Message #26310

[Bianca]

                                      




Personal life

Dee was married twice and had eight children. Details of his first marriage are sketchy, but is likely to have been from 1565 to his wife's death in around 1576. From 1577 to 1601 Dee kept a meticulous diary.  In 1578 he married the twenty-three year old Jane Fromond (Dee was fifty-one at the time).

She was to be the wife that Kelley claimed Uriel had demanded that he and Dee share, and although Dee complied for a while this eventually caused the two men to part company.  Jane died during the plague in Manchester in 1605, along with a number of his children: Theodore is known to have died in Manchester, but although no records exist for his daughters Madinia, Frances and Margaret after this time, Dee had by this time ceased keeping his diary.                                                                 

His eldest son was Arthur Dee, about whom Dee wrote a letter to his headmaster at Westminster School which echos the worries of boarding school parents in every century; Arthur was also an alchemist and hermetic author.

John Aubrey gives the following description of Dee: "He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist's gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit.... A very fair, clear sanguine complexion... a long beard as white as milk. A very handsome man."