John Dee’s ideas and plans for a national research institute

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Abstract

John Dee’s arrangements at his Mortlake house have received some attention as an English ‘academy’ or ‘experimental household.’ His ideas for St Cross, which he requested as a suitable living in 1592, have received less detailed attention. This paper examines Mortlake and his St Cross plans in detail and argues that, at their core, they shared an aspiration to create a national research institute. These plans are related to the context of Dee’s pursuit of royal patronage and his idea of the social and intellectual role of the natural philosopher. His ideas for a research institute are also placed in the context of alternatives to traditional sites of learning, including contemporary academies, princely courts, and independent establishments, indicating that Dee’s ideas, while part of a Renaissance vogue for such alternatives, were independent of other models. Discussion includes the historiographic debate regarding openness versus secrecy in the pursuit of natural knowledge. Finally, Dee’s ideas are contrasted with Francis Bacon’s proposal for a research institute, which also originated in the 1590s and culminated in ‘Solomon’s House.’

Introduction

John Dee’s Compendious rehearsall of 1592 has been a mainstay for Dee’s biography, providing the most comprehensive, if not uniformly trustworthy, personal account of his life (Dee, 1851b, pp. 1–45). This was not, however, an autobiography produced in reflective leisure; it was the product of a crisis in Dee’s campaign to recover royal patronage that is detailed in Glyn Parry’s contribution to this volume (Parry, 2011). Dee’s account of his life is focused on highlighting ‘the very great injuries, damages, and indignities, which for these last nyne years he hath in England sustained’, as well as his scholarly reputation and previous service to Elizabeth, as justification for compensation and substantial future support (Dee, 1851b, pp. 2, 6–23). It is in this context that the climax of Dee’s appeal comes in the penultimate chapter, where he outlines why the most suitable position for him would be the Mastership of the Hospital of St Cross, an endowed almshouse outside of Winchester (ibid., pp. 39–41).

What Dee presents here are rather elaborate plans for what might be termed a national research institute. These plans never came to fruition and so might be dismissed as a fantasy on Dee’s part, but they had a touchstone in reality as elaborations of actual arrangements that Dee had previously developed at his Mortlake house. These practices, and their elaboration in his plans for St Cross, were a pioneering, if rudimentary, type of research institute, which are interesting in their own right and for their bearing on issues of sites of learning and the institutionalization of the pursuit of natural knowledge in early modern Europe. Use of the term ‘research institute’ with its association with modern institutions that have that designation may seem patently anachronistic. The justification is that, on the one hand, there is no contemporary term for what Dee seems to have aspired to, and on the other, Anthony Grafton has referred to Matthias Flacius Illyricus’ 1550s ‘Institutum Historicum’ in Magdeburg as ‘the first endowed, full-time research institute in the history of modern Europe’ (Grafton, 2009, pp. 105–107). Following Grafton, my usage of ‘research institute’ denotes an organization with an endowment, a staff, and facilities engaged in full-time investigation and production of knowledge. Flacius’ organization also included a hierarchical division of labour among teams and individuals that Grafton sees foreshadowing Francis Bacon’s ‘Solomon’s House’, but I do not think this feature is an essential or universal constituent of all research institutes (ibid., pp. 108–111). Dee’s plans for St Cross map onto key elements that Grafton has identified in Flacius’ institute and were the culmination of activities that Dee began at Mortlake. While for both Dee and Bacon such institutions were to serve the advancement of natural knowledge in support of a program of enhanced royal and national power and prestige, there were fundamental differences between the two.

