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In the unlikely event that the makers of Big Brother turn to history publishing, their ideal submission might include the ingredients of The Sorcerer's Tale: an aristocratic nincompoop unhappily married and desperate for cash; a Hampshire bigwig bridled, saddled and ridden round his garden by a witch intent on burglary; cut-price brothels; magic rings; sorcerer's incantations; card-sharps and loaded dice; and a gruesome cure for syphilis. Alec Ryrie's account of England's 16th-century underworld is a rogues' gallery that foreshadows the sexual exhibitionism and wilful self-promotion of modern reality television. Unlike reality television, Ryrie's is not an exercise in voyeurism. The sorcerer of the title is Gregory Wisdom, a second-generation London painter who was somehow admitted to the Royal College of Physicians. He practised a rudimentary form of medicine and, more covertly, a rudimentary form of magic. But his chief accomplishment was as a swindler. The Sorcerer's Tale is not a biography. Wisdom provides the book's impetus and inspiration, but he is not fixed at centre stage. Ryrie's story is as much about Wisdom's victim, Henry, Lord Neville, heir of the earl of Westmoreland, who, in September 1546, was accused of conspiring to murder both his wife and his father. Both, he claimed, would shortly die. All he asked in return was hard cash. Until the final spell, when Neville's conscience pricked him, the credulous nobleman was a willing co-conspirator. Neville's confession is the fullest surviving account of any aspect of Wisdom's life. In the absence of sufficient material to write a full-scale life of Wisdom, Ryrie sets the incident in its philosophical, intellectual, cultural and religious contexts. Catholic/Protestant tensions are glimpsed through a prism of magic and astrology, showing how clergymen demonised the occult as an adjunct to whichever religion they opposed. Ryrie exposes the fatuousness of Tudor medics. Preoccupied with professional status, they insisted on distinctions between the roles of physician, surgeon and quack when all were powerless against a new plague - syphilis - which none understood. If the reader regrets Wisdom's absence from much of the book, those regrets do not appear to be shared by the author, with the result that this fascinating insight into a lost and lurid world is at heart a slightly chilly affair. Such detachment would surely have commanded the respect of Gregory Wisdom. This is cache, read story here
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