., tr. 16181652 Galen's Art1653 Vesling A natomy

l 1653 Phys. Dir., tr. 16501655 Riverius Practice1656 Dir. Midwives1656 C's Ghost1657 Riolan1657 Jonstonus1658 Riverius Pract.I1658 Riverius Pract.I11659 Phys. Dir., tr. 16501661 Eng. Phys. EnL1663 Two TreatisesNote: Numbers in parentheses indicate books mentioned as "in press" or "shortly to be

published." Not counted.


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244 MARY RHINELANDER MCCARLTable 2 shows how Cole advertised Culpeper's works in 16 of Cul-

peper's titles published between 1651 and 1663. It demonstrates clearlythe enormous number of new titles that were attributed to Culpeper afterhis death: 21 titles ranging from Jean Prevost's Medicaments for the Poor,first advertised in the Directoryfor Midwives in 1656 to Ruland's Treatise onBloodletting, advertised as part of the Physician's Library in 1663.

Table2Peter Cole's Advertisements of Culpeper Ztles from 16 ZtlesWritten by or Banslated by Culpeper, 1651-63, Showing the

Great Proliferation after His Death in 1654Title# 51 52 53 53 55 56 56 57 57 58 59 61 63

P G P V R C D R i J o R P E P R uD D P G M Ob DPhys. Dir., 1618 (1)Dir. Midwives(2)Ephem. 1651English Phys. (3)Riverius, Pract.,l7(4)Riolanus, AnatomyVesling, AnatomyPhys. Dir., 1650 (1)Eng. Phys., enl. (3)Dir. Midw., enl. (2)Galen's ArtPartlitz, New MethodCulpeper, RicketsaPrevost, MedicamtsPrevost, Health RichJonstonus, IdeaRiverius, Obs.BartholinusSemertus,l3~ernel ius~Sennertus, Pox, GoutRiverius, All, 34Plater, Pract.5Bks.Plater, Golden PracticeSennertus,ArtSennertus, Scar.Riverius, Pract.,24 (4)300new cures, Folio300new cures, 12".Fernel, Pulses&Urines

X XX XX X X

XX X X X X X X Xx x s X X X X X P L P L

X X X X X X X P L P Lx x x x x x x x x R RX X X X X X X P L P L

X X X X X X X X x P L RX X X X X X X X P L P L

X x x x x X X P L P Lx x X x x x X X P L P LX X X PL PLX X X PL PL

S X X X PL PLS PL PLS PLS PL PLS

X PL PL


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 245Table 2-Continued

Title# 51 52 53 53 55 56 56 57 57 58 59 61 63P G P V R C D R i J o R PEPRuD D P G M Ob DSemertus,Practical1,000 cures, Folio1,000 cures,8'Ruland, BloodlettingPharmacopoeia, Fol.Pharmacopoeia, 12"TotalsCulpeper

Not CulpeperTotal advertisements# Key to works with advertisements: 51PD=1651, Physical Directory, 3d ed. (tr. of1618 ed.); 52G=1652, Galen's Art of Physick; 53PD=1653, Physical Directory (tr.

of 1650 ed.); 53V=1653, Vesling, Anatomy; 55RP=1655, Riverius, Practice;56CG=1656, Mr. Culpeper's Ghost; 56DM=1656, Directory for Midwives;57Ri=1657, Riolanus, Anatomy; 530=1657, Jonstonus, Idea; 58ROb=1658,Riverius, Observations; 59PD=1659, Physical Directory (tr. of 1650 ed.);61EP= 1661, English Physician, enlarged; 63Ru= 1663, Ruland, ' h o Treatises.s "Shortly" or "in press."PL Physician's Library.a Glisson, Rickets, 1st ed. 1651, tr. Phil. Armin; edition first advertised in 1653astranslated and corrected by Culpeper not in Wing.b Fernelius, included in Riverius, Practice.In all of Cole's advertisements, there is no emphasis on astrologicalworks as such. He did advertise Culpeper's 1651 Ephemeris, but al-manacs were used for so many calendrical purposes, that it hardly

counts as an astrological Rather, Cole stuck to a mix of clericalbooks by advocates of Congregationalism and translations of Latinmedical surveys. During his lifetime, all his books were aimed at theI low (two shillings, sixpence to four shillings in 1671), not the lowest endof the market. They were almost all fat octavos, illustrated, if at all, withinferior copperplates.

