What is your take on placing Dee historically? Do you think that he was Late Renaissance, or “early modern”?
As you may know, there’s been a lot of debate on this, going back to Frances Yates calling him the last Renaissance magus. Since then, he’s been presented as belonging to the new scientific revolution, and (thesis, antithesis, synthesis…) as a man with feet in both eras.
I think the debate throws more light on the deficiencies of trying to carve history into strata instead of seeing it in terms of flow. The analogy should not be of a layered rock face or a tree’s rings, IMO, but of a river, with its source lost in the mists, with branchings and tributaries, oxbows left by the wayside, twists and turns, and most importantly a continuous flow from one place to the next.
I see Dee as living in an exciting time when new information was bringing about a change in many people’s way of thinking about the world, in some ways as other ‘revolutions’ did before and have done since. People living in those periods are characterized by having their roots in an older way of understanding the world, and then finding themselves gaining and passing on new ones. Dee flourished at a time when most people still thought in Medieval ways, but were being swept forward into having to incorporate new ones into their worldviews. Such periods, by the way, seem to often be accompanied by millennialist tendencies, and this one was no different. “Ok, with these new telescopes we can now see more comets — they must be signs from God that the world is ending.”
In short (or not-so-short), I see Dee as being rooted in Medieval thinking, yet, like many of his time, having to find new ways to integrate all the new science (which many then called “natural magic”) into his understanding of the world. For me, that *is* what the Early Modern period is about.
Now, if we think of the Early Modern period as the beginning of an era not just of science, but of man’s authority over and control of the world through science, as opposed to a Medieval view of man as being in some way a passive victim of, or at least just another part of, nature — then Dee definitely falls into the latter. His focus is always on understanding the world, through the tools both old and new at his disposal. It is never on using these tools to control the world, despite the Agrippa-like messages of the ‘Angelic Conversations.’
Also, do you see John Dee as an antecedent in any way to “The Enlightenment”?
Antecedent, certainly. Question is, how much impact did he really have? Certainly very little in terms of philosophy, but perhaps more than some realize in terms of science and ’scientism.’ Both directly and through Ashmole (and perhaps even the Rosicrucian movement), Dee was a great influence on Newton, who is often considered one of the leading lights of the scientific influence upon Enlightenment thought.
However, there is very little that I would call Enlightenment thinking in Dee himself. He was still strongly religious, if unorthodox, and there is certainly no hint of the “absent watchmaker” in his views on God.
