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John Dee -EMC (Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture)

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Sherman reevaluates Dee on the basis of his non-occult writings, especially his marginalia (adervsaria) to various texts and his political writings on navigation and the British Empire (a term he coined). The analysis itself is valuable and important, contributing to an understanding of Dee as a man deeply involved with his political and social environment, as well as clarifying the ways in which Dee read his sources.

Unfortunately, Sherman goes overboard in attacking all previous scholarship on Dee, particularly what he calls the "Yatesian" approaches (in reference to Frances Yates). He never wastes an opportunity to attack, implying at times that his predecessors did not really read Dee but rather constructed a myth (of the magus) about him.

While it is certainly true that Yates overstated her thesis, she saw a good deal in Dee that was accurate. And without a thorough reevaluation of the _Monas hieroglyphica_, the angelic conversations or _Libri mysteriorum_, and such varied works as _Propaedeumata aphoristica_, it is not possible to assess Dee's work as a whole. Sherman seems to think that all the occult works are incidental, irrelevant to who Dee really was. But he never argues this directly, preferring instead to pick out the flaws in Graham Yewbrey and Peter French. In the endnotes, he does note that Nicholas Clulee and Deborah Harkness have done excellent work on understanding Dee the occultist, but he gives them little credit despite his own total incomprehension of those works.

Sherman's account is important and should be read by anyone seriously interested in Dee. But the total project cannot be understood absent Clulee and Harkness. More recently, Szonyi and Hakansson have added important rereadings, not of course available to Sherman. If one takes Sherman alone, one has a wrong impression of Dee -- which is precisely what he accuses his predecessors of. Taken with a grain of salt for all its remarks about other scholarship, including especially the totally wrong-headed misunderstandings of hermeneutics and poststructuralism, and in fact taken strictly as the work of a very narrow historian interpreting a few texts, Sherman is essential. But if you think this book covers the range of Dee, you (like Sherman) are sadly mistaken. Read Clulee and Harkness, then come back to Sherman.