Aims
Time and funding permitting, the Casebooks Project aims to provide the following:
freely accessible, electronically searchable transcriptions of the client and consultation details recorded in the surviving notebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier. These include clients’ names, ages and sometimes addresses, dates of consultation and questions asked
information about the presence or absence of other material in each entry, such as charts, judgments, proposed treatments, outcomes, details of financial transactions
archival details about each entry (on which page of which volume it appears and whereabouts on that page)
the facility to search the entire corpus simultaneously
the facility to limit searches according to criteria of the user’s choice, e.g. date range, topic of enquiry (disease, pregnancy, witchcraft, marital relations etc.), querent’s age or sex, and so forth
the ability to generate tabular CSV (comma separated values) displays of the metadata for detailed quantitative analysis, again organised according to criteria of the user’s choice
the option of browsing the entries in the sequence in which they were originally written
the ability to view the transcriptions in either ‘normalised’ versions (with deletions suppressed, abbreviations expanded, errors corrected, etc.) or ‘diplomatic’ versions (fully representing all textual features of the original document)
the facility to track individuals through the records, even if they are referred to by different names in different entries, and without confusing different individuals who happen to have the same name
statistical outputs quantifying and correlating data about the ages, genders, places of residence of the thousands of people who consulted Forman and Napier, the majority of whom are otherwise completely lost to historical record
the facility to locate individuals within families, households or other associations
the option to view the files in XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) format for online use or to download them in PDF (print document format) for offline consultation and/or printing
glosses to explain astrological symbols and opaque, idiosyncratic or obsolete terms and usages
translations of non-English material
bitonal facsimile images of each page of a representative sample of the original volumes
linkage of each transcribed file to the image of its original, if available
supplementary material including an introduction to the casebooks, guides to the use of astrology in Renaissance medicine, and advice about using this material for scholarly and pedagogical purposes
transcriptions of some of Forman’s own previously unpublished guides to astrological practice