NATHANIEL BROOKES AS PUBLISHER OF NICHOLAS CULPEPER'S WORKSPublications of Nathaniel Brookes within Culpeper's LifetimeNathaniel Brookes had registered Culpeper's Semiotics Uranica and hisEphemeris for 1652 in 1651. The Ephemeris "Prognosticating the Ruine ofMonarchy throughout Europe" and Catastrophe Magnatum, whichGeorge Thomason bought on the very morning of the eclipse, were part


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246 MARY RHINELANDER M cCARLof the hysterical prognostication of that year. (Peter Cole stayed strictlyaway from this sort of publication.) Brookes only began to publish Cul-peper titles seriously when he became enmeshed in the struggle be-tween Mr. Culpeper and the Ghost: that is, after 1654. Then he chal-lenged Peter Cole-either directly by printing books that attacked Cul-peper in their prefaces, or indirectly by paralleling Culpeper's subjects.Publicationsof Nathaniel Brookes Immediately Following Culpeper's DeathPeter Cole had registered the list of seven serious translations in August1654; Nathaniel Brookes registered Culpeper's Last Legacy and his Astro-logical Judgment of Diseases (an enlarged edition of the Semiotics Uranica)in March 1655; the Last Legacy was ready by May when George Thoma-son acquired his copy. In 1656 Brookes then published the two majorparts, Composita and Febrilia, separately.Because Brookes did not do his own printing, there is no physical evi-dence to prove that he was behind "Culpeper Reviv'd from the Grave"which attacks Peter Cole and the Aurum Potabile. Nonetheless it is star-tling to discover that "Culpeper Reviv'd" was advertised at the back ofBrookes' edition of the translation of Morel'sExpert Doctors Dispensatoyand Jacob ii Brunn's Compendium (1657). The advertisement is in theidentical language as published by Alice Culpeper in the 7'reatise of AurumPotabile and in the 1659 edition of Culpeper's translation of the Phamzaco-poeia. The book by More1 opens with an undated recommendation byCulpeper, almost certainly supplied by Brookes, in which he is made tosay that if he had seen this work sooner, he would have translated it him-self. Presumably this was part of the arrangement with Alice Culpeper toget the advertisement placed at the back of theNathaniel Brookes and the Publishing of Culpeper's Culpepershoolof Physick, 1659In 1659, Nathaniel Brookes published the memorial volume, Culpeper'sSchool of Physick, or, The Experimental Practice of the Whole Art. Wherein are

l Contained All Inward Diseasesfrom the Head to the Foot, With Their Properand Efectual Cures. By this time, Peter Cole was publishing translationsby others of substantial continental medical authors under Culpeper'sname but did not have any more authentic pieces by Culpeper. Thewidow still had the few remaining genuine pieces by Culpeper, and itwas to Brookes that she turned when she wanted a memorial volumepublished. The book consists of 15 short pieces, chiefly "of the HerbaryArt" which are basically astrological and herbal, only the last being al-chemical. The works are negligible in themselves, but the book as awhole has considerable interest for it contains Culpeper's Life and es-says and poems dedicated to his memory. It begins with a testimony byMrs. Alice Culpeper, declaring that "it is a Legitimate Childe of Mr.


