John Dee and the 'Holy Art' of Alchemy

Event details

In his enigmatic alchemical treatise Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), the Renaissance polymath John Dee presented his dedicatee, Maximilian II, with a hieroglyphic symbol which – he tells him – ‘teaches without words’ (sine verbis docet). Dee promises that this geometrically-constructed glyph contains knowledge of a range of disciplines beyond alchemy (including astronomy and optics) and is also a ‘sacred art of writing’ like that of the ancient Egyptian priests. In his long dedicatory letter to Maximilian, Dee doesn’t seem able to make up his mind whether he is creating a new discipline or recovering an ancient art which had been lost. Whilst Dee is quote boastful about the novelty and originality of his work, in this paper I will reveal some of the very real debts it owed both to ‘ancient’ and more recent doctrines that Dee had been studying in the 1550s.

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