1. The ‘angelic conversations’ were crystallomantic visions reported to Dee by various ‘skryers’ or crystalgazers working in his employ between 1581 and 1607. The records of these skrying sessions can be found in British Library, Sloane MS 3188 (the Libri Mysteriorum, hereinafter referred to by the abbreviation ‘Lib. Myst.’) and in Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1790, art. 1, and British Library, MS Cotton Appendix XLVI, 2 vols. The majority of the extant angelic conversations conducted after 28 May 1583 were printed (albeit inaccurately) in Meric Casaubon’s A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for many Yeers between Dr John Dee… and Some Spirits (London, 1659). A True & Faithful Relation is hereinafter referred to as TFR
2. A previously unknown additional manuscript source was published by C. H. Josten in ‘An Unknown Chapter in the Life of John Dee’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965): 223–57.
3. For a comprehensive survey of the kinds of magical manuscripts which came down to the sixteenth century see Frank Klaasen, ‘English Manuscripts of Magic, 1300–1500: A Preliminary Survey’, in Claire Fanger, ed., Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Mediaeval Ritual Magic (Stroud, 1998 ), 3–31
4. On the angelogical tradition see David Keck, Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford and New York, 1998).
5. For a list of manuscripts that record shorter, and less- detailed, accounts of spiritual encounters see Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London and New York, 1988), 280 n.108.