The Lost Library of Dr John Dee
Dr John Dee was an English scientist and a spy. He collected printed works from all over europe. Infamously his library and practices included astrology, alchemy, numerology and the occult. And his library was raided and dispersed but...
Dee was a compulsive cataloger and he left behind a very thorough list of the books he had acquired. Researchers have acquired many of the books Dee owned, or copies from the same editions, and digitized them for the world.
The best of these recovered books feature Dee's marginalia. Books were printed with wide margins perhaps because it was so popular to make notes in them. Since the books were in Latin, Greek, old French, etc, many margin notes are translations of the more obscure words but with Dee the marginalia is highly imaginative. You can see his brain working on new concepts that were directly inspirted by what he is reading.
We live in the most exciting time for the study of history! New tools like AI, LiDAR, genetic mapping, and digital replication have opened up historical research to all. As a historian focused on this period in England, I see how then as now censorship is directed at the least powerful members of society while the rich are excluded. More specifically, Dee is the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and he travels to Poland and other monarchies, using alchemy, magic and other heretical practices to gather secret truths from rulers who demanded pious adherence to orthodox religion from their subjects while being entertained and duped by non-Christian practices in private. The Catholic church maintains a list of books which the faithful (only the low rank faithful not the bishops) are forbidden to read -- "Index Librorum Prohibitorum". Due to the 'forbidden fruit' effect, this list at one point became a guide for those seeking forbidden knowledge so the Catholic church put their own list on the list of things you were not allowed to read. Ha!
But Dee was allowed to read and collected anything and everything and he was allowed to publish works based on what he learned. Remember that England at this point was 95+% illiterate and had no standardized language. Dee created the first textbook of Euclidian Geometry as part of the effort to prepare England to confront Spain (because geometry is needed for oceanic navigation).
“The whole Renaissance is in this library.” This is how Frances A. Yates described John Dee’s library in her Theatre of the World (1969, p. 12). Others similarly claimed that his collection constituted the scientific academy of Renaissance England. With its three to four thousand volumes, Dee’s library in Mortlake was indeed not only the largest library compiled in Elizabethan England but also the most comprehensive, representing virtually every aspect of classical, medieval and Renaissance learning (Sherman, John Dee, p. 3). For a research project interested in early modern reading practices, this historical collection presents a uniquely rich repository of material on how a reader as prolific as Dee interacted with and manipulated his books. Neither Gabriel Harvey, on whom the first phase of AOR focused, nor John Dee considered the practice of reading an act of passively receiving information authoritatively offered by the author of a book. Rather, reading was a process of surveying any given text for available information, of sifting and filtering the relevant from the irrelevant, and of digesting information and putting it to use, which required an active engagement with the written word.
Images of the books of Dee's library: https://archaeologyofreading.org/viewer/#aor
Marginalia and discussions of the books at the Royal College of Physicians: https://history.rcp.ac.uk/johndee
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Fascinating!.
I'm a big fan - have read all of her books and enjoyed them very much. Her field of expertise is this era and she takes such care with the history when writing her novels.
Yes, she's written 5 novels, starting with A Discovery of Witches. It's fantasy for adults, more erudite than the usual witches & vampires stories. She draws on her historical background to blend real characters from the past with contemporary ones.
