Frances Yates and the Hermetic tradition: a new history of the Renaissance

Until the middle of the twentieth century, historians of philosophy regarded Renaissance magic as a marginal curiosity, a medieval residue destined to be swept away by science. A decisive contribution to changing this perspective came from an English scholar, Frances Amelia Yates, born in 1899 and died in 1981. Her books, written in lively prose full of discoveries, brought Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Bruno and John Dee into the main narrative of European culture.

At the Warburg Institute

Yates worked for most of her career at the Warburg Institute in London, the institute that grew out of the library of the art historian Aby Warburg, moved from Hamburg to England in 1933 to save it from Nazism. That milieu, attentive to symbols, images and the survival of the ancient gods, gave her the tools to study magic as a serious cultural phenomenon, worthy of the same attention given to philosophy and theology.

The book that made her famous was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, published in 1964. In it Yates argued that the philosopher from Nola should be understood not so much as a forerunner of modern science or a martyr of free thought, but as a Hermetic magician, heir to the programme of Ficino and to Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, which Bruno knew and used.

The «Hermetic tradition»

At the centre of her interpretation stood the Corpus Hermeticum, the collection of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that Marsilio Ficino had translated into Latin in 1463 at the request of Cosimo de' Medici. According to Yates, the belief that those texts dated from a remote antiquity, close to that of Moses, had given magic extraordinary religious and philosophical prestige, sustaining for more than a century a coherent movement of thought.

The following volume, The Art of Memory of 1966, showed how the mnemonic techniques inherited from ancient rhetoric had been transformed, in Ramon Llull, Giulio Camillo and Bruno, into instruments of cosmic knowledge. In 1972 The Rosicrucian Enlightenment linked the Rosicrucian manifestos to the court of Frederick of the Palatinate and to the crisis that preceded the Thirty Years' War.

Agrippa in Elizabethan England

In her last major book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age of 1979, Yates devoted ample space to Agrippa. She presented his work as the fundamental handbook of Christian Kabbalistic magic, through which the ideas of Ficino and Pico had reached England, John Dee and the poets of the Elizabethan age. She also read Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and even some of Shakespeare's plays in this light.

Many of these readings have since been debated and corrected, and Yates herself acknowledged that some of her hypotheses were bold and hard to prove. But her work remains an unavoidable landmark: after her, no historian of the Renaissance could ignore magic any longer, and the figure of Agrippa was reread as that of a central thinker of his age, read by philosophers, poets and courtiers, not as a mere charlatan.