Strange Research: a deep dive into false information

Back in 2020 I started to wholesale research the historical figure Arthur Dee. His exact life and history might be explored further in a later article, but for the purpose of your time here today, he was an alchemist and doctor in the 1600s, employed by Michael I, the tsar in Russia. His father was John Dee, far more well known compared to Arthur Dee, at least in the English history circles.

Rather, today I wanted to explore what happens to you, as a researcher in one particular person. If you're anything like me, you try and find any scrap of information about this person, trying to piece together their life, their experiences, what they might have been like. Then you begin to broaden your horizons - any scrap or mention of the person becomes interesting. Any vague mention, which you start to use to build a pattern. A little repeated through line of what you know, what other people know, and what it is people say. Sometimes the last two are different - sometimes people pass along the more interesting story, even if it is wrong and has been wrong for a while.

Once you've built this picture up in your head, you learn about the time this figure existed in and the people who surrounded them. What must their life have been like and how was it different from yours? These questions build and you try and create enough working information to draw from at any given time without having to be that person who has to cite something verbally in a conversation.

And this is when the fun starts happening. You'll read a sentence of a article you just found who mentions the historical figure and you know it's wrong. And it feels egregiously wrong to you, even though this figure is just a minor mention in a paper about something completely different. It can be something small - for example, one author said Arthur Dee was friends with Elias Ashmole. They weren't. They exchanged one set of letters before Arthur Dee died. And those letters were not exactly polite on Arthur Dee's part while Elias Ashmole's was ... fan boy.

(Another thing they won't tell you is the almost parasocial relationship you'll build with long dead historical figures where you have to resist calling them by their first names, but that's another story.)

Catching small mistakes like that can be quite interesting, but ultimately not something to write home about. But inevitably, if you research someone of big-name-fame, you'll find a lot of funky stories. Arthur Dee is one name removed from fame (his father being more well known) but you still end up with some unhinged takes. One is that he was employed by Ivan the Terrible ... which would be physically impossible unless Ivan the Terrible hired an 8 year old. Which is always how I start that fact, only to conclude that the book I found that lovely mistake in was writing about lizard-people conspiracy theories, so I think it got more than just Arthur being employed by the wrong tsar factually incorrect.

You'd be surprised how often you see it repeated though.

But by engaging with a historical figure, particularly one where you find the edges of knowledge fairly quickly, it becomes pretty easy to find 'gems' of strange research like that.

Don't get me started on finding a character in a fiction book which is clearly based off at least the idea of your historical figure of interest. There is some question on GoodReads somewhere where I ask an author if their demon character called Arthur who was the son of a John Dee was THAT Arthur Dee - and yes, yes it was. It becomes a fun game of hunting for your historical character and where they might turn up.

Another interesting little tidbit was discovering someone has misunderstood how Arthur Dee's English translation of his work had been bound up together with someone else's work - as the time's commonly did - and had citing him as saying something when he hadn't. I took a touch of pride in being able to fact check someone with a phD.

I highly recommend to write down your strange research as you come across them, if only to remember them into the future.