Abstract

Despite the later prominence of apocalypticism in John Dee’s ‘angelic conversations’ in the years 1583–85, his correspondence with Roger Edwardes in 1580 about the correct interpretation of eschatological passages in the bible has received surprisingly little attention in Dee scholarship. In this article I give an account of Edwardes’s ill-fated political career, and the apocalyptical writings which he sent to divines in England and Germany for validation. These apocalyptical reflections, which Dee called ‘the boke of Domes Day’, were the subject of the Dee–Edwardes correspondence. Whereas the divines with whom he corresponded were largely lukewarm, Edwardes found a sympathetic reader in Dee. I conclude by considering the significance of the Dee–Edwardes correspondence for Dee’s increasingly apocalyptical outlook, which began in 1564 with prophecies concerning the Habsburg dynasty in his Monashieroglyphica, and reached a fever pitch in the 1580s when he began working with the ‘skryer’ Edward Kelley. The careers of Dee and Edwardes have in common a belief in inspired exegesis and prophetic singularity, and I show that one can detect traces of Edwardes’s concern for the redemption of the Jewish people in Dee’s angelic writings.