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 247Nicholas Culpeper, my deceased husband" dated 15 November 1658.67The preface, by R. W., speaking as the publisher, that is, editor, of thework, is a sympathetic account of Culpeper's practice. He praises itsutility for the unlearned, who need only memorize the precepts within.John Gadbury, who had sprung to Culpeper's defense in 1652, contrib-uted his horoscope. The Life is not signed, but was obviously not writtenby his amanuensis William Ryves as Thulesius suggests.68The authorprovides an important bit of information about the Aurum Potabile: hesays that Culpeper intended to leave his wife "a competent estate,(meaning that he should enrich her with some Secrets of his Practice)which he hath since in the Aurum Potabile, and other rare secret^."^^ Hecalls him "an Astrologer, a Physician, a great searcher into the Secrets ofNature, and a true lover of the Arts"--obviously beginning the tend-ency to treat Culpeper as an actual Physician?O The secretary, Ryves,certified that he had transcribed most of the current book from the pa-pers found in Culpeper's house. Joseph Blagrave, astrologer;E. Cooke,who has not been identified; TIheodore] Sadler, a b~okseller;~~W. Brugis, perhaps related to the writer on surgery Thomas Brugis, allsupplied poems. The most graceful was the last, by E.B., praising Cul-peper for his "Cheap and Charitable Cures."Nathaniel Brookes' Publicationsof Works by Others under Culpeper's NameBrookes, like Peter Cole, succumbed to the temptation to put Culpeper'sname on the title page of works that were not his: in 1660 he publishedArt's Masterpiece, or the Beautifying Part of Physick long since promised by. . .Culpeper, now published by B.T.72Nathaniel Brookes' Publications in Opposition or in Reaction to CulpeperThe second category of books that Brookes published during this periodwere those in direct opposition to Peter Cole's Culpeper titles. In 1656he published the Compleat midwife's practice, which attacked Culpeper

I head on. The book was signed by T.C., I.D., M.S., and T.B.-T.C. beingThomas Chamberlaine. The frontispiece is a portrait of Louise Bour-geois, Midwife to the Queen of France. In the preface, the authors saythat Culpeper used inferior works, originally published in French: "[Iltsalmost a miracle to us that Mr. Culpeper, a man whom we otherwaies re-spect, should descend so low, as to borrow his imperfect Treatise fromthose wretched volumes.. . hat small peice of his, intituled, The direc-tory for Midwifes, is the most desperately defficient of them all, excepthe writ it for necessity he could certainely have never been so sinful1 tohave exposed it to the light."73 The second edition has not survived, butthe third edition, 1663, keeps this severe criticism of Culpeper, while


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248 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLspreading him all over the title page, "A s Also a Guide or Wom en in theirConception, Bearing, and Nursing of Children: From the experience of ourEnglish, Sir Theodore Mayern, Dr. Chamberlain, Mr. Nich. Culpeper.. .W ith a fi r th er Discovery of those Secrets kept close in the Brest of Mr. Nich.Culpeper. . . This peculiar self-canceling edition was still being re-printed in 1698.A variation on the direct attack was to publish books in the same cate-gory as Cole's editions of Culpeper. Brookes used the.physician andherbarist William Coles as a convenient foil. In October 1655, Brookesregistered William Coles, The Ar t of Simpling: A n Introduction to theKnowledge and Gathering of Plant,75written in the tradition of Gerard and

Parkinson and in direct competition with Culpeper's English Physitian;in January 1656 he registered another work by Coles on the same theme:The Anatom y of Plants W it h Their Signatures, or The Countrymans Physical1Garden of Health. In 1657 he published Adam in Eden: or, Natures Para-d i ~ e . ~ ~n a direct echo of Culpeper, the book was arranged so that itsreaders might concoct plant remedies "best agreeing with our Englishbodies."

Nathaniel Brookes covered one market that Peter Cole neglected. Heregistered a series of books aimed at gentlewomen who ran large house-holds in the countryside. In 1657 he registered the Duchess of Lennox'sCabinet Receipts of phisicke and chirurgery, preserving and cookery and SirKenelm Digby's Choice receipts divided into two parts, &, first of phisickeand chirurgery, ye second of cookery &. In September 1658, he registeredAlbertus Magnus his cure of Deseases that are most incident to women, and inNovember of the same year The compleat Doctresse, or a choice treatise ofall deseases incident to women. Unlike Culpeper's Directo ry, they were notaimed simply at midwives.

