Where to start with the legend and life of Dr Dee?

Born on 13 July 1527, John Dee became one of the greatest scholars of the age, and a philosopher and courtier to Queen Elizabeth I.

A polymath, he was a proto-modern scientist, a friend of Tycho Brahe, with interests in rational thought, as well as magic. He was a skilled astronomer but also an astrologer; a mathematician but also an alchemist. He put a hex on the Spanish armada, which is supposedly what caused the bad weather and the English victory.

Shakespeare is said to have based both King Lear and Prospero on him. Ian Fleming gave James Bond the code number 007 because apparently John Dee used that number when he was Queen Elizabeth’s spy. More recently musician Damon Albarn wrote an opera called Dr Dee based on the great man’s life.


During his lifetime, Dee accumulated dozens of artefacts and books and his house in Mortlake, London, became one of the largest libraries in England. Now, for the first time, many are being exhibited at the Royal College of Physicians in London, from 18 January.

Dee was interested in cryptography and has been linked with the mysterious Voynich manuscript. The volumes on display include evidence of an Elizabethan form of cryptography: this rotating paper volvelle, which was used as a cipher disc. It is found in Johannes Trithemius’s cryptographic book Polygraphiae, this copy of which dates to 1561.

This is a wonderful pop-up book of mathematics. Dee wrote a preface to this book, the first English edition of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, published London, 1570.

This animation shows the hole left by a bookworm – possibly the larva of the death watch beetle. The book, annotated by Dee, is Institutionum oratoriarum, a volume of rhetoric published in Lyon, France, in 1540.

The books and artefacts including magic mirrors and a crystal ball, are being shown for the first time since Dee’s death 400 years ago.

Image credits: Royal College of Physicians