Inside the List

Tina Jordan, "Inside the List," New York Times Book Review, Oct. 7, 2018, p. 24.

     In the summer of 1994, not long after finishing her dissertation, [1] Deborah Harkness stumbled on a long-lost manuscript in the stacks of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library. "It once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee [2]. It was called 'The Book of Soyga,' and he prized it above all of his other texts. I found it, hiding in plain sight, among the Bodley manuscripts," [3] she says. Harkness -- now a historian of science and medicine at the University of California -- wove the experience into her best-selling All Souls trilogy, a rich, sprawling historical fantasy about a vampire scientist, a history professor who discovers she's a witch and an enchanted manuscript a the Bodleian. 

 COMMENT

     On Oct. 7, 2018 Harkness' novel Time's Convert was #3 on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. Her inspiration was a manuscript that people knew about, but up until 1994 nobody knew of any extant copy.  I can only imagine the thrill!  Finding and and holding that piece of history inspired the invention of an  entire fictional world populated by supernatural characters. 

    The most exciting thing I ever found in the stacks was a set of uncatalogued Alta Avalanche Studies recording early experiments that led to modern avalanche control techniques.  It's not nearly as exciting as finding The Book of Soyga, but I still remember the astonishment and the prickle of recognition when I realized that I was holding piece of history. I have never felt anything like that spooky sense of touching history looking at a digital reproduction. I believe that a digitized copy of The Book of Soyga might have had equal utility for writing a PhD thesis, but I doubt it would have ever inspired a series of bestselling novels. 

[1] Deborah E. Harkness, “The Scientific Reformation: John Dee and the Restitution of Nature” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Davis, 1994).
[2] Deborah E. Harkness. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[3] The Bodley Manuscripts are a miscellaneous collection of manuscripts formed at Oxford University in 1761.