In summer 2018, Megan Piorko was deep into research for her doctoral dissertation on 16th- and 17th-century alchemist and physician Arthur Dee. On a beautiful London day, she called up a little-studied alchemical notebook from the archives of the British Library, Sloane MS 1902. Immediately, Piorko was intrigued. The notebook, to which both Dee and his famous alchemist, polymath father, John Dee, had contributed, was “odd,” she says. The fabric and leather-bound manuscript has 31 leaves of both parchment and paper. Certain pages are written upside down, so Piorko had…
