Concept
Frances Yates
Overview
Dame Frances Amelia Yates (28 November 1899 – 29 September 1981) was an English historian of the Renaissance who wrote on the history of esotericism.
After attaining an MA in French at University College London, she began to publish her research in scholarly journals and academic books, focusing on 16th-century theatre and the life of the linguist and lexicographer John Florio. In 1941, she was employed by the Warburg Institute in London, and began to work on what she termed "Warburgian history", emphasising a pan-European and inter-disciplinary approach to historiography.
Her most acclaimed publication was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), in which she emphasised the role of Hermeticism in Bruno's works and the role that magic and mysticism played in Renaissance thinking. The Art of Memory (1966), and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) are also major works. Yates wrote extensively on the occult or Neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance, which she is credited with making more accessible.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Lastly, superstition and magic (in its common acceptation) are not to be entirely omitted; for although they be overwhelmed by a mass of lies and fables, yet some investigation should be made, to see if there be really any latent natural operation in them; as in fascination, and the fortifying of the imagination, the sympathy of distant objects, the transmission of impressions from spirit to spirit no less than from…
Francis Bacon, Novum organum
The author is tied to Frances Yates in the knowledge graph.
A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century. The men of this epoch inherited a ferment of ideas attendant upon the historical revolt of the sixteenth century, and they…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
Close in meaning to Frances Yates; the term itself is not named.
The Italic school had for its founder Pythagoras of Samos, to whom also the term "philosophy" is said to owe its origin. For whereas formerly those who seemed to excel others by the laudable manner in which they regulated their lives were called sages, Pythagoras, on being asked what he professed, replied that he was a philosopher, that is, a student or lover of wisdom; for it seemed to him to be the height of…
of Hippo Augustine, The City of God, Volume I
The author is tied to Frances Yates in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Frances Yates
- Francis Bacon
- Giordano Bruno
- Augustine of Hippo
- Giorgio Agamben
- Robert Boyle
- Ramon Llull
- Luciano Floridi
- Francesco Giorgi
Related ideas
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- Antoine Faivre
- Francis Bacon
- Florence
- Anglicanism
- Gnosticism
- Giordano Bruno
- Hugh Trevor-Roper
- Platonism in the Renaissance
- Cremation
- Paradigm
- Hermeticism
- Los Angeles
- Nazi Germany
- Nationalism
- Occult
- Propaganda
- Neoplatonism
- Heliocentrism
- Renaissance
- University of Cambridge
- Romanticism
- British Academy
- Fellow of the British Academy
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Italian philosophy.