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

Part 1: John Dee’s Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, Oxford

Editorial Preface by Dr Julian Roberts

Research on John Dee (1527-1609) is gradually showing him to be one of the most interesting and complex figures of the late English renaissance. Although he was long regarded - for example in the Dictionary of National Biography - as alternately a charlatan and a dupe, he was revealed by E G R Taylor in 1930 as the teacher of the most important Elizabethan navigators. Research since then has underlined his role in the teaching of mathematics and astronomy, alchemy, British antiquities, hermeticism, cabala and occultism and, posthumously, in the Rosicrucian “movement” that swept Europe in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century.

Dee thus stood, in the middle of the sixteenth century, at the watershed between magic and science, looking back at one and forward to the other. Central to all these interests was a great library, the largest that had ever been built up by one man in England. Dee’s omnivorous reading (demonstrated by his characterestic annotation) and the availability of his library to others fed many of the intellectual streams of Elizabethan England, and he was well known to continental scholars, even before his ultimately disastrous visit to eastern Europe in 1583-1589.

He was also an outstanding figure in the history of a scholarship in Britain, as he was, with John Bale, the first to realise the damage that had been done by the destruction of the monastic libraries, and his interest in scientific manuscripts ensured the preservation of much of England’s remarkable achievement in medieval science.

The recent publication of Dee’s catalogue - it proved legible enough to be produced in facsimile - demonstrated the resources he shared with his contemporaries. It explains the early collecting of the young Cambridge scholar, the proposal for a national library which he made to Queen Mary and showed for the first time that with the probable support of Bishop Bonner, he made some progress in performing what he had proposed, by borrowing manuscripts and copying them, or by commissioning copies abroad. The identification and location of the majority of the manuscripts he owned (over 300 in total) has shed new light on the years following the dispersal of the monastic collections and represents a considerable advance on those known to M R James in 1921.

The building of so large a library of scholarly works entailed the import of books into a country like England where learned publishing was under-developed. Many of Dee’s books were gifts but for other such as his vast Paracelsian library, he was (literally) indebted to the Birckmanns of Cologne and their agent Andreas Fremonsheim. Fremonsheim was probably responsible for the meticulously accurate catalogue of Dee’s Library made in 1583.

It is generally known that Dee’s Library suffered damage after his departure for Poland in 1583, though the extent and causes of the damage have provoked much inaccurate speculation. The names of those responsible are now known and, by a curious irony, the books stolen by one of the culprits now form the largest surviving part of Dee’s printed library. More than 300 printed books, many bearing heavy annotation, have now been found.

Renaissance Man builds on the work started with the publication of Dee’s Library Catalogue by making available microform copies of the manuscripts and books that have been identified as having been a part of John Dee’s Library. The project commenced with coverage of the manuscript volumes now held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (in Part 1) and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (in Part 2). Later sections will cover the manuscripts and printed books now held by the Royal College of Physicians, Cambridge University Library, the British Library and smaller collections from over a dozen further libraries throughout the world. The project will conclude with representative samples of important works known to have been in Dee’s Library but for which the authentic copies have not yet been found.

Renaissance Man will thus be an important resource not just for Dee scholars, but for Renaissance scholars in general.

Dr Julian Roberts

October 1992

Consultant Editor,

Paul Hamlyn Keeper of Printed Books, the Bodleian Library, Oxford and co-editor with Andrew G Watson of John Dee’s Library Catalogue, (London Bibliographical Society, 1990).

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