Miss Taken wrote:Fortigorn, thanks.
Can you give sources for him not engaging in the wife swapping episode with Kelley. I thought he reluctantly succumbed and that was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak in terms of their continuing relationship...
I'll see if I can check out the sources I used.
I will look over my sources again. I have read them pretty closely, and the most I can say is that I wasn't able to tell if he went through with it or not. The sources aren't clear. What I can say is that the whole issue hinged on Kelley sleeping with Jane. Dee had no interest in sleeping with Kelley's wife, and that was undoubtedly because of his faithfulness to Jane.
This is from Smith's biography ('John Dee', Charlotte Smith, 1909), emphasis mine:
Kelley affects not to understand, [the vision] but after more hesitation expounds to Dee that the sharing is to be in everything, even of their wives. All things are to be in common between them. Dee, to whom Madimi is invisible, though he hears her voice, fiercely rebukes her: “Such words are unmeet for any godly creature to use. Are the commandments of God to be broken?” This participation, he insists to Kelley, can be meant only in a Christian and godly sense. Kelley construes the injunction very differently, but he affects a chaste horror and swears for the hundredth time that he will deal no more with the spirits.
[...]
Dee protested and argued with Kelley and with Madimi. He was consumed with grief and amazement that good angels could propound “so hard and unpure a doctrine.”
[...]
Until two in the morning of this April 18, 1587, the pair sat up arguing, talking, praying.
[...]
Dee replied that he had found so much halting and untruth in Kelley’s reports of actions when he was not present, that he would believe nothing save what by better trial he found to be true. But at last his resistance seemed to be overridden, and in the chill of the early morning he went to bed, heavy at heart in spite of his delusion. His poor wife was lying awake, wondering what turn their illstarred fortunes were next to take.
“`Jane,’ I said, `I can see that there is no other remedy, but as hath been said of our cross-matching, so it must needs be done.’“ Poor Mrs. Dee, shocked and horrified, fell a-weeping and trembling for a full quarter of an hour, then burst into a fury of anger. At last she implored her husband never to leave her. “I trust,” said she, “that though I give myselfe thus to be used, that God will turn me into a stone before he would suffer me in my obedience to receive any shame or inconvenience.”
[...]
In obedience to Raphael’s counsel, a solemn pact or covenant was humbly drawn up by Dee on the 21st, and signed by these four strange partners in delusion. It promised blind obedience, with secrecy upon pain of death to any of the four.
[...]
Dee’s hand is unmistakable in the document. He regarded the new development apparently only as a symbol of further spiritual union, and a means of obtaining a closer entrance into the secrets of all knowledge. It was no matter to him, he says, if the women were imperfectly obedient. “If it offend not God, it offended not mee, and I pray God it did not offend him.”
Kelley drew up a paper the day after Dee’s, washing his hands of the whole matter, protesting that he did not believe so damnable a doctrine would be commanded, recounting his warnings to his worshipful Master Dee, and so on. On May 6 Dee spread his covenant, a document of the most truly devout character, before the holy south table in the chapel of the castle, with many prayers for divine guidance. The next day Kelley obtained the paper, cut it in pieces and destroyed it, made away with one of the crystals (which was found again under Mrs. Dee’s pillow), and threatened to depart elsewhere with John Carpio. Coldness and jealousy fell between the pair.
So ended the whole extraordinary episode of the Talbot- Kelley spiritualistic revelations.
As you can see, Smith doesn't provide sufficient information to make a determination one way or another. Perhaps she is being coy, but there's enough in what she recounts to leave open the possibility that the revelation was never acted on.
The account given by Calder ('John Dee Studied as an English Neoplatonist', PhD dissertation, R. F. Calder, 1952), is more definite, but not necessarily more accurate (emphasis mine):
The whole pathetic story, with the exception of a few painful lines toward the end of the manuscript which Dee later partly blotted out, but which may still be read, is printed by Casaubon in the T rue and Faithful Relatio n (243). Dee found himself in a cleft stick. He had pledged his soul as to the “angels” truth, there was now no mistaking the unequivocal but seemingly monstrous nature of their commands, but any show of hesitation on Dee’s or others’ parts about accepting this particular revelation threw Kelly into a violent frenzy, when he would threaten to abandon skrying altogether, claiming his cause about the diabolic origin of the spirits to be proved.
Thus Jane Dee and his [Kelley's] own wife raised a shocked outcry when they were first informed of what was afoot, and Kelly took the opportunity to insist that if it were lawful for the women to harbour
doubts of the spirits, then it was permissible to him to indulge his own, and vowed “I will from this day forth meddle no more herein.”
The “doctrine” was at last fulfilled; almost immediately afterwards there is a gap in Dee’s record extending over nineteen years. But it seems that Kelly, his conscience unable to sustain the weight of sin imposed upon it by continued association and conformity with such a besottedly deluded follower of the promptings of the devil as Dee, departedshortly after.
Calder gives no source for his statement that the 'revelation' was 'at last fulfilled', and chooses not to provide any details (in some ways more coy than Smith), so I'm actually uncertain as to precisely how far it went.
