In the late 1740s, Samuel Meadwell arrived in London. A “raw country fellow” from Northamptonshire, he had come to work as a distiller’s apprentice and hoped to make his fortune.

When a pair of women told him there was “something very particular in [his] face”, he was intrigued. They introduced him to a widow called Mary Smith, who allegedly practised “the art of astrology, before very great people, princes, and the like”. She persuaded Meadwell to wrap all his money in a handkerchief with two peppercorns, some salt and a little mould. After waiting three hours, she explained, he would discover a great fortune.

Meadwell discovered only that his money had been replaced with scraps of metal. Smith was deported for fraud, while Meadwell learned a lesson about city life. He bemoaned his naivety – but he was not alone in believing in the power of astrologers, or the potential for magical methods to reveal weighty secrets.

In early modern Britain (1500-1750), divination was widespread. People consulted diviners to find stolen goods, learn about the next harvest, or scrutinise their marriage fortunes. Sometimes they wanted to know what diseases or disasters loomed, and several nobles exhibited an unwholesome interest in the monarch’s date of demise.

The sex of unborn children was another topic of speculation: when Anne Boleyn gave birth to the future Elizabeth I in 1533, she disappointed not only Henry VIII, but also a whole........

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