Research vault
Background notes on subjects this collection holds: what a thing actually is, where the primary documents are, and what can and cannot be established about it.
These are not the library speaking. Each note was commissioned from an outside research tool and is published under its own name, as received. They are a weaker kind of claim than the study, which only says what it can recompute, or the readings, which argue from the books themselves.
What can be checked is checked. Where a note makes a claim about the words a primary source uses, the build opens this library’s own copy and counts them, and prints the result at the foot of the note whether it helps the argument or not.
- The Enochian languageWhat John Dee and Edward Kelley actually recorded, what the surviving manuscripts contain, and why the question "is it a real language?" has more than one honest answer.11 volumes in this library bear on it
- Hebrew and LatinThe analysis the next note answers — why Hebrew and Latin are not sister languages, the one thing they do share, where they touched, and what a Renaissance chart is really lining up.10 volumes in this library bear on it
- Latin and HebrewTwo languages that share an alphabet and nothing else — how Phoenician letters reached both, why their word-building is incompatible, and where a Renaissance assumption put a relationship that was never there.7 volumes in this library bear on it
- Christian KabbalahHow Renaissance humanists read Jewish Kabbalah as secret proof of Christian doctrine — Reuchlin's inserted letter, Dee's geometric alphabet, and what became of the idea afterwards.17 volumes in this library bear on it
- The Monas HieroglyphicaJohn Dee's single composite glyph of 1564, its four parts and its twenty-four theorems — checked, theorem by theorem, against the two copies of the book this library holds.6 volumes in this library bear on it