ABSTRACT
John Dee has had the mixed fortune to have lived a notably interesting life. His fortune has been good largely because certain facets of his career contain much of popular and even sensational interest, assuring that his life exerted considerable fascination ever since his death in 1608. 1 His fortune has been ill because these very same features have presented great obstacles to any satisfactory understanding of his career. His contemporary reputation for arcane learning, his practice of astrology and alchemy, and most spectacularly his long association with Edward Kelley, as the spiritual medium for his conversations with spirits and their exploits in the domains of Emperor Rudolf II, have provided matter for moralizing and romance. His relationship with the Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham among others at court, and not least with Queen Elizabeth herself has made him party to perennial interest evoked by the Elizabethan Court; and the hints that he was consulted on arcane and mysterious matters is scantily enough documented to allow ample room for imaginative and often titillating speculations. Until the present century, much of the biographical literature on Dee has been concerned with him as a personality and with the drama of his life; it has devoted little attention to the study of his writings, and has been less than scholarly. 2 The romantic, adventurous, and conspiratorial possibilities of his biography exercise a continuing attraction, from which even the scholarly literature has not been immune. 3
