> Subject: [HM] Dr. John Dee - secret agent?
> In David Kahn "The Codebreakers" (New York: Macmillan, 1967),
> page 866 reads "Dee...made a gift of [the Voynich manuscript]
> to Rudolf [Holy Roman Emperor Rudoft II], perhaps on behalf
> of [Queen] Elizabeth, for whom he was serving at Rudolf's court
> as a scret political agent."
>
> Can anybody confirm whether Dr. John Dee was in fact a secret
> agent for Queen Elizabeth?
>-- End of excerpt from James A Landau
Good question. This secret agent theory is asserted in two books
by 'Richard Deacon', one a biography of Dee, the other about the
English secret service, both dating from the 1960s. ('Deacon' is
apparently the pseudonym of Donald McCormick, a newspaperman.)
Serious Dee scholars and historians of the English secret service
pretty much agree that Deacon made it all up. (But Robert Hooke
apparently thought the same thing: I have seen citations to, but
not checked up on, _The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke_, (London,
1705), pp.205-206.)
There are two other questionable bits in the quoted snippet from
Kahn: 1, it is only conjecture that Dee gave the mysterious Voynich
manuscript to Rudolf. (The earliest documentary evidence on the
provenance of the ms, a 1666 letter addressed to Athanasius
Kircher -- now MS 408A in the Beinecke Library at Yale -- does not
mention Dee by name), and 2, it is not really known if Dee was
properly a doctor.
It might make sense to pose your question to the John Dee list,
JOHN_DEE@fre.fsu.umd.edu, and to the Voynich MS list,
voynich@rand.org
-- Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USAreeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178