Confronting the tumultuous political, religious, and social landscape of Reformation Europe, monarchs and ministers naturally employed all possible means to position themselves for whatever an uncertain future might hold. Without as yet any compelling alternative to the orthodox Aristotelian conception of a static but transcendental universe, the boundaries between nature and supernature, matter and spirit, science and sorcery, were far from clear-cut. Thus it was by no means unreasonable for Sir William Cecil and his queen to think that the power of the philosopher’s stone to transmute base metals into gold might help balance the government’s budget, nor for Dee to greet a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia as a divine signal to a decaying world that it was about to be renewed by angelic magic. A founding fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and occasional lecturer at the Sorbonne, this cosmopolitan polymath and public intellectual was a prolific author. The works printed in his lifetime (many remained in manuscript) include a standard commentary on Euclid’s geometry and a general treatise purporting to reveal the secret mathematical language of the cosmos. Dee also evidently amassed the largest library in Tudor England.

So complex and exotic a character challenges the imagination, not to mention the erudition and empathy, of would-be biographers and historians. Dee was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, and remains one to this day. Yet the basic outlines of his long and eventful life are reasonably clear. Claiming descent from the fabled King Arthur of Britain and Prince Cadwallader of Wales, Dee was actually of immigrant Welsh yeoman-farmer stock, born close by the Tower of London and christened in the parish church of St Dunstan’s in the East (Dunstan was the patron saint of metalworkers, hence goldsmiths, and alchemists). His father was an upwardly mobile cloth merchant who exploited court connections gained through marriage to become a minor functionary in Henry VIII’s household.From grammar school and Cambridge University, awash with Renaissance humanism and religious ferment, Dee embarked upon the first of many momentous forays to Continental Europe, studying law at Louvain and mathematics in Paris, while establishing an enduring network of connections with leading humanist philosophers and scholars. On returning to England he became an occasional astrological consultant at the court of the boy-king Edward VI, and following the latter’s death provided Princess Elizabeth with horoscopes detailing her chances of succeeding her sister, Mary, to the throne.

Long after that event duly occurred, Dee continued to advise the queen and many of her councillors, even though the preferment he was often promised proved elusive. But when the government failed to follow his recommendation to adopt the Gregorian calendar, worldly frustration combined with the urgings of Edmund Kelley, a medium or ‘scryer’ through whom Dee conversed with angelic spirits, led him to undertake what became a six-year expedition to eastern Europe. There he failed to gain the patronage of the mystical Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, and found himself increasingly dominated by the much younger Kelley, who even persuaded the very reluctant Dee that the spirits demanded they should ‘participate in one another’ by swapping wives. This ‘cross-matching’ for God’s secret purposes (perhaps to demonstrate their freedom from earthly sin) seemed to assist Kelley’s alchemical researches. But Dee’s position at the court of Hesse-Kassel became increasingly precarious, and in late 1589 he brought his wife and family back to England.

Over the next two decades, Dee tried to reassemble his plundered library and engaged in extensive litigation with the fellows of the collegiate church of Manchester, where he was appointed warden by the queen in 1595. Despite renewed accusations of conjuring and witchcraft in what had become an increasingly hostile intellectual climate, alchemical investigation and angelical revelations continued until just before his death, in relative penury and obscurity, a few months short of his eighty-second birthday.

‘Hee had a very faire cleare rosie complexion: a long beard as white as milke; he was tall and slender; a very handsome man.’ So John Aubrey described the celebrated figure he had often heard of from his grandmother, since ‘My great grandfather Will. Aubrey and he were cousins, and intimate acquaintances.’ Aubrey must also have seen the portrait painted when Dee was in his late sixties and subsequently acquired by another astrologer-mathematician – hence its current location in Oxford’s Ashmolean museum. Not that Glyn Parry concerns himself with such details. Nor does his book convey much sense of Dee as a human being, despite its dust jacket billing as the first ‘full-scale biography [...] based on primary historical sources’. We learn little about Dee’s character, family, or private life, notwithstanding some shrewd passing comments on his lack of worldly wisdom and inflated sense of prophetic self-importance.

The great strength of this scholarly monograph masquerading in trade-book dress is rather that it brings to bear a richly informed understanding of the politico-religious contexts in which Dee operated. Parry thereby adds a distinctively original and satisfyingly grounded perspective to what is now a large and rapidly expanding body of research (nearly sixty books and articles on Dee have been published since 2000). Most serious studies hitherto have been by intellectual historians, following in the footsteps of, or reacting against, the late Dame Frances Yates, whose learned pioneering work depicts an occult magus on the margins of Tudor and early Stuart English society. But Parry’s familiarity with the complexities of early-modern court politics and church history enables him to re-cast Dee as someone whose esoteric knowledge and skills kept him much in demand by the powerful and the power-hungry, hence to that extent an insider, indeed a significant player in his own right.

Besides some remarkable discoveries (not least Dee’s ordination as a Catholic priest and Queen Elizabeth’s own hands-on alchemical activities), Parry offers helpful guidance to the intellectual rationale underlying Dee’s magical procedures and writings. But he freely admits that one episode Dee recounted in considerable circumstantial detail, where an angelic ‘gardener’ apparently restored undamaged three manuscripts (now in the British Library) that had previously been burnt in a tiled stove by Dee and Kelley, ‘defies historical explanation’. Faced with such accounts, we must somehow navigate between the twin poles of credulity and cynicism. Perhaps that is one reason why Dee continues to fascinate us today no less, and perhaps even more, than he did his own contemporaries.