Brookes also dealt in practical books for medical students and practi-tioners. In May 1656, he registered Schola Medica, or the Institutions ofPhisicke translated from Frambasanus; in May 1657, Ravenstein's Lexi-1 con medicum Graeco-Latinum. Both of these books filled in gaps in PeterCole's collections.Before Brookes became involved in the squabble over Culpeper'sposthumous works, he had published two of his astrological works.Unlike Cole, who never printed alchemical treatises, Brookes published

a good deal of both astrological and alchemical interest.InOctober 1655he registered three astrological/chymical/mystical works: Majerus'Themis Aurea . . awes of thefiaternity of the Holy crosse and MyrotheciumSpagyricum, or a chimicall dispensatory by Faber, both translated byThomas Hodges, and Elixir vitae or Quintessentia Quintessentiae by theEnglish Samuel Boulton. In April 1656, he registered another work by


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper 249Boulton, Medicina magica tamen physica, and in 1660, he registeredRobert Turner's Art of Divination by Geomancie. These alchemical workswent far beyond anything Culpeper ever wrote.

An Analysis of Nathaniel Brookes' Book AdvertisementsAs we have seen, Brookes did not use Culpeper's titles to build a sys-tematic medical library, but he did make use of most of them to adver-tise his publications. Beginning with his first Culpeper title, the 1651Semiotica Uranica, which listed 32 books," of which one was alchemical,five astrological, and four mathematical, we can see a pattern emerging.The first four books on the list were on practical mathematics and sur-veying, the fifth was the 1649 sermon given before the Society of Astrol-ogers by Robert Ge11;78 the sixth and seventh were Sir ChristopherHeydon's Astrological Discourse, finally put into print after 50 years,and Hardick Warren's Magick and Astrologie Vindicated. Brookes wasstressing astrology as a respectable discipline. In 1655, when he pub-lished a revised edition of the Semiotica as Culpeper's Astrological Judg-ment of Diseases, of the total of 55 books advertised, 2 were alchemicaland 14 astrological, counting Culpeper's 4 astrological and 1 medical/astrological. Culpeper's works were quite far down on the list: twelfth,thirteenth, fourteenth, and then Brookes skipped to advertise the twonewest works in the two last places. The featured authors include EliasAshmole, George Wharton, and Sir Christopher Heydon. The 1656 edi-tion of the Last Legacy contained the most elaborate book list: 81 titles, ofwhich 3 were alchemical, 13 (including 3 by Culpeper) were astrologi-cal, 3 mathematical, 2 occult, 1Rosicrucian, and 9 medical (including 2astrological/medical by Culpeper). Here again, Culpeper's works aretenth, eleventh, twelfth, fifty-second, and fifty-third. Four years afterthe fact, Brookes still advertised the 1652 Ephemeris and CatastropheMagnatum. Only in the 1659 edition of Culpeper's School ofphysick, doeshe put Culpeper first: the Semiotica Uranica and Morel's Expert Doctor's

l Dispensatory head the list, which includes the Compleat Midwife's Prac-tice.

The Restoration did not make as much of a difference to Brookes as ithad to Peter Cole. His most elaborate list was in the 1663 "self-cancel-ing" edition of the Compleat Midwife's Practice. There were altogether147books in the list; the first 89 divided into categories: divinity; occultsciences; mathematics; physick, chirurgery, cooking, and preserving,and the humanities. Culpeper's Catastrophe Magnatum is still among the21 books on the occult; the section is dominated by 9 works by WilliamLilly. There are 10 books in the medical section: Culpeper's SemioticaUranica and his Last Legacy are the first two; Morel's Expert Doctor'sDispensatory "with a Preface of Mr.Nich. Culpeper's . . . in its commen-


