Re: Why not Dee?

[Clay Holden <cholden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Kluge wrote:

>> It does include it: "630 Ducatos illi exhibuimus coram Deo".
>
>This *may* be what Brumbaugh was refering to, but it seems odd that he or his
>source would confuse what is normally called Dee's "diary" with the _True
>and Faithful Relation_, would spell "ducats" as "doucats" in translating
>the phrase from Latin to English, and would put a translated phrase in
>quotation marks without so indicating, making it appear to be a direct quote.

The material transcribed in _A True and Faithful Relation_ *is* a
significant portion of Dee's *esoteric* diaries for the period of late 1583
through 1587 (with some later entries from the end of Dee's life). In my
line of research, the spirit diaries (Sloane MS. 3188 and Cotton Appendix
LXVI in particular) are more frequently referred to as Dee's "diaries" than
the mundane materials found in his "Private Diaries".

Without having time at the moment to reference my microfilm copy of the
Cotton Appendix material from which the "TFR" is drawn, I would note that
Casaubon's typesetters paid little attention to the spelling or
capitalization in the original MS. (the man who transcribed the material
was *not* Casaubon, BTW), so the published material is in no way
authoritative. There are in fact many changes of spellings from the
original source to be found on nearly every page of the book.

The variant spellings of "duckettes", "duckats", "duckatts" or "doucats"
seems only to serve as demonstration that spelling conventions were very
slippery in the late 16th-century, and does not seem to me to be otherwise
significant (Dee used variant spellings of numerous words throughout his
diaries, oftentimes even within the same session on the same day).

I will see if I can dig out the original quote this weekend, when I do the
rest of my archival dig.

Incidentally, my preliminary observations entirely support Rafal's findings
regarding Dee's orthography of the character "8".

Clay