The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, and the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts

John Dee advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, mathematician, astrologer, and occultist kept this private journal as a portal into worlds both earthly and celestial. The entries span decades of his extraordinary life, documenting his calculations alongside his dreams, his political machinations alongside his attempts to communicate with angels. Here is a man who navigated the highest corridors of power while pursuing forbidden knowledge in the shadows a man whose library of manuscripts was the envy of England and whose spiritual experiments drew both awe and suspicion. The diary reveals not the mythological figure of legend but the flesh-and-blood scholar: anxious about finances, devoted to his work, wrestling with questions that would consume any thinking person in an age when magic and science had not yet split apart. Also included is the complete catalog of his manuscript collection, a list that reads like a tour through the entire intellectual heritage of Renaissance Europe. This is primary source material at its most intimate a chance to hear Dee speak in his own voice across four centuries.