William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681

Wade Caves is an excellent teacher for the School of Traditional Astrology (STA) and, in the role of editor for this 300th anniversary edition, is an excellent commentator on Lilly's biography. A 'must read' for students of traditional/hellenistic astrology. I enjoyed it so much that I have purchased another copy to gift to a friend.

Good clean copy arrived in good time well worth it thanks

My favourite astrology of all time book so far, although I haven't quite finished it yet

This is required reading if you are doing Sue Ward's horary diploma course, but it makes fascinating reading anyway - Mr Lilly got up to quite a lot in his lifetime!

Very nice book. I've been studying from his book Traditional astrology and wanted to learn more about Lilly's life. Very happy with this purchase.

Great book!

This is a pretty light but interesting primary source, written by the greatest astrologer of his day, William Lilly. It's very definitely an autobiography meant for public consumption, even though it is ostensibly written to Lilly's great friend Elias Ashmole.As such it's more about his life story as a whole and his triumphs and adversities, which amount mostly to lawsuits and disputes and questioning by the various authorities about either the godliness of his Art, or the contents of his predictions, which sometimes offended or worried; the more so when he was right, as he was believed to have been about the Great Plague and the Great Fire.As compared to Pepys, whose Diary was for himself and his own amusement, Lilly's tale is pretty staid, although there are a few off color bits. It's amazing, however, how he goes from very modern sounding astrological consultations such as who will I marry to more magical sounding questions like where is the treasure to serious prognostications like when should Parliament's forces march, or on what day should the King plan his escape, all of which he was asked.Toward the end there are even matter-fact sections about having summoned and been instructed by Angels and Mab, the Queen of the Fairies, and how terrifying it was to some who were not ready for it, that they as she began to draw near in a whirlwind, they were overcome with fear and made him stop the summoning. Lilly seems to be highly amused by this.It's maybe not the most detailed or useful historical document, as it's clearly a public-relations piece. And yet, if you're researching Restoration-era astrology, it's an extremely useful portrait of a practitioner, his education, and his life.As a free Kindle Book, it's got the usual issues; some formatting problems (footnotes undistinguised from regular text, in the middle of pages) and the odd OCR problem. Honestly, however, it's a FREE Kindle book. If you had to read the original 400+ year old book in the original typesetting fonts, spellings, f for s, and so on, it's be considerably more difficult. And expensive, outside of a library.I do wish it were annotated, however. I'd pay good money for an edition annotated by an expert. I've read a lot of this kind of thing, yet I am sure there's plenty more I could have learned reading along behind a real expert...

Gives clear description of the way 15th & 16th century sudoscientist looked at life and politics in English history, I enjoyed the book very much. Others may not share my opinion. In the same type of booksl enjoyed Samuel Peppyss Diarys. Steve Routh

The Kindle version is not the version with Wade Caves's introduction or annotation. It's a fine transfer of the original text, but it's not the version of the paperback the kindle version is grouped with.