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HEAVILY ANNOTATED BY THE RENAISSANCE POLYMATH JOHN DEE. First edition, an extraordinary copy of the greatest importance, signed and heavily annotated by the celebrated English polymath John Dee (1527-1608), and later acquired and signed by John Winthrop Jr. (1606-76), the first Governor of Connecticut, whose library was one of the most important in the early American colonies. The present volume, no. 74 in Roberts & Watson s listing of Dee s 2292 printed books, is one of only three which they record as being in private hands; others are located in institutional collections on three continents. "Dee s library, the Bibliotheca Mortlacensis, was not only a monument to his scholarly interests and achievements; it was one of the great monuments of English Renaissance culture. By the time it was catalogued in 1583 he had assembled England s largest and for many subjects at least most valuable collection of books and manuscripts. Its dispersal, which began even while he lived, was perhaps the most significant redistribution of textual resources since the dissolution of the monasteries" (Sherman, p. 30). Dee s interests extended into many fields, but he published relatively little; "his ideas on many topics must be teased out from his manuscripts and from the copious notes that he entered in many of the books in his enormous library" (Grafton). "One collector provided John Dee after his death with the link with the New World which would not have been wholly uncongenial to him. The large library of John Winthrop Jr. (1606-1676), first governor of Connecticut, has been described in detail as befits one of the first major accumulations of books in the American colonies … Whether John Winthrop was able to acquire any of Dee s books as soon as they came on the market is uncertain. His first dated acquisition is the 1537 Apollonius Pergaeus which Dee had acquired in Antwerp or Louvain in 1549. Winthrop bought it in 1631 and it was probably he who added Dee s monad to the title page. As Winthrop sailed for Boston at the end of August it would have been in the barrel of books that went with him" (Roberts & Watson, p. 67). Winthrop "was especially attracted to the pansophic Christian alchemical philosophies of Paracelsus, John Dee, and the supposed secret order of the Rosicrucians" (DSB). The Opera is the first printing of any part of Apollonius Conics, "one of the greatest scientific books of antiquity" (Stillwell), alongside those of Euclid and Archimedes. It contains the first four books Books V-VII were not published until 1661, and Book VIII is lost. "Apollonius s theory of the conic sections (about 220 BCE) is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of ancient mathematics and will remain one of the great classics of mathematical literature" (Neugebauer, p. 295). To understand its importance in modern science, we need only recall that it was fundamental to Kepler s discovery in the Astronomia Nova that Mars follows an elliptical orbit, and to Galileo s finding that projectiles follow parabolic trajectories. "The verso of the flyleaf [of the present volume] bears a detailed set of notes by Dee, based chiefly but not only on the prefaces to books 1 and 4 of this text, which he annotated in the margins. These notes deal with an intricate and technical subject: the relative chronology of Hellenistic mathematicians. Dee laid out their names in brackets, in the form of a sort of a table, on the left side of the page, along with notes recording their chronological relationships to one another. In a second column on the right, Dee argued at length that Archimedes came before Apollonius" (ibid.). A complete transcription and translation of Dee s annotations, by Professor Anthony Grafton of Princeton University, is available upon request (his description of this copy has already been referred to above). Apollonius Opera is very rare OCLC lists five copies in the US (Harvard, Louisville, MIT, UNC, Yale); ABPC/RBH list only two other complete.
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