ABSTRACT
John Dee’s treatise on the calendar has had a poor press. The historians of the Gregorian reform have had little time for it. Hoskin simply records it as a “favourable verdict” on the Gregorian reform.1 For North, Dee’s astronomy is second-hand and inferior, his treatise “a pale shadow of the Gregorian recommendations”, his outlook “excessively insular”, his emphasis on the time of Christ rather than the time of Nicaea merely “a very refined form of nationalism”, and his agreement to accept a ten-day reformation a sign of a contradictory willingness “to compromise with Rome”.2 Dee’s biographers have duly noted the calendar episode but have not followed it up, and this despite the exhaustive attention paid to his mystical obscurities and his marginalia.3 Understood in context, however, it emerges as the culmination of decades of better-known work on the history and future of the “Brytish empire”, and as Dee’s last attempt to gain recognition and patronage for his ideas in England before leaving for the continent.
