Her voice was full of good humor and entreaty, and Alex was delighted at her passion for the subject. He listened appreciatively while she narrated with skill her understanding of the atmosphere of the time. The Elizabethan world had an eclectic mix of inhabitants: politicians, theologians, poets and playwrights, explorers and glamorous old sea dogs like Raleigh and Drake. But the population also included an extraordinary array of spirits—fairies, demons, witches, ghosts, sprites—both good and ill: and conjurors to talk to them. It was totally within the fabric of their world for Spenser’s great epic poem to be about a fairy queen, and for Hamlet’s troubles to be set in motion by the ghost. This fascinating blend of the physical and the ethereal worlds owed as much to a philosophy of occult thought at the most intellectual level as it did to a tradition of superstitions and folkloric influences. It drew on a legacy of magic and cabala, inherited from the great Neoplatonists of the Italian renaissance. The aim was to comprehend the deepest spheres of hidden knowledge, blurring scientific and spiritual thoughts.

“The face of this movement in Britain was John Dee.”

Alex had been absorbed, admiring her professional control of the flow of so much complicated information; but when she came to Dee—the man he knew as the lecturer on Euclid—he was puzzled. “It’s hard to digest this—a man who’s famous as a mathematician of some genius, obviously, but who is also infamous as a conjuror. I wonder how he was able to reconcile for himself these scientific and occult interests.”

“Hold on to the fact that at that time, even mathematics was regarded as a subject very close to the ‘black arts.’ Calculating was an uncomfortably close relative of conjuration and the casting of astrological charts.”

Alex laughed at this, as it reminded him privately of Will’s distaste for math—the devil’s subject, he’d always called it to Alex while he’d finished his younger brother’s math prep for him. “And yet Dee always maintained a sober claim to be a devout Christian, from what Calvin told us—and even a supporter of the Tudor religious Reformation?”