John Dee: The World of the Elizabethan Magus

Peter J. French

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134572342
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies

First published in 1987. John Dee was Renaissance England's first Hermetic magus, a philosopher magician. He was also a respected practical scientist, an immensely learned man who investigated all areas of knowledge. In this fine biography, Peter French shows that not only magic and science, but geography, antiquarianism, theology and the fine arts were fields in which Dee was deeply involved. Through his teaching, writing and friendships with many of the most important figures of the age, Dee was at the centre of great affairs and had a profound influence on major developments in sixteenth-century England. Peter French places this extraordinary individual within his proper historical context, describing the whole world of Renaissance science, Platonism and Hermetic magic.

John Dee’s Reputation

John Aubrey’s brief estimation of John Dee as ‘one of the ornaments of his Age’ may be as fair as any that has so far been made. Although Dee was a major intellectual force in Elizabethan England, many of his contemporaries – the ‘Ignorant’ Aubrey termed them – branded him a conjurer.⁴ Posterity has not been any kinder than his less learned contemporaries. Because of Dee’s interest in occult philosophy and because of the controversy surrounding his rather remarkable life, many erroneous notions developed about him and his activities, and these have frequently been embellished to the point of absurdity in successive centuries.

Opinions about Dee varied during his own lifetime. Most erudite scholars on the Continent and in England respected him as a learned man and a dependable source of information. So, also, did the English mechanicians, those self-educated and middle-class craftsmen and technologists who flourished in Elizabethan London. In court circles Dee enjoyed almost universal esteem, though, as Aubrey suggests, the commonalty feared him as a sorcerer and a necromancer, a black magician left over from the medieval past.

Dee’s fame among Continental circles spread from Louvain where he went to study in 1548; noblemen from the court of Charles V (then at Brussels) and scholars from as far away as Bohemia and Denmark came there to discuss philosophy and science with him. They arrived, he informs us, with ‘strange and no vulgar opinion’ of his skills in the various arts and sciences.⁵ In 1550, shortly after his stay at Louvain, Dee was prevailed upon to give lectures on Euclid at the University of Paris. These caused a sensation.⁶ He had previously begun a fruitful intercourse with Ortelius, Mercator and other important Dutch scholars that was to last through much of his lifetime and was to exert a profound influence upon English navigation.⁷ Only twenty-three years old in 1550, Dee was already respected on the Continent, and his reputation continued to grow.⁸ The admiration for him throughout Europe eventually resulted in the Russian emperor offering him a large annuity to take up residence at his court, saying that he had ‘certain knowledge of his great learning and wisdome’.⁹ This was only one of many offers from foreign kings and emperors (including Charles V) that Dee received, and refused, during his lifetime.

Among scholars and mechanicians in England, Dee was known primarily as a mathematician (which, in the opinion of Dee and his colleagues, was synonymous with philosopher). Mathematics was still suspected of being one of the black arts, however, and to ordinary people it was a frightfully dangerous study. It had barely begun to develop into the science we know today; even ordinary symbols such as the plus, minus and equal signs were only beginning to be used.

Nevertheless, many of Dee’s contemporaries fully recognized his solid and important contributions to the mathematical sciences. One, Richard Forster, claims that it was only through Dee’s efforts that the mathematical disciplines were reborn in England, and Forster also says, ‘Unless he re-interposes his Atlas-like shoulders, all [the mathematical disciplines] with the heavens of Copernicus and Rheinholdt will fall to ruin.’¹⁰ Edward Worsop, a self-educated mechanician, writes that Dee is ‘accounted of the learned mathematicians throughout Europe ye prince of Mathematicians of this age: as Cicero named Cratippus ye prince of Philosophers in his age’.¹¹ These are only two of the numerous testaments made to Dee’s immense learning by his countrymen. Although he was most widely known to his fellow scholars as a mathematician and philosopher, he was also respected as a geographer, antiquarian, mechanician, teacher and theologian. Dee was indeed, as George Gascoigne claims, ‘a great learned man’.¹²

John Dee’s generally favourable reputation in English court circles seems to have developed early, continued through change of monarchs, and prevailed regardless of court factions. Except for the brief period from June to August of 1555 when he was in prison under Mary after a false accusation of ‘lewde vayne practices of caculing and conjuring’ to enchant the Queen, Dee was welcome at court.¹³ After Elizabeth’s coronation in 1558, he was often there, and Richard Harvey writes that it was ‘M. Dee, whome hir majestie vouchsafeth the name of hyr philosopher’.¹⁴ The courtiers also respected Dee. He could count among his friends and patrons Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton, and even the sober Lord Burghley. The list could be enlarged.

