About the Author

Benjamin Woolley is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He is the author of the best-selling The Queen's Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr John Dee. His first book, Virtual Worlds was short-listed for the Rhone-Poulenc prize and has been translated into eight languages. His second, The Bride of Science, examined the life of Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter. He has written and presented for the BBC's The Late Show, including programmes on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and the architecture of Tokyo. He has won the Arts Journalist of the Year award and an Emmy for his commentary for Discovery's 'Three Minutes to Impact'. He lives in London.

Reviews

'This is a London story, one of grubby back streets, of mass hysteria, of religious bigotry, of a quarter of a million people living out the world of Apocalypse Now. Never before have I felt the kinship between the London of the English Civil War and revolutionary Paris so strongly... This is a wonderful book - a delight to read, fast-moving, informed and passionate in its advocacy. It is a vivid and compelling portrait of the world turned upside down, of people-power run riot, of a great city dissolving into chaos, a place where the irrational had become the norm as ordinary people responded to Lilly and Culpeper's prophecies and prognostications.' Roy Strong, Sunday Times'Taking medicine as a lens on English society at a critical fulcrum between the medieval and the modern, it reveals some of the muddled half- steps by which political thought, science and the understanding of the human body have stumbled towards their modern condition. The research is superb -- rich, detailed, and original -- and the lives Benjamin Woolley describes are as passionate as the great events of the English Civil War around which they orbit.' Adam Nicolson'A fascinating, brilliant account of the Renaissance world picture...' Kathryn Hughes, New Statesman'Woolley handsomely captures a society torn between rationality and romance, cynicism and hero worship'. New Scientist'An informative and enlightening book... immensely enjoyable, its narrative exciting and inexorable. I have not read as stimulating a study of the Elizabethan period since Charles Nicholl's book on Marlowe, The Reckoning'. Thomas Wright, Daily Telegraph