11/14/2023 0 Comments Divine royalty conjure queen group![]() ![]() Dee’s struggles to find a stable position upon the lurching political and confessional map of Tudor England and Counter-Reformation Europe are foregrounded in Glyn Parry’s recent biography, The arch-conjuror of England: John Dee ( 2011). ![]() By reevaluating Dee’s activities within the wider context of Elizabethan patronage, commerce and learned expertise, Sherman refocused attention on his active role as courtier and political and commercial ‘intelligencer.’ Dee’s occult interests were also revisited in the work of Deborah Harkness, who approached his apocalyptic, angelic and alchemical thinking as a sustained development of his natural philosophy, rather than an intellectual aberration, while situating the whole range of his activities within the domestic economy of his house at Mortlake ( Harkness, 1999, 1997).Īs early modern political circumstances changed, so did contemporary distinctions between legitimate and suspect activity. Dee’s lesser studied compositions and marginalia also provided the focus for William Sherman’s influential monograph, John Dee: the politics of reading and writing (1995). This endeavour was augmented by Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson’s reconstruction of John Dee’s library catalogue (1990), a bibliographical feat which revealed not only the scope and scale of Dee’s library, but also of his manuscript writings and annotations in printed books. 3), instead tracing the evolution of Dee’s thought throughout his life. Clulee challenged earlier interpretations of Dee ‘as an embodiment of some pre-existent intellectual tradition’ ( 1988, p. 3Ĭontradictory anatomies of Dee as either ‘scientist’ or ‘magus’ provided the impetus for Nicholas Clulee’s seminal intellectual biography, John Dee’s natural philosophy: between science and religion ( 1988). Taylor (1930, 1954), Francis Johnson (1937) and John Heilbron (1978), who, in focusing on Dee’s contributions to mathematics, geography, astronomy and navigation, distinguished these enquiries from his occult leanings. Calder (1952), Peter French (1972) and Frances Yates (1969, 1972, 1979), in emphasising Dee’s occult philosophical interests, thereby provided a sharp contrast with the internalist histories of E. 2 His re-engineering as a hermetic magus in the 1960s and 70s offered a new narrative, in which Dee became the case study par excellence for the influence of Neoplatonic currents on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments in astronomy and natural philosophy. In the absence of any single, outstanding contribution to support his inclusion in canonical histories of the Scientific Revolution, for much of the twentieth century Dee remained a marginal figure in broader histories of science. Dee’s esoteric pursuits were well known to his contemporary detractors, and continue to occupy the popular imagination today, yet the academy has struggled to reconcile his natural philosophical interests with those apparently antithetical to modern conceptions of science. Historiographically, Dee’s Protean interests have proved no easier to classify than his spectra of the mathematical arts. Here, Dee’s ‘Groundplat’ of the sciences laid out the applications of geometry and arithmetic not only in the fields of mathematics and natural philosophy, but also in ‘thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine.’ 1 The range of his pursuits was famously taxonomised in his account of ‘the Sciences, and Artes Mathematicall’ in the Mathematicall praeface to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570). ![]() All of these interests, and more, were represented in his library, one of the largest and most comprehensive in Europe, particularly for scientific content. A mathematician learned in British history, cartography, astrology and navigation, throughout his life Dee also became increasingly engaged with alchemy, kabbalah, divination, and communion with spirits. The significance of John Dee (1527–1609) for historians of science rests both on the range of his interests and activities, and the problems this range has caused for his biographers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |