RENAISSANCE MAN:
The Reconstructed Libraries of European Scholars, 1450-1700
Series One: The Books and Manuscripts of John Dee, 1527-1608

Part 2: John Dee's Manuscripts from Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Renaissance Man Series One  makes available the actual volumes - printed and manuscript - that made up the library of Renaissance polymath, John Dee.
It does so without significantly duplicating volumes covered in EEBO.  It focusses on:

• Unique manuscript texts owned by Dee - His library catalogue lists 368 of these and we should not understimate the importance of such texts to Renaissance learning.
• Continental Literature - The majority of most major Renaissance libraries were not works printed in England or written in English.
• Heavily annotated volumes, which tell us much about the reading practices of scholars of the period.

Part 2 is based on the holdings of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and offers a further 71 manuscripts from Dee's Library.  These include medical texts, works on the spheres and on spirits, romances, saint's lives, commentaries, grammars, alchemical receipts, and texts on astronomy, geometry, music theory, numerology and rhetoric.  There is also an almanac by Dee, one of his commonplace books and, 3 letters from Walsingham to Dee.  There are works by authors as diverse as Aegidus, Albumazar, Bernard of Clairvaulx, and Albert of Saxony. We also include a printed miscellany owned by Dee that is now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The project is a major research resource for all those interested in Renaissance culture, the history of the book, alchemy, astrology, astronomy, chemistry, exploration, literature, medicine, navigation, the occult, politics and science