John Dee has proved an endlessly fascinating subject for students of early modern thought almost from the moment of his death. This collection, the somewhat belated proceedings of a conference held at Birkbeck in 1995, is a welcome contribution to a burgeoning field. That conference was held at an opportune moment in Dee scholarship: Nicholas Clulee's meticulous account of Dee as natural philosopher and mathematician, and Andrew Roberts and Julian Watson's study of his library, the finest English collection of its day, had both been published a few years before; William Sherman's account of Dee as a reader must just have appeared. Two major monographs on Dee, by Deborah Harkness and György Szönyi, have since been published as well. All but one of these scholars were present at the conference, and hence are represented in this volume; and although their activity, and that of other Dee aficionados, might be thought to have rendered this volume untimely, the reverse is the case. The contributions testify to the maturity of the field of Dee studies, and bring into focus questions that remain to be answered about Dee personally, and those that concern the relevance of figures like him to historians of science.

Consciously reflecting on the work of their predecessors, many of the authors point to the way in which Dee's work, life and thought have tended to perplex. Even the work of Frances Yates and her followers, to the extent that it was characterized by an entrancement with, rather than an analysis of, the avowedly irrational elements in the work of contemporaries such as Giordano Bruno, tended to mystify. But as this volume demonstrates, we are now past the point at which the possibility of a John Dee defies comprehension. Every one of the activities in which Dee was involved, from proffering political and navigational advice on the basis of humanist readings of geographical and historical works of dubious worth, to conversing with angels, could be rational and legitimate in the context of the period. Each one of his beliefs, from the efficacy of alchemy and astrology, to the imminence of the world's end and his own status as the privileged recipient of special revelation, was tenable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was widely, if not universally, held.

With this perplexity dispelled, what remains are questions about the relationship between Dee's various activities, his career choices, and his intellectual affiliations; and it is in relation to these that the volume's contributors fail to agree. Robert Baldwin, for example, writing on Dee's involvement in England's imperial enterprise, suggests that his switch from navigation to alchemy and angelology, and move from England to the Continent, was conditioned by his failures as a maritime entrepreneur. Harkness, however, sees his move towards conversations with angels as something shaped by a long-standing interest in prophecy and spiritual magic, reflected in his library, and by an increasing sense of urgency fostered by a belief in the imminence of the apocalypse. Yet Sherman points out that, in his textual encounter with another ‘prophetic’ figure of the Renaissance, Christopher Columbus, Dee's reading was highly pragmatic, and focused on questions of geography, history and patronage. Federico Cavallaro, meanwhile, offers a detailed exegesis of Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica in alchemical terms. Karen de Léon Jones, writing on Dee and the Kabbalah, compellingly calls into question the whole notion of a Christian Kabbalah advanced by Yates and her school, but identifies the Monas as the result of a creative transformation of Kabbalistic practice, applying it to geometry and number rather than to language. Stephen Clucas convincingly demonstrates, contra Yates and to some extent Harkness, that Dee's angelic exercises were affiliated not so much with the Renaissance Neoplatonism originating with Marsilio Ficino, or with the radiative optics of Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, but with the medieval ars notoria, a religio-magical practice identified with the biblical Solomon, and with conventional sixteenth-century notions of prayer. Szönyi, however, contra Clucas and Sherman, reaffirms Yates's description of Dee as a Hermetic magus, arguing that the Corpus Hermeticum was a central component of his syncretic philosophy. These are subtle but significant differences; they reflect, I think, both the complexity of Dee's life and the admirable level of detail with which these scholars are concerned.

One significant question that remains unresolved is how to situate John Dee within early modern history more generally. Unintentionally, I think, the volume tends to reinforce the impression that, as his life progressed, Dee became a more fascinating but less significant figure. Thus, while the contributions by Robert Goulding, Stephen Johnston and Robert Baldwin meticulously uncover Dee's participation in the mathematical and navigational communities of Elizabethan England, and in particular his relations with, and differences from, Thomas Digges, later contributors focus on his thought to the exclusion of his interactions with others. The essays that touch on his sojourn in eastern Central Europe are more concerned with the activities and family of his scryer, Edward Kelley, than with Dee per se. And it has certainly been easy for historians of science, pace Yates and her notion of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, to suppose that as Dee became more focused on his angelic conversations, and less involved in the promotion of mathematics, he became of marginal importance to the evolution of natural philosophy. Clulee's suggested solution to the historiographical dilemma that Dee and others like him pose – to abandon attempts, of the sort that Yates powerfully advocated but unhelpfully conceived, to find ways to connect the ‘Scientific Renaissance of the sixteenth century’ with the ‘Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth’ – seems curiously defeatist. I have some sympathy with Szönyi's proposal, to see in the seventeenth century a transformation in conceptions of rationality that, retrospectively, rendered Dee an ancestor to Western esotericism rather than science, but less for his description of this as an epistemological paradigm shift. By definition, Kuhnian changes of paradigm defy explanation in certain respects, and explaining why learned scholarship increasingly moved away from the occult enterprises that Dee and others pursued is surely a proper task for historians. I have doubts, moreover, about Szönyi's classification of scholars whose ‘magical’ thinking complemented (Bruno and Bacon) or was discontinuous with (Kepler and Newton) their ‘scientific’ thought. As Clucas points out, when not seeking to justify the labelling of conference and volume as interdisciplinary – a slightly misleading description, since all but one of the papers displays outstanding historical scholarship, and the exception, by Jim Reeds, displays both that and the application of modern cryptological techniques to one of Dee's most infamous magical manuscripts – it may be unhelpful to assume the existence of clear distinctions between fields and practices such as magic, natural philosophy (or science) and religion, and then look for the ways in which they overlapped or interacted in the work of individuals. Indeed, once the possibility of a highly idiosyncratic, but culturally conditioned, understanding of the relationship between man, God and the world is fully appreciated, one of the lessons of this and other recent studies in early modern science might be that the traditional notion of the Scientific Revolution – and in particular its characterization as the moment of emergence of the ‘new philosophy’, ‘scientific method’ or ‘empirical science’ – is almost wilfully misguided. A few such characterizations slip into this volume. On the whole, however, the collection is marvellously meticulous, engaging and learned. No student of Dee, sixteenth-century mathematics or early modern magic can afford to ignore it.