John Dee and the sciences: early modern networks of knowledge

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. 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. All of these interests, and more, were represented in his library, one of the largest and most comprehensive in Europe, particularly for scientific content. 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). 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.’ Historiographically, Dee’s Protean interests have proved no easier to classify than his spectra of the mathematical arts. 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. 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. 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 sixteenthand seventeenth-century developments in astronomy and natural philosophy. The synthetic studies of I. R. F. 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