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250 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLdation" is ninth. This was obviously Brookes' standard list; the remain-ing "lately printed" books include Culpeper's School of Physick. In 1671Brookes published an edition of the Last Legacy, in octavo, with a listthat quoted the prices of books for sale.79This ist had 41books, 3practi-cal mathematical titles, 2books on cooking, 1book on natural history,9medical works (including 2 medical/astrological titles by Culpeper),and 1 on astrology. The Culpeper titles are twelfth and thirteenth. Onlyin the 1659 edition of the School of Physick does Culpeper head the list inhis own titles.Culpeper was simply not a very important author to NathanielBrookes. That is one conclusion to be drawn from these lists; the other isthat Culpeper fitted into the niche of "occult" books, better than into themedical category.COLE'S AND BROOKES' MARKET FOR CULPEPER'SWORKSPeter Cole saturated the medical market with works under the name ofNicholas Culpeper. His primary market was for male practitioners, in thecountry towns and with the armies and navies of the period. The marketamong apothecaries and surgeons is obvious. There were no require-ments to master Latin as part of their training. The apothecaries and lesssophisticated physicians bought the Dispmtory for the official, legalcures and the English Physitian for the unofficial, herbal remedies. The sur-geons acquired Vesling's, Riolan's, and Bartholinus' Anatomies.Country clergymen were another target. In the confusion of the CivilWar period, when both Royalists and Parliamentarianswere dismissingclergymen from their livings, they turned officially or unofficially tomedicine. The system of medical licensure in the country, which hadbeen in the hands of the bishops, broke down during the Civil War-thefew physicians joined the armies-and many clergymen, whose educa-tion had been much like that of the physicians, were happy to try to fill

l the gap. They were delighted to have substantial surveys of currentmedical practice. The works of Jean Prevost, particularly Medicamentsfor the Poor, and the works of Lazare Riviere were practical works. Thetranslations of the works of men such as Johann Jonstonus, who sum-marized the academic medicine of his day, enabled those without for-mal training to grasp the outline of formal academic medicine. Colechose his titles shrewdly to appeal to people who dealt with the myriadmedical problems of the inhabitants of the countryside.Cole tapped into a large market among women for Culpeper's books,but it is extremely difficult to quantify because of the lack of reliable sta-tistics on female litera~y.~here is no doubt that the ability to readprinted matter was much higher than the ability to write. This was be-cause the two were taught separately: reading from the age of about


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Publishing the Worksof Nicholas Culpeper 25 1seven, writing from the age of about 11.Kenneth Lockridge, countingsignatures of New Englanders on wills, showed that in 1660,70 percentof adult women were unable to write their names.B1There is no way,however, to ascertain the number who could read.

Certainly there was enough of a market among the midwives forPeter Cole to set Culpeper to work on his Directory. Although there islittle extant evidence from seventeenth-century England, we have thediary of Martha Ballard, who practised in Maine for more than 30 yearsat the turn of the eighteenth century. Three quarters of the herbs thatshe grew, harvested, and made into medicines were herbs advocated byNicholas C~lpeper.~*here were surely others of comparatively

/ humble station who were able to read and profit by Culpeper's works.There has been no systematic research on the survival of Culpeper'sworks in gentry households. It would involve a massive survey of pro-

bate inventories, as well as the examination of surviving copies forprovenance evidence. From private journals and autobiographies suchas that of Lady Grace Mildmay (who died before Culpeper published),we know that women of the gentry and nobility were capable of goingwell beyond the simple nursing that was expected of every woman.Lady Mildmay was familiar with the medical authorities who wrote inLatin, composed her own medicines, and prescribed from a distance inthe same way as professional physicians. Yet it was a personal eccentric-ity of Lady Mildmay to have become such an expert. Her daughtermade a stab at organizing her papers, but did not follow her example,for there was no prescribed educational route for any woman who de-sired professional trainingB3

Peter Cole did not tailor his advertisements to this market. NathanielBrookes aimed at it directly, but did not pretend that the works that hepublished had any connection to Culpeper, who was too much of a so-cial radical to appeal to gentry women as a source of information.Brookes published four works in the years 1657 and 1658 for gentry

, women who were health providers. The Duchess of Lemox's CabinetReceipts and Sir Kenelm Digby's Choice Receipts were of general interest;Albertus Magnus his cure of Deseases most incident to women and The com-pleat Doctresse addressed specific female needs. These books were em-pirical compendia of mostly herbal mixtures in the immemorial style ofthe household receipt book.Culpeper's English Physitian, which proceeded from a theory of astro-logical medicine, was an improvement on empiricism. The inexpen-siveness of the remedies and their widespread availability must havebeen irresistible in a time of social dislocation and sudden poverty. Yetthe only published evidence of Culpeper's works passing from motherto daughter is from eighteenth-century New England.B4