Dee’s services at court were many and varied. As court astrologer, he selected the most propitious day for Elizabeth’s coronation. And once, when an image of the Queen with a pin stuck in its heart was found in Lincoln’s Inn fields, a thoroughly alarmed Privy-Council asked Dee to counteract any harm intended against her.¹⁵ It was not only his magic which the court used: John Dee was frequently consulted before voyages of exploration, about affairs of state (particularly those requiring antiquarian knowledge), and on scientific matters. In 1583, he was given the task of reforming the Julian calendar for Britain. His work was widely admired, and the Queen went so far as to approve the draft of a proclamation implementing Dee’s suggested reforms; but the bishops objected for religious reasons, and the intended improvements were not made.¹⁶

Queen Elizabeth was fond of her philosopher. Time and again she exhorted him to attend court more frequently. She sent him gifts of money and promised him livings. It was not until 1596, however, that he was finally granted the Wardenship of Christ’s College, Manchester.¹⁷ Elizabeth undoubtedly procrastinated in giving Dee a living because she astutely realized that finding him a suitable position would be a delicate task in view of his reputation as a conjurer; and when he did take over at Christ’s College, he encountered only hostility because of his notoriety.¹⁸

The most valuable gift the Queen bestowed on Dee came early in his career when, he writes, she ‘promised unto me great security against any of her kingdome, that would by reason of any my rare studies and philosophicall exercises, unduly seeke my overthrow’.¹⁹ This promise was especially important to Dee because he seemed odd and out of place in Reformation England. His Hermetic philosophy with its theological, magical and scientific ramifications ran counter to the officially sponsored humanist education provided at the universities. As we shall see, he would not have appeared so strange in one of the mystical academies that flourished in Italy and France under the aegis of powerful patrons, but the academic movement had not developed in England and John Dee was therefore a lonely and a suspect figure.

It was fortunate that Elizabeth was so farsighted in granting her philosopher protection because common opinion deemed him a sorcerer. Although he poured out his learning freely in private conferences and correspondence, John Dee published few books. Consequently, the exact nature of his various studies was not public knowledge, and the details of his life, for which his considerable fame had created demand, were often provided by people with ill-informed and, not infrequently, malicious opinions. It is easy to understand why the public thought of Dee as a sorcerer. After all, he was a magus and mathematician and admittedly performed ‘marveilous Actes and Feates’ that popular opinion ascribed to diabolic powers, even though they were ‘Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically, wrought and contrived’.²⁰ The ordinary man could hardly be expected to admire what he did not fully understand.

Among those who understood Dee’s role as a magus were some who praised his art openly, and thus contributed to his fame as a conjurer. The philosopher was forced to ask these ‘Fonde Frendes’ to stop their indiscreet praise; he passionately cries: ‘Such Frendes and Fondlinges, I shake of, and renounce you.’²¹ Dee knew well that it was wise to keep his reputation for ‘forbidden’ knowledge within a limited circle. Fame as a man who produced wonderful machines and who attempted to delve into the secrets of nature would not bring him the esteem of his neighbours. This was clearly demonstrated when a mob plundered his house at Mortlake after he left for the Continent in 1583.

John Foxe, in his early editions of the Actes and Monuments, probably did more than anyone else to brand Dee as a conjurer; among other uncomplimentary references in the 1563 edition is the phrase, ‘Doctor Dee the great Conjurer’.²² The intensely Protestant Actes and Monuments enjoyed extraordinary popularity throughout the Elizabethan period; in 1571, Convocation ordered a copy placed in every cathedral church, and the book was also to be found within most ordinary parish churches throughout the kingdom.²³ Finally, Dee could stand Foxe’s ‘damnable sklaunder’ no longer and, in 1576, he issued a plea that Foxe be refrained from describing him as a ‘Caller of Divels’, and the ‘Arche Conjurer’ of England.²⁴ Dee’s plea was successful, for all references to him by name were suppressed in the 1576 edition of the Actes and Monuments.²⁵

