John Dee (1527-1609) has emerged as one of the most influential figures in the intellectual history of Tudor England. Though best known in his own time as a mathematician, he had a host of other interests (including navigation, astrology and astronomy, cabbala, alchemy, paracelsian medicine, and Welsh history) and was one of the first scholars to advocate collecting manuscripts from the dissolved monastic libraries. Indeed his own library was perhaps the largest assembled in England by one man before 1600. This study, which includes a facsimile of the detailed catalogue of 1583, recounts for the first time the growth of Dee's library, the raid made upon it during his absence in Poland, and its dispersal after his death. The book also describes the location of his surviving books and manuscripts.

This fascinating work explores John Dee's Enochian magic and the history of its reception. Dee (1527–1608/9), an accomplished natural philosopher and member of Queen Elizabeth I's court, was also an esoteric researcher whose diaries detail years of conversations with angels achieved with the aid of crystal-gazer Edward Kelley. His Enochian magic offers a method for contacting angels and demons based on secrets found in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Examining this magical system from its Renaissance origins to present day occultism, Egil Asprem shows how the reception of Dee's magic is replete with struggles to construct and negotiate authoritative interpretational frameworks for doing magic. Arguing with Angels offers a novel, nuanced approach to questions about how ritual magic has survived the advent of modernity and demonstrates the ways in which modern culture has recreated magical discourse.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1922 Edition.

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.