John Dee - Early Life

Tower of London

John Dee was born in the Tower Ward of London on July 13, 1527 to Roland Dee and Jane Wilde Dee.  John's father Roland was in the textile business, and his mother had an inheritance from her father, William Wilde of Milton-next-Gravesend in Kent.  John was born into a world that was being shaken by unprecedented change:

1492 Christopher Columbus discovers the "New World"
1514 Copernicus drafts (though doesn't yet publish) his heliocentric model of the universe

1517 Martin Luther's 95 Theses set in motion the Protestant Reformation

1519-1522 First circumnavigation of the globe (Magellan-Elcano Expedition)

1527 King Henry VIII begins to seek annulment from Katherine of Aragon, leading eventually to England's break with Rome.

All of these events shaped the world into which John Dee was born and hence the course of his life.

The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror in the early 1080s

John Dee was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith at the church of St. Dunstan's in the East, which at the time would have been an imposing parish church, richly decorated by the members of the wealthy guilds in that area of London.  Now it is a ruin, but it has been preserved by the city of London and now serves as a park, as shown in the five pictures below.

The namesake of the church, St. Dunstan, lived from 909 to 988 and was an abbot of Glastonbury, a bishop of London, and an archbishop of Canterbury.  He was later canonized and was considered a patron saint of goldsmiths and, thus, alchemists.  Given Dee's later associations with Arthurian lore (which involves Glastonbury) and with alchemy, it seems somehow appropriate that the church in which he was baptized and raised was named for this particular saint.

 The area of London in which John Dee grew up was a busy center of commerce.  The quays near the Billingsgate Docks bustled with ships bringing goods into the capital city.  Nearby streets were Cheapside, the thoroughfare for London's main market, known as a "cheap," and Lombard Street named for the northern Italian merchants who had settled there in the twelfth century.   Dee's father was a mercer, and the family was of middling income, but Roland worked hard to improve his lot in order to be able to provide connections and an education for his son.  Eventually Roland Dee became a "gentleman sewer" to the king (which doesn't necessarily mean he sewed the king's clothing, but he was probably involved with buying and maintaining fabrics for the king's palaces and garments).  This put Roland into contact with the king, and thus in position for reward for good services.  In 1544, King Henry VIII appointed Roland Dee to the position of "Packer to the Strangers" - a position in which he assessed customs on exports by foreigners and charged fees for packing them.  By 1541, Roland Dee was one of the wealthiest merchants in St. Dunstan's.  The rise in the Dee fortunes allowed Roland to provide his son John with an education.  After his grammar school training, John Dee entered St. John's College, Cambridge in 1542.

The pictures above and below are of St. John's College as it looked in 2016 on my first sabbatical.  It would have looked different in Dee's time.  It was a small college then and had only been founded 30 years previously.  Dee was tutored by John Cheke, one of the foremost teachers of the day and the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.  Cheke was also a tutor to Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth, both future monarchs.

Dee was very serious about his education.  He claims to have studied 18 hours a day, allowing 4 hours for sleep and 2 hours for meals.  Dee showed aptitude for mathematics at an early age.  Certainly, he had learned 'vulgar' numbers of trade in his growing-up years due to his father's business.  Dee was drawn to the geometry of Euclid, but this was not looked on favorably at Cambridge.  In fact, a fellow of the college just before Dee's time there had, in his lectures on mathematics, dismissed such manual studies as geometry as being unfit for gentlemen and unable to provide them the judgement and eloquence that could be gained by literary studies. But Dee remained devoted to geometry, eventually writing the preface to the first English edition of Euclid (1570); this preface has now become famous in its own right.

First English Edition of Euclid's Elements as displayed at RCP London 2016

Dee learned something else at Cambridge that we today might not look favorably on.  It was something that was not part of the curriculum, and this was his occult work, particularly in alchemy which seems to have been a natural outgrowth of Aristotelian philosophy.  This study served him well in his later life consulting for Queen Elizabeth I who herself was a practitioner of alchemy.

De humani corporis fabrica libri septem by Vesalius (RCP London)

 For the reasons stated at the beginning of this post, the world had turned on its head just before the time of Dee's birth, and the changes just kept coming.  It was during Dee's student days at Cambridge that two of the most important books in the scientific revolution were published a book on human anatomy by Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, and the book on the cosmos that Copernicus had drafted so many years before (but wisely waited to have published after his death), De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.  The book of Vesalius opened up the inner spaces of the human body for study, and the book of Copernicus opened up the outer spaces of the cosmos for study.  These were both published in 1543, and a foundational book on algebra, Girolamo Cardano's Ars Magna was published two years later in 1545.

De humani corporis fabrica libri septem by Vesalius (RCP London)

John Dee's serious approach to his studies paid off, and in 1546 King Henry VIII appointed him as a Junior Founding Fellow of the newly opened Trinity College, Cambridge.  There Dee was a Reader in Greek and also taught logic and sophistry.

Above the Great Gate is Trinity's founder, Henry VIII, with a rather interesting scepter.

Trinity College, Cambridge, Great Court (2016)

The college, of course, looks different now than it would have in Dee's day.  For example, the chapel, which is the building containing the clock, was not finished until 1567, which is during Dee's lifetime but after his time as a fellow there.  The fountain in the center was built in the early years of the 17th century.  A building that Dee would have been familiar with is that of the chapel of King's College, Cambridge, which was built between 1446 and 1515.  King's College is just to the south of Trinity, and St. John's is just to the north.  The chapel was begun by Henry VI of the House of Lancaster, but there is much in the details of the chapel that relate to the Tudor Dynasty that Dee is closely associated with.

Do you see the intertwined H and A in the picture below?  This was carved at the time of Henry VIII's wedding to Anne Boleyn and is part of the ceiling just below the organ.

The Tudor Rose also makes and appearance in many places inside and outside the chapel.

And so, with some digressions and tangents, I give you the early life of John Dee and the world that he was born into.  Future posts will trace more of the course of his life.