Illuminating Treasures

The University of Cambridge has provided online, samples of thousands of charts with notes from the practices of two astrologers working in the time of Shakespeare: Richard Napier and Simon Forman. The charts and their notations make for a month's worth of interesting reading if you have any inclination toward morbidly obscure history (come on, I know that you do).

Nicholas Culpeper, Dr. Diligence

With a powerful Venus-Uranus combination he was unconventional and impulsive and had moments of beautiful revelation, perhaps even periods of real epiphany. Culpeper would die young, but first he would write 79 books and translations that catalogued hundreds of plants and their medicinal properties.