Frances Yates
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Categories: 1899 births | 1981 deaths | Academics of the Warburg Institute | Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire | British historians | Historians of science
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Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE (1899–1981) was a noted British historian. She taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London for many years. Yates' father, a devout Anglican, was a naval engineer who began working in the shipyards as a teenager & supervised the construction of British warships in the years leading up to World War I. Although one of her older sisters attended Girton, like many independent women scholars, Frances was educated at home by her mother. The youngest of four children, she grew up in a middle class family whose Victorian worldview influenced her later scholarship. She wrote extensively on the occult or neoplatonist philosophies of the Renaissance. Her books Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Art of Memory (1966), and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1971), drew attention to the key role played by magic in early modern science and philosophy before scholars such as Keith Thomas brought this topic into the historiographical mainstream. With the publication of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition she transformed Renaissance historiography. In it Yates revealed the hermeticism with which the Renaissance was imbued, and the revived interest in mysticism, magic and Gnosticism of Late Antiquity that survived the Middle Ages. In the face of longstanding conventional interpretations, Yates suggested that the itinerant Catholic priest Giordano Bruno was martyred in 1600 for espousing the Hermetic tradition rather than his affirmation of heliocentricity. Some of her conclusions have later been challenged by other scholars. [1] As was the case with so many families of her time, the death of her only brother in World War I, along with the ravages of World War II, underscored her disdain for rampant nationalism and contributed to her espousal of interdisciplinary historiography. For more than forty years she was affiliated with the Warburg Institute, University of London. The author of many books and articles, Yates was recipient of numerous prizes and honorary degrees. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1972, and raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1977. Yates remains one of the great scholars of Renaissance Europe; her book The Art of Memory (1966) has been named one of the most significant non-fiction books of the 20th century. Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition by Marjorie G. Jones, the first biography of this pioneering woman scholar, is scheduled to be published in June 2008 by Ibis Press (ISBN: 978-0-89254-133-1). The American novelist John Crowley drew extensively on Yates for the occult motifs in Little, Big (1981) and Aegypt (1987-2007).
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