A Table of the World as 1584 Knew It

What makes the Liber Scientiae unusual among angelic books is that it is a geography. The ninety one Parts of the Earth are matched to named regions, and the regions are those of a late sixteenth century European world picture: the provinces of the classical geographers, the kingdoms of Europe, the parts of Africa and Asia that reached Elizabethan London as names. There is nothing timeless about the list. It reflects what was on the maps John Dee owned, and Dee owned one of the largest libraries in England. That gives the book a double character. Read as angelic doctrine it assigns each region its governors and its Aethyr. Read as a document it records what a learned Englishman of the 1580s believed the divisions of the world to be, which is why historians of geography have found it interesting quite apart from its magical content.

The material was received in sessions where Edward Kelley reported what he saw in the stone and Dee wrote it down. Dee's role as recorder is why anything survives at all: he kept the working books, dated the sessions and preserved corrections, so the corpus can be studied as a sequence rather than as a finished revelation. The nature of Kelley's part in it, whether vision, invention or something between, was disputed in Dee's own lifetime and remains so.