John Dee in Bohemia: The Angelic Covenant of 21 April 1587

What this episode covers

In April 1587 in a Bohemian household at Třeboň, the angel Madimi instructed John Dee and Edward Kelley to share their wives. Dee drew up a covenant, all four signed on 21 April 1587, and the page survives in the British Library. Seventy-two years later an Anglican churchman published the diary to discredit him, and the book shaped Dee's posthumous reputation as a deluded magus for 250 years. This article reads what is actually in the diary, who the man was who wrote it, and why every modern scholarly reading of John Dee still has to process the same five pages.

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