Looking ahead to Thursday's discussion of chapter 3, which introduces us to Giordano Bruno's embrace of Epicureanism and its "vision of a limitless, eternal, wildly fecund cosmos," Don shares this:
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Donald Enss
MALA 6050
Dr. Suzanne Sutherland
11 December 2017
What was it about Giordano Bruno that made Frances Yates devote more than thirty years of her life doing research on and writing about him? Shortly after I posed this question, I realized that I based it on one book, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. I disregarded the body of work that preceded it and the depth of the research and study performed by Frances in the early years of her life that laid the foundation for her understanding of the role that Bruno played at the onset of the scientific revolution during the Renaissance. In Nicholson’s book review, she refers to it as “a signal event to Renaissance scholars,” and she doubted that the few who had learning equal to Yates also had the courage and imagination to tackle the impact of Giordano Bruno on the Renaissance.
To better understand Frances, it is essential to familiarize oneself with her reflections written after she published Bruno. In 1976, in an article entitled, The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science, Frances states, “I would thus urge that the history of science in this period, instead of being read solely forwards for its premonitions of what was to come, should also be read backwards, seeking its connections with what had gone before.” This statement applies directly to those writing about Frances who fail to learn about her early life and how it was connected to Bruno.
Frances died before she could complete her autobiography, but Jocelyn Nigel (J.N.) Hillgarth and Joseph Burney (J.B.) Trapp, both British historians who knew her personally assembled a series of her essays in three volumes that they believed would represent what she would have included in her autobiography. In a few autobiographical fragments that she had already organized, she mentions as a five-year old that she saw a rainbow after it rained and recognized that it confirmed doubts that she may have harbored about the truth of the Bible. She recalled frequent moves as a child, especially one from southern England to Glasgow, Scotland when she was six. Her father oversaw shipbuilding and his job determined where they lived. She lived in Glasgow for five years, but only attended formal school during the last two. She was home schooled by her older sisters, Hannah and Ruby, and her mother, when they were attending school. Ruby taught her to read and Frances attributed her enjoyment of reading to the freedom to read without the pressure to complete a book within a certain time limit. Hannah conducted her religious training, but apparently was unsuccessful in addressing Frances’s concerns about the Trinity and Eternity. Her mother’s style of teaching was to have Frances “copy out what she considered fine passages from good authors.” This undoubtedly contributed to her literary style.
She had an internal drive to succeed and this compensated for her lack of a formal education. In her journal, she describes her motivation, “I want to write something great and splendid…But in order to write you must have read and I am reading like fury.” While she was cared for by her older sisters, she seemed to develop a closer relationship with her brother, Jimmy, who was eleven years older. That he also viewed her as special was reflected in a letter in 1903 that he wrote to his mother from school, “A lot of my friends remark on the beauty of the small Frances now that her photograph is in evidence on my desk.” Two years later, when he wrote to his mother, he expressed concern for what Frances was feeling, “How is Frances getting on in her state of loneliness?” This question suggests previous discussions within the family about her state of mind. When her father retired in 1911, they were forced to move again and she experienced anxiety, “an agony of grief: Never again, no never any more, something is over which will never come again.” She was removed from school and spent the next couple years living with her mother which was a challenge, “Inspiration is never allowed to flicker for long in this establishment. Just as I had written the last word, somebody bawled in an angry voice requiring me to come down at once.”
Four years later, her world was turned upside down when Jimmy was killed in WWI. She did not reveal her feelings about his death in her diary, but in 1975 when she reflected on the tragedy, she noted that “As a teenager I lived among the ruins.” We can reasonably conclude that she consoled herself through reading. By seventeen, she had read many of Shakespeare’s plays, and books by Carlyle, Hugo, Dickens, and poems by Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Dante. There is little doubt that in solitary hours when she thought of Jimmy, she was saddened. She later acknowledges periods of depression throughout her life, “Yates’s diary of 1916-1917 conveys considerable verve and humor, but it also documents several periods of despair and anxiety.” Her reading during this time included several books that would later play a role in her perception of Bruno. One was On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by Carlyle about which she said after reading it, “I determined to lead a better life in the future. It is a duty which we all owe to our country at the present time & which we always owe to ourselves & to God.” Bruno would become her hero perhaps as a poet or as a man of letters. When she later learned that he was an “omnivorous” reader, digesting the works of St. Thomas, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Euclid and perhaps Ramon Lull, she could relate to him as someone like herself who thirsted for knowledge while wearing the mantle of an outsider. As she read one book, she would inevitably be led to another which became a habit that she “carried into her later life and scholarship.” It is highly probable that as she read Carlyle’s description of Dante, the hero as a poet, who suffered greatly before and after writing The Divine Comedy that she would want to learn more about Dante’s life and country and this led her to Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Macauley. As she read it, she drew, “maps of Italy, ‘tracing the places in the poems with intense delight.’” It would be years before she would cross the Alps and enter Italy, birthplace of Dante, Bruno, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution, but she had much more to learn.