The silencing of Foxe did not, however, end the vicious rumours about Dee’s activities. And during the final decades of his life there was, in fact, good reason for the continuing suspicions: John Dee had spent from 21 September 1583 until 2 December 1589 on the Continent where he had quite openly practised cabalist angel-magic with the disreputable Edward Kelley acting as his skryer, or medium.²⁶ Even though it was Queen Elizabeth herself who had commanded Dee’s return to England (see Plate 1), he afterwards suffered neglect, poverty, and the increasingly strident abuse of his countrymen.²⁷ He continued to have a few influential friends – but a very few. ‘I know no one’, he bitterly complains to Sir Edward Dyer, ‘of her Majesties most honourable privy Cownsaile, who, willingly & cumfortably will listen unto my Cumplaynt & declaration, how this Colledge of Manchester, is all most become No Colledge, in any respect.’²⁸ Those who had encouraged Dee – who had made his life in Elizabethan England bearable – were very old, or dead. Leicester had died in 1588, Walsingham in 1590, and Burghley died in 1598 shortly after this letter was written. The last years of Elizabeth’s reign were consumed by the growing power struggle among the courtiers, and no one had time for the old ‘conjurer’.

When in 1603 that witchcraft-conscious monarch, James I, succeeded Elizabeth, life did not improve for John Dee. On 4 June 1604, he petitioned the King to have him tried for sorcery, hoping that this would at last clear his name and confound those ‘Brainsicke, Rashe, Spitefull, and Disdainfull Countrey men’ who made his life so miserable. Dee dramatically and poignantly offers ‘himself willingly, to the punishment of Death: (yea, wyther to be stoned to death: or to be buried quicke: or to be burned unmercifully) If by any due, true, and just meanes, the said name of Conjurer, or Caller, or Invocator of Divels, or damned Spirites, can be proved.’²⁹ The crux of this plea, it should be noted, is the emphasis upon the evil nature of the demons with which John Dee was thought to be dealing. He believed that he was only invoking angels, for which the Bible offered excellent precedents, though his contemporaries, not unnaturally, were less certain. The philosophically esoteric cabalist theurgy (a natural part of the cosmology of a Renaissance magus), in which Dee became absorbed, dealt exclusively with the angelic hierarchies, but the differentiation between this and the widely feared conjuration of devils appeared tenuous to laymen. Dee received no satisfaction from the King, but considering the seriousness of conjuring charges during the reign of James, it is perhaps merciful that he was ignored and that his death in December of 1608 was at least peaceful.³⁰

We have seen how contemporaries thought of Dee; it now remains to examine the strange twists and turns that his reputation has undergone since his death. Dee’s fame for learning persisted well into the seventeenth century. His ‘Mathematicall Preface’ was twice reprinted and continued to be widely admired as a scientific text, and John Selden, the renowned jurist, referred to him as an authority of ‘very great knowledge in sea-affairs’.³¹

But the generally accepted posthumous picture of John Dee – that of a fanatic deluded by devils and Edward Kelley – was established by Meric Casaubon.³² His publication in 1659 of excerpts from the diaries that Dee kept of his supposed conversations with angels revived all the old doubts about Dee’s conjuring.³³ In his long and dire preface, Casaubon warns that the text might be ‘deemed and termed A Work of Darkness’. Despite that, he continues, ‘I may and must professe in the first place, in Truth and Sincerity, that the end that I propose to my self (so far as I have contributed to the Publishing of the Work) is not to satisfie curiosity, but to do good, and promote Religion.’³⁴ Although Casaubon charitably admits that Dee dealt with the spirits in all simplicity and sincerity and concedes that he was one of the magicians who dealt with them by command rather than through a compact, the scandalized editor feels ‘that these Spirits had as great hopes of Dr. Dee, as ever they had of Bacchus or Mohamet’.³⁵

A contemporary witness provides some pertinent information about the reception of A True & Faithful Relation.³⁶ Apparently, most members of the government considered it subversive: they suspected that it had been produced by men loyal to the Church of England who wished to discredit those pretending ‘so much to Inspiration’. Though it wished to do so, it was beyond the gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 John Dee’s Reputation
• 2 The Development of an English Magus
• 3 Elizabethan England’s Greatest Library
• 4 John Dee and the Hermetic Philosophy
• 5 Magic, Science and Religion
• 6 John Dee and the Sidney Circle
• 7 John Dee and the Mechanicians: Applied Science in Elizabethan England
• 8 John Dee as an Antiquarian
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index