What I will present on Dee has not gone unnoticed, but I think it deserves more systematic attention than it has received. In his 1937 Astronomical thought in Renaissance England, Francis Johnson, commenting on the state of English scientific learning in the sixteenth century, said in reference to Dee’s home at Mortlake, ‘where his library, his laboratory, and his astronomical instruments were located’, that ‘during the third quarter of the century, John Dee and his friends and pupils constituted the scientific academy of England’ (1968, pp. 137–38). Johnson did not do more to delve into the nature of this ‘academy’, presumably because the institutional framework of sites of knowledge was not his main subject, which is surely the case of the ‘subsequent scholars’ who Sherman regrets have been ‘surprisingly slow to answer—and in many cases to ask’ the many questions Johnson’s comment should raise (Sherman, 1995, pp. 29–30). Sherman’s study of Dee’s ‘politics of reading and writing’ certainly makes a major contribution to exploring important aspects of Dee’s institution at Mortlake, but, given his focus on ‘reading and writing’ and his agenda to reveal a Dee other than the magus and natural philosopher, he gives most attention to Dee’s library and political consulting.1 Sherman certainly contributes much to evoking the concrete ‘social and spatial circumstances’ of Dee’s activities, giving us a substantial picture of the ways his library functioned also as a museum and academy where ‘independent scholarship’ was pursued and circulated among ‘academic, commercial, and political communities’ (Sherman, 1995, pp. 19, 23, 45). While he argues that Dee bridged the poles separating the secretive occultist and open humanistic styles that Hannaway associated with the contrasting laboratory designs of Tycho Brahe and Andreas Libavius, Sherman’s purpose was not to address the larger issue of scientific institutions that has developed within the history of science (Sherman, 1995, Hannaway, 1986). Deborah Harkness grappled more directly with Mortlake as a site of natural philosophical knowledge in which the ‘household bridged the gap between monastery [and university] and laboratory as a site for the practice of natural philosophy’ (Harkness, 1997, pp. 248–49). But as her title, ‘Managing an experimental household’, suggests, her significant contribution was to situate Dee’s activities in the domestic sphere and to highlight the role of Jane Dee as a partner in running the experimental household, and the tensions created for both John and Jane by the conflict between John’s need for privacy in his occult pursuits and the semi-public nature of the experimental household.

Section snippets

Dee and Mortlake

Despite these previous notices, I think there is more that can be said about Dee’s experimental household and the ambitions he came to entertain. Mortlake in the sixteenth century was a small village eight miles upstream on the Thames river from London and on the road to Richmond and other palaces further upstream. The Dee house was next to the river on the north side of the main road, almost across from the church of St Mary the Virgin. The house had an open courtyard and was set in gardens

St Cross

Dee’s appeal in 1592 for renewed support in the form of the Mastership of St Cross was very much an attempt to reconstitute and expand the research activities of Mortlake into a more developed institution. Although he still had Mortlake as a residence, it had suffered during his six years’ absence: his household furnishings sold or dispersed, some of the library and instruments missing or damaged, and the alchemical laboratories and their furnishings lost or in disrepair (ibid., pp. 31–32). As

Dee’s inspiration: possible models

Dee’s groping toward an idea of a research institute was similar to other Renaissance initiatives to develop alternative sites of learning to the traditional sites: the universities and religious orders. The old stereotype of the universities, as ossified and backward descendants of the medieval period, is no longer tenable. Recent studies have revealed the vigour of new teaching and new subjects in private tutorials and new colleges that supplemented the traditionalism of statutory curricular

Dee’s inspiration: the role of the sage

As the culmination of Dee’s appeal for royal support in 1594, he emphasized the benefits that would accrue to Elizabeth. Among the ‘good fruite likely to ensue’ from Elizabeth’s support for his plans for St Cross, Dee promises that,

diverse antient, rare, and excellent good monumentes, historicall and philosophicall, and also late invented and written bookes, of no vulgar argument, may come to be either faire written for her Majesties use, and her libraries, or else to be published by print. (

Dee and Francis Bacon

Referring to Bacon’s earliest proposal for an institution to support the pursuit of knowledge in the 1594/5 Gesta Grayorum, William Sherman has observed that ‘at Mortlake, during the previous decades, Dee had created just such an institution’ (Sherman, 1995, p. 37). Anthony Grafton has seconded Sherman by placing ‘the English research institute that, as William Sherman has shown, grew up around John Dee’s famous library at Mortlake’ in the ‘rich tapestry of sixteenth-century scientific life’

Conclusion

This essay has attempted to put Dee’s idea of an institutional place for the philosopher at the head of a research institute into central focus and high relief. More than a domestic residence that encompassed the pursuit of natural knowledge, an ‘experimental household’, the wide variety of pursuits carried out at Mortlake gave it the character of a multidisciplinary research centre serving a number of different constituents. These ideas came into clearer focus as an endowed, full time research

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my interlocutors at the John Dee Quatercentenary Conference and two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions that have improved this essay in important ways.

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