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252 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLTHE INHERITORS OF COLE'S A ND BROOKES' TITLES:STRWTER, SAWBRIDGE, AN D BLAGRAVEPeter Cole hanged himself in his warehouse on 4 December 1665. Hisnephew, Edward, never put his name independently on a book, andCole's titles moved to John Streater, who printed some of the Culpeperfor himself, and occasionally for George Sawbridge. On 10 November1673, Streater sold the useful titles to George Sawbridge: the Pharrnaco-poeia and the Dispensatorium in Latin, Culpeper's translation of the Lon-don Dispensatory, the Directory for Midwives, the English Physician En-larged, two treatises of fevers and rickets,85Rivi&rers ractice in 17books,Rivi&relsObservations, Riolanus Anatomy, Sennertus Works, BartholinAnatomy, [Prevost] Medicaments for the Poor, and Plater in 5 books. Be-tween them, Streater and S a ~ b r i d g e ~ ~rought out five editions of theEnglish Physician Enlarged, three of the Pharmacopoeia, four of the Direc-t o y for Midwives (with from 1671 on, a second part, published twice),two of the Rivi&rePractice and Obseruations, and one each of Vesling'sAnatomy and Prevost's Medicaments for the Poor. The astrological andcontroversial works have disappeared along with the mdifferentiatedThree Hundred Cures, Seven Hundred Cures, One Thousand Cures: but bythis time no one knew exactly what Culpeper had written.

Nicholas Culpeper had become old-fashioned by the 1 6 6 0 ~ ~oth inhis medicine and in his politics. The political prefaces pulsating withpassionate interest in raising the dignity of the common people of Eng-land were quietly dropped. With them gone, his medicine, both his ownand in his translations, was shown to be extremely out of date. This canbe seen in the Printer's Preface to Culpeper's translation of Riverius'Practice of Physick, published in 1668 by John Streater and GeorgeSawbridge. The frontispiece portrait was of four men: Riverius, Cul-peper, Abdiah Cole, and Fernelius.In his preface the printer said that hesaw the primary market for the book among the poor and the badlytrained surgeons who cared for soldiers and sailors. He cqntinued

l rather doubtfully hat physicians might want to keep it on hand to lendto their gentry patients who would then read it, diagnose themselves,and then turn back to the physicians to cure them. Sawbridge's bookadvertisements sandwiched Culpeper in among Van Helmont andtreatises on the Philosopher's Stone. Whereas Culpeper had once beenproud to learn from and teach the common people to care for them-selves, George Sawbridge trivialized them and their troubles.In 1674 Obadiah Blagrave, a former apprentice who had taken oversome of Nathaniel Brookes' titles, printed his uncle Joseph Blagrave'sSupplement to the English Physitian,8' explaining in his "Address to theReader" that it was printed in octavo, the exact size as the new [Saw-bridge's] edition of the English Physitian. It not only treats of English


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Publishing the W orks of Nicholas Culpeper 253plants omitted by Culpeper, but plant material "found in any part of theworld and bought to be sold in our druggists and apothecaries shops."There is an irony here, in that Culpeper had written his English Physitianto deliberately omit all exotic imported ingredients. His point had beento treat only of plant material that grew in England and was free for thegatheringa8Blagrave's name is on copies of the Last Legacy four times. In 1678,with partners, he published an elaborate folio edition of Culpeper'sSchool of Physick. In the engraved portrait, Culpeper, within a laurelwreath surmounted with his crest, wearing doctor's robes, has his righthand on a skull, with an astrological paper in the foreground and aglobe in the background. Here again, the friend of the common people,famed for his "cheap and charitable cures" has been transformed.For practical purposes, after 1675, Culpeper's name became identi-fied with undifferentiated collections of herbal cures at the low end ofthe market. Awnsham and John Churchill published the Pharmacopoeiain 1695 and the English Physitian Enlarged in 1698, aiming at the countryand colonial trade, and in the early eighteenth century these were pub-lished in Boston; but more common were titles such as Culpeper's Faith-ful Physician by Dr. [Lancelotl Coe1song9and Culpeper's Physical Receipts,printed for Thomas Howkins in 1690. The only copy, at the British Li-brary, is incomplete, but it contains nothing originally by Culpeper. Itconsists of improbable mixtures said to effect still more improbablecures.CONCLUSIONThis study is a cautionary tale for students of seventeenth-centurypop-ular medicine. It has demonstrated how booksellers, particularly PeterCole, capitalized on Culpeper's reputation to attribute to him numerousworks that he did not write. His public image was exploited and manip-

