Frances A. Yates

Dame Frances Amelia Yates (born November 29, 1899 in Southsea , Hampshire , England , †  September 29, 1981 in Surbiton , Surrey ) was an English historian and author .

Life

Yates' father worked his way up to chief designer of the British Navy, Frances was the youngest of four children in the family. Her hopes of being able to take his place at Oxford after her brother's death in 1915 were dashed. Rather, she began studying the French language through correspondence and graduated with a thesis on French religious drama of the 16th century.

From about 1925 she lived in Claygate , a rural area outside of London , where she continued her private studies almost until her death. She worked mostly in the British Library and the Public Record Office in London. Her first work, John Florio : The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England (1934), earned her an award. In 1937 she worked at the Warburg Institute in London, which had come to Great Britain from Germany through Aby Warburg's exile. In 1941 she got a part-time position there, which was her first paid job. Here, through Fritz Saxl , Gertrud Bing , Edgar Wind and Rudolf Wittkower , she got to know the encyclopaedic work that was to become important for her work on Giordano Bruno .

She first learned Catalan for her work on the Spanish universal mystic Ramon Lull . Her best-known works are Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Art of Memory (1966), in which she explained the hermetic and mnemonic tradition of the premodern. She also dealt with the teachings of the secret societies and orders of the Rosicrucians , which she interpreted in parts as a forerunner of the Enlightenment .

Yates' works are characterized by the fact that, before the general “ culturalist turn ”, she succeeded in relating historical topics such as social circumstances, political situation and scientific knowledge to one another. Not least because of her extensive study of natural scientific and philosophical primary sources of the early modern period, her works are among the fundamental works in the history of science. Throughout her work runs the idea that peace and harmony are always endangered by interest groups and fanaticism.

In the meantime, Yates' theses have come under fire from various quarters because they are too speculative and empirically not verifiable. Joachim Telle writes that she has put together a “potpourri of conjectures and assertions”; some of their theses, which were received “initially with astonishing applause”, contained “nothing but unsecured assumptions”.

A Warburg Scholarship was named after Yates. In addition to numerous awards and honorary doctorates, she was accepted as an officer in the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1972 and was ennobled as Dame Commander of the same order (DBE) in 1977 . Since 1967 she was a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy . In 1975 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1980 she became an external member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences .

Publications (selection)

• John Florio. The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1934.
• The Valois Tapestries (= Studies of the Warburg Institute. Vol. 23, ISSN  0083-7199 ). The Warburg Institute, London 1959 (Reprint. (= Frances Yates: Selected Works. Vol. 1). Routledge, London et al. 1999, ISBN 0-415-22044-0 ).
• Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1964.
• The Art of Memory. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1966 (In German: Gedächtnis und Erinnern. Mnemonics from Aristotle to Shakespeare. 6th edition. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-05-003530-7 ).
• Theater of the World. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1969, ISBN 0-7100-6370-9 .
• The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1972, ISBN 0-7100-7380-1 (In German: Enlightenment under the sign of the Rosicrucian. 2nd edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-608-91883-3 ).
• Astraea. The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London et al. 1975, ISBN 0-7100-7971-0 (= Frances Yates: Selected Works. Vol. 1). Routledge, London et al. 1999, ISBN 0-415-22048-3 ).
• Shakespeare's Last Plays. A new approach. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1975, ISBN 0-7100-8100-6 (Reprint. (= Frances Yates: Selected Works. Vol. 6). Routledge, London et al. 1999, ISBN 0-415-22049-1 ).
• The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Routledge and Paul, London et al. 1979, ISBN 0-7100-0320-X (In German: The occult philosophy in the Elizabethan era. Weber, Amsterdam 1991, ISBN 90-73063-06-X ).
• Lull and Bruno (= Frances A. Yates: Collected Essays. Vol. 1). Routledge and Paul, London et al. 1982, ISBN 0-7100-0952-6 .
• Renaissance and Reform. The Italian Contribution (= Frances A. Yates: Collected Essays. Vol. 2). Routledge and Paul, London et al. 1983, ISBN 0-7100-9530-9 .
• Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance. (= Frances A. Yates: Collected Essays. Vol. 3). Routledge and Kegan Paul, London et al. 1984, ISBN 0-7102-0184-2 .

literature

• JB Trapp: Frances Amelia Yates, 1899–1981 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 120 , 2003, p. 527-554 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• François Quiviger: Frances Yates and the Mnemonic Works of Giordano Bruno. In: The Warburg Institute (website).

supporting documents

1. ^ Frances A. Yates: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London 1972, ISBN 0-7100-7380-1 .
2. ^ Joachim Telle: John Dee in Prague. Traces of an Elizabethan Magus in German Literature. In: Peter-André Alt , Volkhard Wels (Hrsg.): Concepts of Hermetism in the literature of the early modern period. (= Berlin Medieval and Early Modern Research. Vol. 8). V & R Unipress, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-89971-635-1 , pp. 259–296, here p. 270 .
3. ↑ Past mebers: Frances Amelia Yates. Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, accessed 25 August 2020 .