Frances Yates


Dame Frances Amelia Yates was an English historian of the Renaissance, who wrote books 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, 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, and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment are also major works. Yates wrote extensively on the occult or Neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance, which she is credited with making more accessible.

Biography

Youth: 1899–1913

Frances Amelia Yates was born on 28 November 1899 in the southern English coastal town of Southsea. She was the fourth child of middle-class parents, James Alfred and Hannah Malpas Yates, and had two sisters, Ruby and Hannah, and a brother, Jimmy. James was the son of a Royal Navy gunner, and occupied a senior position, overseeing the construction of dreadnoughts. He was a keen reader, ensuring that his children had access to plenty of books.
James was a devout Anglican Christian, influenced by the Oxford Movement and sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Frances was christened in February 1900 at St. Anne's Church in the dockyard, although from an early age had doubts about Christianity and the literal accuracy of the Bible.
In 1902, James was transferred to Chatham Dockyards, and then in December 1903 he relocated to Glasgow to become superintendent of shipbuilding on the River Clyde. There, the family began attending the Scottish Episcopal Church of St. Mary. James retired in 1911, although continued to offer his advice and expertise to the dockyards. The family moved regularly over the coming years, from a farmhouse in Ingleton, Yorkshire, to Llandrindod Wells, to Ripon, to Harrogate, and then to Oxton in Cheshire. They also took annual holidays to France each summer.
Throughout this period, Yates's education was haphazard. In her early years, she was home schooled, being taught to read by her sisters before her mother took over her education as they moved away from home. When in Glasgow she briefly attended the private Laurel Bank School, but wouldn't attend school for two years after leaving the city. Despite a lack of formal education, she read avidly, impressed by the plays of William Shakespeare, and the poetry of the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, in particular that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats. She also began to write; in March 1913, Yates published a short story in the Glasgow Weekly Herald. Aged 16 she began writing a diary, in which she stated that "my brother wrote poems, my sister writes novels, my other sister paints pictures and I, I must & will do something. I am not much good at painting, I am no good at all at music, so there is only writing left. So I will write."

Early career: 1914–38

In 1914, the First World War broke out; her brother joined the British Army, and was killed in battle in 1915. As a result, she said that the "war broke our family... As a teenager I lived among the ruins."
Deciding to pursue a university education, she unsuccessfully sat the University of Oxford entrance exam, hoping to study history. The family subsequently moved to Claygate, Surrey, settling into a newly built house in which Yates lived until her death. Her sisters had moved away, leaving Frances to care for her ageing parents, although she also regularly took the train to central London, where she spent much time reading and researching in the library of the British Museum.
In the early 1920s she began her undergraduate studies in French at the University College, London. Enrolled as an external student, she devoted herself to her studies, and did not socialise with other students. She was awarded her BA with first-class honours in May 1924. She published her first scholarly article in 1925, on "English Actors in Paris during the Lifetime of Shakespeare", which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Review of English Studies. She then started an MA in French at the University of London, this time as an internal student. Her thesis was titled "Contribution to the Study of the French Social Drama in the Sixteenth Century", and in it she argued that the plays of this period could be seen as propaganda aimed at the illiterate population. Although written for a degree in French, it was heavily historical, and showed Yates's interest in challenging prior assumptions and interpretations of the past. Supervised by Louis M. Brandin and F. Y. Eccles, she was awarded her MA on the basis of it in 1926. From 1929 to 1934, Yates taught French at the North London Collegiate School, but disliked it as it left little time for her to devote to her research.
While looking at records in the London Public Record Office, she learned of John Florio in a 1585 testimonial. Intrigued by him, she devoted her third scholarly paper to the subject of Florio: "John Florio at the French Embassy", which appeared in The Modern Language Review in 1929. She proceeded to author a biography of Florio, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England, which Cambridge University Press published in 1934; they agreed to the publication on the condition that it be shortened and that Yates contributed £100 to its publication. The book gained positive reviews and earned Yates the British Academy's Mary Crawshaw Prize. Having previously relied on self-taught Italian, in summer 1935 she spent several weeks at a course in the language held for scholars at Girton College, University of Cambridge; here she developed lifelong friendships with Nesca Robb and Linetta de Castelvecchio, both fellow scholars of the Renaissance. Yates's second book was A Study of Love's Labour's Lost, an examination of Love's Labour's Lost. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 1936.
Through her research into Florio, Yates had become intrigued by one of his associates, Giordano Bruno. She translated Bruno's La Cena de la ceneri, and added an introduction in which she argued against the prevailing view that Bruno had simply been a proponent of Copernicus' Heliocentric theories; instead she argued that he was calling for a return to Medieval Catholicism. She offered the book to Cambridge University Press, who declined to publish it; she later commented that it was "the worst of my efforts ... it was lamentably ignorant of Renaissance thought and Renaissance magic." In reassessing Bruno's thought, Yates had been influenced by a number of other scholars who had begun to recognise the role of magic and mysticism in Renaissance thought: French historian of science Pierre Duhem, American historian Lynn Thorndike, and Renaissance studies scholar Francis Johnson. Yates's biographer Marjorie Jones suggested that this interpretation was partly influenced by her own religious views, which - influenced by the Romanticists and Pre-Raphaelites - adored Catholic ritual and were critical of the Protestant Reformation.

