Putting the Manuscripts in Print

The larger contribution is editorial. Over many years, working with collaborators, he has produced editions of primary magical manuscripts, above all the working papers of John Dee and a range of grimoire material that had circulated for centuries in copies. The importance of that is easy to state. For most of the modern period, the Western magical tradition was known to its own practitioners through quotation, paraphrase and revised versions, produced by orders and authors who had an interest in what the material was taken to say, and the manuscripts they were working from were in private hands or in library collections that few people could reach.

Printing the manuscripts changes the standard of argument. A claim about what a text contains becomes checkable, a nineteenth century revision can be compared with the seventeenth century source it was made from, and the accumulated corrections and inventions become visible as such. The principle generalises well beyond this subject and the atlas follows it: an edition is worth more than a synthesis, because a synthesis asks to be believed and an edition can be tested. Where a reader of this atlas meets a magical text, the question to ask first is which edition, from which manuscript, and edited by whom.