QI The Book of the Dead

1570) the first English translation of the most successful textbook ever written, Euclid’s Elements .
    Dee was a NeoPlatonist. He thought that everything – both matter and spirit – was interconnected and that the physical world was merely the external manifestation of an intangible realm of ‘forms’, in which all real chairs, for example, emanate from the Idea of a Chair. Dee called these ideal forms the ‘pure verities’ and he thought that if the laws by which they operate could be found, a universal religion, uniting all people in a single faith, would follow.
    For Dee and many of his contemporaries, scientific enquiry, pure and applied mathematics, philosophy and what we would call ‘magic’ were all aspects of the same search for truth. Like modern physicists, Dee was looking for a Theory of Everything: something that made sense of all the observable facts. For men of his age, alchemy (forerunner of chemistry) and astrology (indistinguishable in Renaissance times from astronomy) were just as ‘scientific’ as geometry. And before pointing out the ‘obvious flaw’ that these things aren’t ‘true’, remember that it was men likeDee, probing the unknown in search of invisible forces, who laid the groundwork for Newton and Faraday, without whom we would have no understanding of gravity or electricity.
    The challenge, then as now, was how to fund a life of pure research. Dee lived in an age of superstition and paranoia. He was a devout Protestant at a time when the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe was at its height and the fledgling Church of England still in turmoil. Any new ideas might easily be denounced as witchcraft or blasphemy and punished by imprisonment or death. Royal patronage was essential and young Dee was luckily well placed to take advantage of this. His father was a cloth merchant and ‘gentleman sewer’ at the court of Henry VIII, so Dee was educated well, at Chelmsford grammar school and St John’s College, Cambridge. He performed brilliantly, especially in mathematics and Greek, establishing the work pattern he would maintain throughout his life: eighteen hours of study, four hours for sleep and two set aside for meals. It was at university that he was first, quite absurdly, accused of witchcraft. For a production of Aristophanes’ comedy Peace he had built an impressively realistic giant mechanical beetle that carried one of the actors up to the ‘heavens’ in the Great Hall at Trinity College, terrifying some of the more unsophisticated members of the audience. Dee cleared his name but left Cambridge in disgust, determined to pursue his studies abroad.
    From 1548 to 1551, Dee built a reputation as one of Europe’s leading scholars. His lectures on Euclid in Paris attracted large and appreciative audiences. He met the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who told him of the revolutionary theories of Copernicus, and he became close friends with the cartographer Gerard Mercator, working with him to develop a new set of toolsfor making accurate maps. He also began to collect books; this would remain a lifelong passion. Dee amassed over 4,000 volumes, the largest library of any kind in Europe, and twenty times as many books as were held at Cambridge University. The breadth of his interests is astonishing. From magic to mathematics, subjects included the Church in Armenia, botany, chastity, demonology, dreams, earthquakes, Etruria, falconry, games, gymnastics, horticulture, Islam, logic, marriage, mythology, the nobility, oils, pharmacology, rhetoric, saints, surveying, tides, veterinary science, weather, women and zoology.
    Dee was offered the job of scholar-in-residence at several European courts but turned them all down to return to England as the teenage King Edward VI’s special advisor on ‘philosophical’ (i.e. scientific) matters. This came with an annual pension of 100 crowns and guaranteed him lucrative additional work tutoring the sons of senior courtiers such as the Duke of Northumberland. This was the perfect outcome for Dee, providing financial security to enable him to continue his studies, and a position at the centre of things with a chance to put his theories into practice. This happy state of affairs lasted just two years. The accession of the Catholic Queen Mary brought a wholesale purging of the court’s inner circle and in 1555 Dee was arrested and charged with casting horoscopes for the queen’s sister Princess Elizabeth and ‘conspiring by