, ulated by the booksellers, and the publication history of his swen-teenth-century editions was largely their creation.Publishing history is a relatively new field that provides the tools nec-essary for this kind of investigation. As this study has shown, by usingthree readily available sources-the Short-Title Catalogues, the Registersof the Stationers' Company, and the catalogue of the Thomason Tracts-in conjunction with microfilms of the actual books, a great deal of evi-dence about seventeenth-century publishing practices can be gleanedby a researcher armed with little more than curiosity and patience. Inparticular, although it has been confined to a minute examination ofworks attributed to Nicholas Culpeper, this study has larger implica-tions beyond untangling Culpeper's authorship. It makes clear that anyresearcher must be very cautious in naming authors and drawing con-


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254 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLclusions from their works during the seventeenth century, particularlyin studies of practical works, such as medical titles. A new definition of"authorship" may be needed to cover such cases, which were probablynot uncommon.From the point of view of general intellectual history, this investiga-tion shows how works coming out of radical circles during the CivilWar period fared during the Restoration. Astrological predictions of thefall of monarchies, such as Catastrophe Magnatum, were dropped en-tirely. Works that required the approbation of elites, such as the transla-tion of the Pharmacopoeia, had their introductory material completely re-written. Works of general appeal to the great self-doctoringpublic, suchas the English Physitian, moved down the social scale of publishing andbecame immortal.From the point of view of the history of medical publishing in partic-ular, this study shows how shrewd entrepreneurs covered the marketfor medical works in the vernacular. Peter Cole and Nathaniel Brookesbetween them published medical works that appealed to the wholerange of professionals from the elite physicians to humble apothecariesand midwives, as well as the enormous number of amateur healers.This article covers only the first 50 years of publishing history forNicholas Culpeper's books, and therefore leaves many topics and rela-tionships to be explored. A census of surviving copies of Culpeper'sworks, with notes on provenance, is of the first importance.An analysisof changes in the text and prefatory mafter of eighteenth-, nineteenth-,and twentiethcentury editions forms the next phase of my own re-search into Culpeper's books, for only then can one begin to answerquestions about non-elite medicine and self-education. In Americanmedical history, for example, a possible question to be explored is therelationship between Culpeper's works and the writings of the Thom-s ~ n i a n s ; ~n English medical history, the question of where EbenezerSibly, author of an early nineteenth-century illustrated edition of the

l English Physitian (as Culpeper's Herbal), got his added material would in-volve a study of Rosicrucianism and Masonry. In short, in addition totheir publishing history, the books of Nicholas Culpeper themselves de-serve careful study.NOTES

1 There are two different works under the same title currently in print: Culpeper's Com-plete Herbal: A Book of Natural Remedies for Ancient Ills (Ware, Herefordshire: Words-worth Editions,1995)is a reprint of the English Physitian Enlarged, Culpeper's transla-tion of the College of Physicians 1618Pharmacopoeia and selections from hisLast Leg-acy. The plants in the herbal are arranged alphabetically from Amara Dulcis to Yarrow.Culpeper's Complete Herbal: Consisting of a Comprelwnsive Description of Nearly AllHerbs . . . (London: W. Foulsham, [n.d.]) is a photoreproduction of an unidentified


