Abstract

Dame Frances Yates is highly respected as a reliable guide through the eclectic labyrinths of Renaissance intellectual history, and her latest book is a further exploration of themes now thoroughly familiar to those who have followed her work. It is difficult to convey in a phrase the unity of a life’s study that links theatre architecture, memory devices, iconology, French academies, hermetic thought, royal processions, rosicrucian symbolism, Jacobean drama, and, now, the cabalistic tradition in a convincing chain of arguments. Nevertheless, no one who is aware of her pursuit of such figures as Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, Robert Fludd, and John Dee can fail to see that the interconnections are not simply produced by her scholarly imagination. The Renaissance was an age with a philosophical climate radically different from our own, and its thought submits more readily to unravelling than to pigeonholing. Yates’s main labors have been exerted in an effort to recover the sense of that tangled complexity without losing the stupendous vitality of a power-hungry, magic-haunted era. Her inquiries lead to an emphasis that may seem bizarre to those whose idea of Renaissance philosophy is closer to that of Paul Oskar Kristeller.