Background
Yates, Frances Amelia was born on November 28, 1899 in Southsea, England.
Historian of philosophy and culture
Yates, Frances Amelia was born on November 28, 1899 in Southsea, England.
University College. London. Infis: Personal influences: Fritz Saxl, Gertrude Bing, E. H. Gombrich, Dorothea Waley Singer and R. W. Yates. Literary influences: E. Garin and P. O. Kristeller.
1944-1967, Lecturer in Renaissance Culture and Editor of Publications, then (1956) Reader in the History of the Renaissance, then (1967) Honorary Fellow, Warburg Institute, University of London. 1967, FBA; 1970, Ford Lecturer, University of Oxford: 1972, OBE. 1977, DBE.
The interest that formed the nucleus from which Yates’s researches radiated was the nature and significance of Giordano Bruno’s writings and life. As early as 1936 she had planned to translate Bruno’s Cena de le Ceneri. Through word of this, she came to be introduced to the circles of the Warburg Institute. In a succession of original inter-disciplinary writings, Yates explored the cultural and intellectual life of the Renaissance. Her French Academies (1947) traced the interrelationships between the philosophical, artistic, religious, and political activities fostered by the academies established by the courtiers of the King of France. Her monumental Giordano Bruno (1964) emphasized the importance of the influence of ‘hermeticism’ in the Italian Renaissance. She contended that the dissemination of hermeticism throughout Europe by its chief proponent, the itinerant Bruno, was central to the development of the arts, the sciences and the imperial politics of the sixteenth century. In her Art of Memory (1966) she showed how the ‘art of memory’, inherited and recorded by the Romans, was revived, in occult form, at the Renaissance and penetrated the arts and sciences of Europe, including the Shakespearian theatre. Yates’s pioneering studies have vastly increased our understanding of Renaissance philosophy and culture and, implicitly, of the development from ‘magical’ to ‘scientific’ rationality.