Where the Book of Soyga Survives: Sloane 8 and Bodley 908

The Book of Soyga was never recovered from a sealed vault. Its modern identification came through patient library work: two extant Latin manuscripts were recognized under the alternative title Aldaraia.

British Library: Sloane MS 8
Bodleian Library: MS Bodley 908
Identification: Deborah Harkness, 1994

Two titles, two library shelfmarks

Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor is the title that links the surviving text to Dee’s book. Roberts and Watson’s catalogue addendum lists Bodleian MS Bodley 908 and British Library Sloane MS 8 as Latin copies. It describes Sloane 8 as a folio manuscript whose early title is followed by a later hand’s description, Tractatus Astrologico Magicus. A catalogue title, a manuscript title, and a researcher’s convenient short name are related but not interchangeable pieces of evidence.

The Bodleian and British Library shelfmarks identify the two surviving manuscript books. They are not equivalent to a modern edited translation: handwriting, layout, variants, and signs of correction can change how a passage or letter grid appears in each witness. Their separate cataloguing histories also show that a shared text can survive under different descriptions until a title formula and internal tables reveal the connection.

How Harkness recognized the work

The identification is credited to historian Deborah Harkness. In a Folger Shakespeare Library interview, she recounts visiting the Bodleian after finishing research on Dee’s library, calling up a manuscript, and recognizing its magical squares and formula. She dates her discovery to 1994. The first-person account gives the event useful specificity: a scholar read a catalogued object in a library and understood it as a text that Dee scholarship had long sought.

The story is sometimes compressed into “the book was lost until 1994.” That phrase can suggest that no physical copies existed or that the original volume had been concealed. The manuscripts had survived in collections, catalogued under another title. What changed was their identification in relation to Dee’s recorded Soyga. The catalogue addendum credits Harkness with initially identifying Sloane MS 8 as Dee’s book or close relative, while also listing Bodley 908 as another copy.

What can be claimed about provenance

An Ashmole report places an Aldaraia volume formerly associated with Dee in the Duke of Lauderdale’s collection; the 1692 sale catalogue is part of the trail. Roberts and Watson note that Sloane MS 8 bears a title close enough to make it Dee’s book or a close copy, but they explicitly say neither known manuscript contains direct evidence of his ownership. Reeds evaluates the same material and considers Sloane 8 likely to be Dee’s copy. The claims differ in strength, and both should be represented as scholarly judgments.

The manuscripts agree closely but are not identical. Reeds’s comparison of the tables is especially useful because copying errors reveal relations among witnesses. A modern clean transcription can conceal this material history by smoothing away variants. The original shelfmarks identify distinct surviving books; a reconstructed grid may resolve uncertain letters differently from either one.

Worked comparison: a full tract and an executive summary

Bodley 908 devotes about sixty-five leaves to the Liber Radiorum. Sloane 8 preserves only a two-leaf shortened form of that tract, even though the two manuscripts otherwise transmit closely related material. The table layouts move in the opposite direction: Bodley fits the thirty-six arrays into eighteen leaves, while Sloane uses thirty-six. One witness is therefore fuller in a prose tract and more compressed in its tables; the other abbreviates the tract and gives each table more page space. “Complete copy” is too blunt a label for that mixed pattern.

A single cell comparison makes the family relation more precise. In Bodley’s third table, row twenty-two reverses the expected pair qk to kq; the corresponding Soyga table copied into Sloane 3189 does not carry that transposition. Elsewhere, Sloane 3189 shares an inherited generation error with the larger tradition. Reeds therefore treats the eight Loagaeth tables as genuine Soyga copies that are somewhat closer to Sloane 8, not as proof that Sloane 3189 was copied directly from Bodley. Layout, abridgement, and error patterns each answer a different question about transmission.

Source distinction

Soyga is a Latin treatise; Dee’s angelic diary books and Liber Loagaeth are separate manuscripts. A copied table is evidence of contact, not identity.

Sources and records

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