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Publishing the Works of Nicholas C ulpeper 255nineteenth-century edition of the Herbal, that does not depend directly on Culpeper'soriginaland is arranged from Aconite to Yucca.2 Culpeper used the spellingPhysitinn n all his authentic editions.3 This study is based on surveys of medical titles--broadly considered-from the fol-lowing three lists: the second edition of Wing's Short-title Catalogue of Bwks Printed1641-1700, the Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Bwks, Newspapers, and Manuscripts. ..Col-lected by George Thomason, 1640-1661, and The Registers of the Company of Stationers,1640-1708, edited by Eyre and Rivington. The Wing STC is not searchable by subject;the Thomason Tracts have a subject index that is an artifact of late nineteenth-centuryattitudes towards the historv of science and medicine: the Re~isters f the Stationers'Company are not indexed a; all. Books and pamphlets conce&ing the following sub-iects in the Thomason Tracts were considered to be germane: medical works, including$urgev (102), midwives (4), alchemy (5), chemis'try (2), botany (2), astrology ( 43 iastronomy (6), almanacs (58), and prophecies (40).The Appendix, "Culpeper and the Authors He Translated Chronologically Ar-ranged, 1649-1700," contains publishing information obtained from the books them-selves, from the records of the Stationers' Company, from Thomason's annotations,from contemporary newsletters, and from the prefaces of contemporary works thatmention Culpeper.The great majority of the material was consulted in microfilm. Copies of Culpeper'sworks at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and at McGill University have beenpersonally examined.4 Still the best discussion of publishing from an administrative point of view is W. W.Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1956). Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers' Company: A History, 1403-1959 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960) is the standard history. Most ofthe records of the company have been published in microfiche by Chadwyck-Healey;however, this article is largely based on the edited registers of the Company (Eyre andRivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Sfationers;From 1640-1708A.D. [orig. ed. 1913, repr. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967). Blag-den ("The Stationers' Company in the Civil War Period," The Library, 5th ser., 13[1958]: 1-17)concentrateson the period under discussion.5 Five booksellers published most of the material by or about Nicholas Culpeper in theseventeenth century: Peter Cole, 1649-65, 64 titles; Nathaniel Brookes, 1649-76, 16;John Streater, 1666-81,17; George/Hannah Sawbridge, 1666-84,24; and Obadiah Bla-grave, 1668-83,5. The total number of titles by these publishers: 126, by other publish-ers: 32. The total of Culpeper editions is 158.6 The others reprinted these works: Sawbridge and Streater took over Cole's titles,Blagrave took over Brookes' titles.7 There is no notice of his matriculation at Cambridge, but Culpeper claimed to have

I spent time at the university and this is accepted by his contemporaries, whether sup-portive or hostile. His grandfather had studied at Peterhouse, his father at Queen's(Olav Thulesius, Nicholas Culpeper: English Physician and Astrologer [New York: St.Martin's Press, 19921, p. 89, n. 1).8 Heydon did not sign any of the prefatory material in the book, but Nathaniel Brookeslisted him as "publisher" when he registered it with the Stationers' Company 25 Sep-tember 1658 (Eyre and Rivington, Transcript, vol. 2, p. 199). According to the life ofHeydon in the Dictionary of National Biography, Heydon married Alice Culpeper on4 August 1656, but in "The Life of John Heydon" by Frederick Talbot, Esq., dated3 March 1662/3, and prefaced to Heydon's Elhavarevna (1665), "And many courtedhim to Marry but he denyed, now there was left (amongst a few old Alrnanacks, andscraps of other mens wit) Collected and bequeathed unto the world by Nic. Culpe (ashis own admired experience) old Alice Culpeper his widdow, the hearing of thisGentleman (that he was heir to a great estate. ..Courts him by letters of Love, to nopurpose, the next Saint in order was she that calls her self the German Princess. But he


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256 MARY RHINELANDER McCARLflies high and scorns such fowl great beasts, the first of these two blessed birds in herlife time caused oneHeath to arrest him.. . "Elias Ashmole, the famous virtuoso, on 16April 1658,had just finished writing thepreface of his edition of The Way to Bliss, a sixteenth-century treatise on the philoso-phers' s

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M Rhinelander McCarl: Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper