Frances Yates: An Appreciation

Frances Yates who was born in 1899 and died last October was something of a late developer. She did not take a degree until she was twenty-five, and she was thirty-five when she published her first book, a study if John Florio, the Italian Protestant who translated Montaigne into English. It was said that Shakespeare had portrayed Florio as Holofernes in Love’s Labours Lost , so she made a study of that play. Florio was a friend of the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who lived in England for some years, so she turned to study him. Her interest in Bruno led her to the Warburg Institute, which was translated from Hamburg to London after Hitler came to power in Germany. During the war she was – besides being an ambulance attendant – a research assistant at the Warburg, and the many books and articles she published later belonged to the Institute’s tradition of interest in the classical heritage, court festivals, iconography and the occult.