Search Results

“... Dame Frances Yates was an explorer: someone who pushed forward the frontiers of the generally known world, discovering and charting previously unmapped territory. The metaphors of exploration which abound in her own writings are not, therefore, merely rhetorical devices. Thirty years ago Ramon Lull’s philosophical output was a ‘huge un-climbed mountain’ and she was planning ‘a, reconaissance expedition searching out new routes for some future attempt on the summit ...”

“... it. Among those more congenially celebrated are friends and professional associates of the author: Frances Yates, Ernst Kris, Otto Kurz, George Boas. Others are great art historians of an earlier generation: Aby Warburg and Johan Huizinga, each remembered on the centenary of his birth. More remote are Hegel and Lessing, remembered in occasional pieces ...”

“... world of Renaissance hermeticism, or rather into Renaissance hermeticism as it was represented by Frances Yates and her followers. Pierce is fascinated by Aegypt, which is not the place that we call Egypt, but ‘a land that never existed. Where Hermes was king, where magic worked.’ This was Egypt as perceived by a number of Renaissance ...”

“... Against this background, enriched by the contributions of modern scholars from Denis Saurat to Frances Yates and Gershom Scholem, there emerge the first outlines of Yeats’s spiritual biography. As Professor Hough rightly remarks, this remains to be written. Should it ever be completed, this short book will be among its most important harbingers. The ...”

“... a section is ‘reserved for books by or about people who have most influenced me’; the death of Frances Yates, his former tutor at the Warburg Institute, occurs ‘a few months before I was knighted’. Yet this unswerving concentration on himself has the advantage of particularity. Memoirs, especially perhaps those of the 1960s, risk dissolving into ...”

“... Something badly needed has got left out from the great structure that Dame Frances Yates has been building as an exposition of her view of the Occult tradition. I have felt it since her book on Bruno (1964), though I am ill-equipped to complain. Still, my ideas derive from a critic who had something of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up ...”

“... The discussion of Colbert and the arts draws heavily on an excellent old monograph by Lady Emilia Frances Dilke: some readers might have liked to know that Lady Frances (née Strong) was once the wife of Mark Pattison, and was widely believed to be the original of George Eliot’s Dorothea Casaubon. The First Moderns would ...”

“... represented by ‘the classics’. Interest in the apocalypse was joined, under the influence of Frances Yates, by an interest in the ‘Imperial theme’, the theme of timeless empire continually renewing itself over huge tracts of history by means of ‘translations’ and ‘renovations’. This imperium sine fine was seen by Kermode as a paradigm of ...”

“... and exorcism from sacred to profane representation’. One is reminded of the argument of the late Frances Yates, popularised by Sir Roy Strong, about the replacement of the image of the Virgin Mary by that of the Virgin Queen. This brief summary does less than justice to the richness of Greenblatt’s interpretation, or to his skill in interweaving ...”

“... interest in the psychodynamics of magic, and partly to the historical researches of scholars like Frances Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the ...”

“... iconography or numerology? The thought is put aside. What of the historical revisionism of Frances Yates and others, that the ‘Elizabethan world view’ should be thought of as an ideological construct, state propaganda? Followed through, this could have encouraged a much more animate and sceptical weighing of the relationship between background ...”

“... Palace of Matteo Ricci, is at first sight a wilfully bizarre piece of work, a combination of Frances Yates, Joseph Needham and one of those novels which deliberately subverts chronology. All the same, it is in many ways effective, as well as being a natural development from the author’s earlier experiments with historical form. In 1595, Ricci ...”

“... used to – say – Marxist criticism, or to the work of art historians like Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. The emphases and conclusions differ – as they do between the essayists here – but the principle of balancing evidence intrinsic to the painting against material that lies outside the frame to make a critical account is the same. It is the ...”

“... regime detests. One of Nicholl’s most interesting lines of investigation follows the work of Frances Yates, and concerns Giordano Bruno’s visit to England in 1583. Bruno was protected by Henri III of France; while in England, he may have proffered a distinctive Valois solution to Europe’s problems. On the one hand was an ...”

“... scarcely mentions religion, which was inseparable from both public and private life in 1858. As Frances Yates says in The Art of Memory, ‘the rational reader, if he is interested in the history of ideas, must be willing to hear about all ideas which in their time have been potent to move men’ and historians have to take influential ideas ...”