John Dee was a much respected mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, alchemist and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, but subsequently derided as a conjurer and a trickster. Dee became Queen Elizabeth's trusted advisor on astrological and scientific matters, choosing her coronation date himself. From the 1550s through the 1570s, he served as an advisor to England's voyages of discovery, providing technical assistance in navigation and ideological backing in the creation of a ""British Empire"" Dee's library, at 4000 volumes, was the largest philosophical and scientific library collection in Elizabethan England. Queen Elizabeth finally made him Warden of Christ's College, Manchester, in 1595

Although his accomplishments were substantial-he became a trusted confidante to Queen Elizabeth I, inspired the formation of the British Empire, and plotted voyages to the New World-John Dee's story has been largely lost to history. In The Queen's Conjurer, Benjamin Woolley brings to life the tale of one of the most colorful characters of the Renaissance. In the midst of a pivotal era when the age of superstition collided with the world of science and reason, Dee's mathematics anticipated Newton by nearly a century, and his mapmaking and navigation were critical to exploration. Obsessed with alchemy, astrology, and mysticism, his library was one of the finest in Europe, a vast compendium of thousands of volumes. Yet, despite his powerful position and prodigious intellect, Dee died in poverty and obscurity, reviled and pitied as a madman. Written with flair and vigor, and based on numerous surviving diaries of the period, The Queen's Conjurer is a highly readable account of an extraordinary and nearly forgotten life.

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter: It seems remarkable that three hundred years should have been allowed to elapse since the death of John Dee in December, 1608, without producing any Life of an individual so conspicuous, so debatable, and so remarkably picturesque. There is perhaps no learned author in history who has been so persistently misjudged, nay, even slandered, by his posterity, and not a voice in all the three centuries uplifted even to claim for him a fair hearing. Surely it is time that the cause of all this universal condemnation should be examined in the light of reason and science; and perhaps it will be found to exist mainly in the fact that he was too far advanced in speculative thought for his own age to understand. For more than fifty years out of the eighty-one of his life. Dee was famous, even if suspected and looked askance at as clever beyond human interpretation. Then his Queen died. With the narrow-minded Scotsman who succeeded her came a change in the fashion of men's minds. The reign of the devil and his handmaidens - the witches and possessed persons - was set up in order to be piously overthrown, and the very bigotry of the times gave birth to independent and rational thought - to Newton, Bacon, Locke. But Dee was already labelled once and for all. Every succeeding writer who has touched upon his career, has followed the leaders blindly, and has only cast another, and yet another, stone to the heap of obloquy piled upon his name. The fascination of his psychic projections has always led the critic to ignore his more solid achievements in the realms of history and science, while at the same time, these are only cited to be loudly condemned. The learned Dr. Meric Casaubon, who, fifty years after Dee's death, edited his Book of Mysteries - the absorbing recital of four out of the six or seven years of his crystal gazing - was perhaps the fairest critic he yet has had. Although he calls Dee's spiritual revelations a "sad record," and a "work of darkness," he confesses that he himself, and other learned and holy men (including an archbishop), read it with avidity to the end, and were eager to see it printed. He felt certain, as he remarks in his preface, that men's curiosity would lead them to devour what seems to him "not paralleled in that kind, by any book that hath been set out in any age to read." And yet on no account was he publishing it to satisfy curiosity, but only "to do good and promote Religion." For Dee, he is persuaded, was a true, sincere Christian, his Relation made in the most absolute good faith, although undoubtedly he was imposed upon and deluded by the evil spirits whom he sometimes mistook for good ones. It may be well here to remark that this voluminous Book of Mysteries or True and Faithful Relation (fol. 1659), from which in the following pages there will be found many extracts, abounds in tedious and unintelligible pages of what Casaubon calls "sermon-like stuff," interspersed with passages of extraordinary beauty.

John Dee (1527-1608) was a noted English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultist, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his time, he had lectured at the University of Paris when still in his early twenties. John was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery (he coined the term "British Empire"). Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that mathematics (which he understood mystically) was central to the progress of human learning. His personal library at Mortlake was the largest in the country, and was considered one of the finest in Europe, perhaps second only to that of de Thou. His works include: Navigationis Ad Cathayam... Delineato Hydrographica (1580), De Trigono (1595) and others.