The Queen’s Conjuror: the science and magic of Doctor Dee
by Benjamin Woolley
HarperCollins, £15.99, ISBN 0002571390
This fascinating book begins with a gripping introduction in which 64 years after Dee’s death a secret compartment in a chest was discovered containing strange books and mysterious papers. Their provenance and value was not recognised and some were used “for the lining of pie tins”. It was not until 1672 that Ashmole, the antiquarian whose collection formed the basis for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, received what he had spent years searching for, the remnant of Dee’s diaries.
Born in London in the reign of Henry VIII (Protestants were the good guys), Dee survived Edward VI, Mary (Catholics were the good guys and Protestants were burned at the stake with church approval), Elizabeth I (Protestants again), apparently by changing hats at the appropriate moments. Fortunately he was a voluminous diarist, and the papers that survived, translated from Latin, Greek, and alchemical symbology, give us a rather complete picture of this curious man as scholar, mathematician, magician, spy, political adviser, calendar revisionist, astronomer, astrologer, navigator, in the days when “astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things”. We also learn of his lifelong dependence on “skryers” (spirit mediums), several of whom he harboured along with their families in his own household. These men duped not only him but also many of the nobility and intelligentsia of the time with their purported conversations with spirits and angels. Perhaps the most notorious of these was Edward Kelly who has 48 entries in the index and was so competent at his job that at one time he persuaded his host that the angels wanted Dee to engage in a little wife-swapping with him.
Copious notes (35 pages), an 11-page bibliography, a four-page chronology, and a 14-page index complete the book and make it a scholarly reference as well as an extraordinary insight into the intrigues, scams, and scandals of the age.
