He did coin the term, which to him meant the restored Empire of Arthur, King of the Britons. However, to uncover the full story we must set Dee's writings about an Atlantic ‘British Empire’ in the context of Elizabethan Court politics and contemporary European events.1 That context enables Dee's General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577) and his manuscripts, ‘On the Limits of the British Empire’ and ‘Of Famous and Rich Discoveries’, to shed new light on the Elizabethan Court and Dee's contemporary world. For those writings were actually advice aimed at Elizabeth and her Privy Councillors on how to deal with a domestic and international crisis in the 1570s and 1580s, which would determine English history for centuries to come. Those intervening centuries have persuaded the modern world to associate the British Empire with the spread of forward-looking Protestantism, first through American discovery and colonisation, and then throughout the globe.2 There was, however, nothing very Protestant about Dee, or his ‘British Empire’, which looked back to the ancient past.
What do You think about The Arch Conjuror Of England?
