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

Part 7: John Dee's Manuscripts and Annotated Books from the British Library, London

The aim of this project is to reconstruct one of the greatest libraries of Renaissance England and, in doing so, to enable us to better understand renaissance culture.

The choice of the library at Mortlake established by John Dee (1527-1608), mathematician, scientist, advisor to court, astrologer, and bibliophile, was obvious – famous during his lifetime, the library was visited and utilised by many of his contemporaries including Queen Elizabeth, Walter Ralegh, Martin Frobisher, Edward Dyer, Robert Dudley, Philip Sidney, Thomas Digges, William Herbert, Francis Walsingham, Oronce Finé, Bishop Bonner, Thomas Benger, and Thomas Harriot. 

What is more, Dee’s library was catalogued in 1557 and 1583 and the work of Roberts & Watson (John Dee’s Library Catalogue, 1990) and later scholars has helped to identify many of the original volumes.  It is now known that the library consisted of 2,317 printed books and 368 manuscripts.  Nearly all of the manuscripts and 288 of the printed works have been identified.

By bringing together the actual volumes from Dee’s library we can see how books were read and how knowledge was practically employed.  We can judge the comparative influence of Arabic and Classical thinkers on Elizabethan society.  We can ponder the division of the library into printed and manuscript texts and can realise how small the quantity of books in English was compared with the library as a whole.

The British Library holds the greatest surviving number of manuscripts formerly held in John Dee’s library. Many were purchased after Dee’s death by Robert Cotton and Simonds D’Ewes, who knew the value of his texts.  There are 118 manuscripts in total, covering topics as wide ranging as astrology, astronomy, history, geography, mathematics, medicine, music, natural history, navigation and theology.

Noted individual items in Parts 7 & 8 include:

• Boethius’s De Institutione Musica (12th century, Ms Royal 15 B IX)
• The Tollemache Orosius (a 10th century Anglo-Saxon translation attributed to  Alfred the Great, Add Ms 47967)
• A collection of theological tracts in manuscript, including commonplaces on ecclesiastical questions (Ms Royal 7 D II)
• collection of works on alchemy and the philosopher’s stone (Ms Stowe 1070)
• Tracts on astronomy (12th century, Egerton Ms 823)
• Notes on calendars and prognostications (Egerton Ms 3314)
• An account of the rituals associated with the coronation of the Kings of England (Lansdowne Ms 278)
• Aristotle’s Secreta secretorum (Sloane Ms 59)
• Geber’s Turba philosophorum and Bacon’s Speculum Alchemiae (Sloane Ms 2325)
• The Book of Enoch (Sloane Ms 2599)
• Mysteriorum libri, an account of spiritual conferences at Mortlake (Sloane 3188)
• De heptarchia mystica, a key text relating to the occult (Sloane Ms 3191)
• A genealogy of Queen Elizabeth I and himself (Ms Cotton Charter XIII, art 39)

There are also letters from Dee to Lord Burghley, Julius Caesar, William Camden, Edward Dyer, Roger Edwards, Elizabeth I, James I, Queen Mary, and John Stowe, which help to give us a better picture of Dee and his times.  In addition, Part 8 features 13 printed works replete with annotations.

With the completion of Part 8 we will have covered 258 (69%) out of the 368 manuscripts known to have been in Dee’s Library and 218 (76%) of the 288 printed works known to have been the actual copies on his shelves. As such, scholars have access to much of the library used by Dee when framing his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid, or when writing for the first time on the notion of a “British Empire” in the Perfect Arte of Navigation.