Customer Reviews

John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion

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Nick Clulee's book, now for some reason fantastically expensive, remains the seminal work on Dee. It's not an argument book, as such, but rather a brilliant overview of the great Elizabethan magus's intellectual career.

In essence, Clulee synthesizes Dee's various works into a cohesive whole, arguing that Dee wasn't a scientist on Mondays, a magus on Tuesdays, and so forth. Instead, he views the totality of Dee's work as a developing project.

Clulee's perspective is unabashedly within the history of science, but not in its old-fashioned positivist sense; he was a student of Allen G. Debus at the University of Chicago, and while he grounds his work solidly in the history of science tradition, he does not dismiss material that doesn't quite accord with modern ideas of science. This is, in fact, what makes the book so valuable: scholars like Frances Yates (to take a famous and wonderful example) draw fascinating conclusions, but sometimes stray rather far from texts; Clulee never does this, remaining locked to Dee, yet is able to build up a synthetic picture.

Good recent works on Dee, such as Harkness's book on the angel-conversations, all lean heavily on Clulee. His book is not, thus, the "last word," but it doesn't seem likely that there will be a new survey of Dee to supersede this one.

If you're interested in Dee's work from a scholarly perspective, you need to read this. Without it, you can't make much sense of Harkness, or Hakansson, or whoever. Pity it's so expensive, though -- I can't imagine why.