John Dee's Angelic Diaries: the Long Journey of the Manuscripts

Of all John Dee's manuscripts, those with the most eventful life are the diaries of his sessions with Edward Kelley, which began in 1582. In those notebooks Dee recorded the messages Kelley claimed to receive from angelic beings through a stone or a mirror, including the letter tables that make up the so-called Enochian language. After their author's death, those papers passed from hand to hand for more than a century.

Robert Cotton and Meric Casaubon

Part of the diaries entered the library of the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), a celebrated collector of medieval manuscripts. Those leaves were studied by the theologian Meric Casaubon, son of the philologist Isaac, who in 1659 published a large edition in London under the title A True and Faithful Relation. The book, opened by a long preface, presented the sessions as an example of diabolical deception suffered by a learned man.

Casaubon's aim was polemical: in the religious climate of seventeenth-century England he wanted to expose the dangers of spiritual enthusiasm. Paradoxically, that very edition brought the angelic conversations to a wide audience and secured their lasting fortune. Cotton's library later passed to the state and became part of the British Museum; today those manuscripts are in the British Library.

The Recovered Chest

Another group of papers had an almost novelistic fate, known through the account left by Elias Ashmole. According to this testimony, a chest that had belonged to Dee was bought by a London couple; years later a secret drawer full of manuscripts was discovered in it, and some of them are said to have been used for household purposes before anyone grasped their value.

Ashmole managed to obtain the surviving leaves in 1672 and studied them carefully, transcribing large portions. Among them were the first books of the sessions, earlier than those edited by Casaubon. Today Dee's original diaries are kept largely in the British Library, in the Cotton and Sloane collections, while many of Ashmole's transcriptions and notes are at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The Objects of the Sessions

Alongside the books, some objects traditionally associated with Dee have survived. The British Museum holds an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, owned in the eighteenth century by the writer Horace Walpole, who linked it to the Elizabethan scholar; it also holds wax discs engraved with seals and a crystal sphere. The provenance of these objects is reconstructed with varying degrees of certainty and should be treated with caution.

The Aztec mirror is a reminder that sixteenth-century Europe received from the Americas not only goods but also objects charged with ritual meaning, reinterpreted through European categories. In the hands of an English collector, a Mesoamerican religious artefact could become an instrument of vision, and later a museum curiosity. The path of these objects is, on a small scale, the same as that of the manuscripts.

The story of these papers shows how much an author's reputation can depend on those who keep and publish his manuscripts. Without Cotton, Casaubon and Ashmole, the angelic conversations might survive only as rumour. Thanks to them, they have become one of the most studied sources for understanding the relationship between science, religion and vision in late sixteenth-century England.