The Queen’s Conjuror

There is no record of John Dee’s birth in 1527 beyond an astrological chart he himself drew years later.  Neither was his death in December 1608 recorded with any certainty.  However, the life that stretched in between was truly remarkable. As a trusted confidante to Queen Elizabeth I, Dee wielded his influence in the political, scientific, and artistic realms of Elizabethan England.  His insatiable quest for knowledge of the workings of the universe led him to the greatest universities and courts of the Renaissance—and to a dangerous obsession with the spirit world that ultimately discredited his many accomplishments and relegated his legacy to a mere historical footnote.  The Queen’s Conjuror reveals the extraordinary and deeply engrossing story of a character and a thinker who helped usher in the Renaissance.

 

Following a stint at Trinity College, Cambridge, young Dee travelled to the Low Countries and Paris, where his education as a mathematician was enriched by acquaintances with notable scholars of the day, including cartographer Gerard Mercator. He began to amass what would become one of Europe’s greatest libraries, broad in its scope and notable in its inclusion of works by Copernicus and studies of Ptolemy and Euclid. Anticipating Newton by a century, he proposed that every entity in the universe emanated “rays” of a force that influenced other objects it struck. Back in Elizabeth I’s court, Dee’s ideas resonated with a queen who had a profound sense of the forces of the cosmos acting upon her and her monarchical powers.  She not only allowed Dee to pick her coronation date, but she was also open to his ideas of creating a “Brytish Impire” supported by a strong navy.  Dee also compiled geographical and nautical data for Humphrey Gilbert, Martin Frobisher, Walter Raleigh, and other explorers.

 

Eventually, Dee’s pursuit of knowledge would lead him to what, in the age of the Reformation, was a dangerous mix of science, religion, and magic. What emerges from surviving diaries and documents, including Dee’s own, is a gripping account of Dee’s encounters with the spiritual world via his trusted confidant and medium, Edward Kelley.  Dee thought of his magical practices and mysticism as another form of scientific observation.  The secrets to the universe could be found in the Adamic language, first revealed to Adam by God himself but now lost to man, and Kelley was the conduit through which a host of visiting angels would make their revelations.  Dee entrusted his life and his family into Kelley’s fraudulent visions, uprooting them to Bohemia for several years before returning to England under a cloud of accusations of necromancy.  He found his library, as well as his reputation, had been destroyed.

 

Despite his once powerful position and prodigious intellect, Dee died in poverty and obscurity, reviled and pitied as a madman.

Published by Harper Collins in the UK, Owl Books in the US.

 

ISBN:     0-8050-6510-5 (US)

                 0-00-655202-1 (UK)