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Foreword
The centers of learning in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are usually associated with the great universities in Italy, France, and Germany, whereas London has been considered, more or less, a backwater of intellectual activity. It was, however, due to the influence of the well-educated and enlightened Queen Elizabeth that new openness to and encouragement of new ways of thinking began to thrive throughout England. This was particularly true in the fields of mathematics and natural philosophy.
It was in England, a generation before Galileo in Italy, that John Dee was applying empiricism as a means to investigate nature. This approach was anathema at many of the major philosophical centers. Although better known as a mystic and necromancer, Dee was also an exceptional mathematician, an experimenter in optics and ballistic trajectories, and Europe's foremost authority on mathematical methods of celestial navigation.
Leonard Digges and his son Thomas were influenced by Dee's empirical approach, and they contributed their own significant advances in