The Book and the Stone: The Witnesses of Time • Volume I

When every witness can be corrected, who decides what counts as truth? In 1577, David Chytraeus joins the Lutheran theologians laboring to give the divided churches of Germany a confession they can publicly defend. Every sentence must withstand Scripture, history, political suspicion, and the scrutiny of men who know how easily a correction can become a distortion. In England, the mathematician and philosopher John Dee searches for a master key to the restoration of lost wisdom. His instrument is not a council or a printed book, but a polished stone—and Edward Kelley alone can report what appears within it. As royal ambitions, calendar reform, correspondence from Constantinople, and the purported speech of angels draw Dee’s household eastward, the same problem confronts both enterprises: What makes a witness trustworthy, and who possesses the authority to judge it? Moving from the Frankfurt Book Fair, Kloster Berge, and Rostock to Mortlake, Kraków, and Prague, The Book and the Stone interweaves the documented lives of David Chytraeus and John Dee against the religious and intellectual upheavals of late-sixteenth-century Europe. Books are written, revised, carried, and contested. Visions are observed, recorded, and interpreted. Between them lies the dangerous seam where faithful preservation becomes alteration—and where the desire for concord may conceal a will to command the evidence. Rich in historical detail, theological conflict, and quietly gathering suspense, The Book and the Stone is the first volume of The Witnesses of Time .