Joining the Warburg Institute: 1939–60

One of Yates's friends, the historian and fellow Bruno scholar Dorothea Singer, introduced her to Edgar Wind, Deputy Directory of the Warburg Institute, at a weekend house party in Par, Cornwall. At Wind's invitation, Yates contributed a paper on "Giordano Bruno's Conflict with Oxford" for the second issue of the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1939, which she followed with "The Religious Policy of Giordano Bruno" in the third issue. In these articles, she did not yet associate Bruno with Hermeticism. In 1941, the Warburg's Director Fritz Saxl offered Yates a job at the institute, then based in South Kensington; she agreed, taking on the post which revolved largely on editing the Journal but which also gave her much time to continue her independent research. By this time, Britain had entered the Second World War against Nazi Germany, and Yates involved herself in the war effort, being trained in first aid by the Red Cross and volunteered as an ARP ambulance attendant. In 1941, her father died during an air raid, although the cause of death is not known. Yates herself continued to have depression, and was deeply unhappy.
File:Warburginst.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square, London
In 1943, Yates was awarded the British Federation of University Women's Marion Reilly Award. She also gave an address to the Federation's Committee on International Relations on "How will History be written if the Germans win this war?" At the Warburg, her intellectual circle included Anthony Blunt, Margaret Whinney, Franz Boaz, Ernst Gombrich, Gertrud Bing, Charles and Dorothea Singer, D. P. Walker, Fritz Saxl, Eugénie Droz, and Roy Strong. At this time, she also developed lifelong friendships with Jan van Dorsten and Rosemond Tuve, both scholars.
Upon Britain's victory in the war, Yates was among a number of Warburg scholars who emphasised the need for pan-European historiography, so as to reject the nationalisms that had led to the World Wars; this approach, she believed, must be both international and interdisciplinary. She described this new approach as "Warburgian history", defining this as the "history of culture as a whole - the history of thought, science, art, including the history of imagery and symbolism." Connected to this, she believed that school education should focus on pan-European, rather than simply British history.
The Warburg Institute published Yates's third book in 1947 as The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. She described this as "an ambitious effort to apply the Warburgian modes of work, to use art, music philosophy, religion" to elucidate the subject. The following year, she began to contemplate writing a book on Bruno, and spent September 1951 in Italy, visiting places that had been associated with his life. By 1948, both Yates sisters had moved back to the family home in Claygate; however, in March 1951 Hannah died of leukemia, and Yates's mother died in October 1952. Despite the problems in her personal life, she continued her scholarship, typically publishing two or three scholarly papers a year. She also lectured on the subjects of her research at various different universities across Britain; during the 1950s she lectured on the subject of espérance impériale, which would later be collected and published as Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century.
In 1954, Gertrud Bing became Director of the Warburg, overseeing the move from South Kensington to a specially-constructed building in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury. Bing was a close friend of Yates, and they often went on holidays together. Yates's fourth book, published in 1959, was The Valois Tapestries, in which she discussed the eponymous tapestries in the Uffizi in Florence, Italy. She offered a novel interpretation of the tapestries, approaching them as if they were "a detective story" and arguing that they were meant as portraits of the French royal family.