Dr. John Dee's Library

[Paul Ferguson]

"'The whole Renaissance is in this library.' This is how Frances A. Yates described John Dee’s library in her Theatre of the World (1969, p. 12). Others similarly claimed that his collection constituted the scientific academy of Renaissance England. With its three to four thousand volumes, Dee’s library in Mortlake was indeed not only the largest library compiled in Elizabethan England but also the most comprehensive, representing virtually every aspect of classical, medieval and Renaissance learning."

https://archaeologyofreading.org/john-de...or-corpus/

[Paul Ferguson]

See also Dee's annotations of Gerhard Dorn 's Chymisticum artificium naturæ, theoricum & practicum:

"...the work is not heavily annotated by Dee but, a note on the title page suggests why this work might have caught his attention. He states that Dorn has used the hieroglyphic monad, Dee’s symbol for the unity of the cosmos, as his basis for drawing the symbols in the Chymisticum artificium natura. The symbol was the subject of a short explication that Dee published in 1564, and Dee speculates that this must have been Dorn’s source for the work, done apparently without Dee’s knowledge or consent."

https://archaeologyofreading.org/bibliog...rpus/dorn/