The John Dee Society:
The John Dee Society has been formed to accomplish several general and specific goals.
- Our primary purpose is
to produce a standard edition of the published and unpublished
works of Elizabethan England's great polymath, antiquarian and
magus Dr. John Dee, to make available to students of Renaissance philosophy and of Dee's Enochian magical system a coherent data base of primary source material for their researches.
- Secondly, we seek to reconstruct John Dee's Library, based on his Catalogue of manuscripts and books of 1583, prior to its dispersal throughout Europe. To this end, we have begun assembling a microfilm archive of Dee's manuscripts and books from the libraries where they now reside, and are in the process of transcribing this material for eventual publication. This is a long-term project which will require the assistance of other archivists, libraries, antiquarians and translators.
- Dee's library, at 4000 volumes, was the largest philosophical and scientific library collection in Elizabethan England, and arguably the greatest in all of Renaissance Europe, as is generally agreed by scholars; thus its reconstruction should be of interest to a broad cross-section of the academic community, as well as to students of the Western magical tradition.
- Thirdly, the John Dee Society hopes to be a useful source-point for networking with others interested in pursuing such work, and for publishing original studies by individuals and groups furthering the researches begun by Dee in the 16th Century.
- All of our offerings will appear here on our website. We will not be publishing on paper.
- Secondly, we seek to reconstruct John Dee's Library, based on his Catalogue of manuscripts and books of 1583, prior to its dispersal throughout Europe. To this end, we have begun assembling a microfilm archive of Dee's manuscripts and books from the libraries where they now reside, and are in the process of transcribing this material for eventual publication. This is a long-term project which will require the assistance of other archivists, libraries, antiquarians and translators.