A gap of about eight years exists in her journals which covered her formative collegiate years. The journal that contains those critical years has not been found, so we are denied access to her thoughts and experiences during this time. Later in life, when she contemplated her autobiography, she jotted down reflections on those times almost sixty years before. In her “Autobiographical Fragments,” in 1925, she described looking with her father for a house in London and finally finding one in Claygate, which he bought. In this house, she would live the rest of her life and write all of her books. From her notes composed in June 1981 just three months before her death, we learn that she “achieved the London B.A. in Worthing, working on my own,” and that she was “working on her M.A. thesis on ‘French Social Drama in the Sixteenth Century.’” She described the landscape, “Throughout all the years since 1925 – years of horror and destruction – it has remained unscathed, possessing something of the immemorial peace of an English garden…The trains of thoughts started and nurtured here have drawn unconsciously upon the garden; it has preserved memories, and communicated the strength and stay upholding all creation. I bless and thank it. It has been an essential part of my spiritual history.” It is likely that as she settled into her new home, Giordano Bruno was not on those “trains of thoughts,” as evidenced by a list of her lifetime writings.
Frances’s interest in French history, literature, and language is not surprising given her father’s love of France and his fluency in French. After she graduated with her B.A. in French, she “re-enrolled as an internal student and began to work on her M.A. in French.” According to Jones, “For some reason, she neglected to mention, however, that between 1929 and 1932, she taught French at the North London Collegiate School.” Frances’s focus after graduating was not on Bruno or Hermeticism, but on various aspects of Elizabethan drama and Shakespearean plays in England and France. In 1925, her first scholarly published article was “English Actors in Paris during the Lifetime of Shakespeare.” In the article, there are three elements emblematic of her future writing on Bruno: A detailed search for primary sources – “Among the Alleyn Papers there is a letter…asking for a loan of three pounds.” The tendency to speculate – “it would therefore be quite natural for him to tack the expression on to his ‘Tiph, toph.’ Probably he imagined that these words meant ‘Cut off his head,’” and an expression of a caveat - “But all this is mere conjecture, and must remain so unless any further documentary evidence on the subject is brought to light.” While she was criticized by some later historians for speculating on her findings, her writing initiated further research and discovery by others to verify or disapprove her thoughts.
She next published “Some new light on L'Ecossaise of Antoine de Montchrétien” in 1927. She examined the political impact on England and France of Montchrétien’s play related to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. The depth of her persistent research is again revealed. “There are in effect two references among English diplomatic records of the period, which have, I believe, hitherto escaped the notice of students of Montchrétien, and which would seem to prove beyond all doubt that this play was considered by some contemporaries to have a dangerous political significance.” She seemed to relish the search for clues to mysterious events or little-known people which would serve her well once she began her study of Bruno.
When she was sixteen she took a course in Italian that she thoroughly enjoyed, but she became fluent in Italian primarily by her own study. This opened the door to another adventure that brought her a little closer to Bruno. “When working on a French theme, I found in the Public Record Office in London the manuscript of a testimonial written by the French ambassador in London, Michel de Mauvissière, for a certain Giovanni Florio, an Italian, then in his employment, the year being 1585. This hitherto unknown document which I had discovered excited me. One can never quite account for the process through which some particular area in the vast extent of history suddenly lights up in the mind and arouses a passionate desire to explore it further. I wanted passionately to know more about Giovanni Florio, about the French Embassy in London, and the people whom he might have met there.” One of those people was Giordano Bruno and she would later pursue his life with the same passion that she did Florio’s.
Her book, John Florio, was her breakthrough work and gained her national and international recognition. “It was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, presented each year to a woman author (of any nationality) of an historical or critical work ‘of sufficient value’ on any subject connected with English literature…It was recognized in Italy, with a long review by Mario Praz in La Stampa.” One reviewer, Alice Walker, noted that it was not without errors but that on the whole it added, “much not only to our understanding of Florio, but to our knowledge of the world in which he moved,” and “most interesting of all, for its suggestion of larger issues, is Miss Yates discovery that from 1583 to 1585 Florio was employed at the French Embassy in London. He was, therefore, under the same roof as Mauvissière’s protégé, Giordano Bruno, and the friendship between the two expatriated Italians left its mark on their work.” It was particularly interesting that in a book on Florio, Frances devoted an entire chapter to “Florio and Bruno.” It was during Bruno’s two years in England that according to Frances, he did, “much of his best work as a thinker,” and that “His was an early attempt to build a philosophy to include the discoveries of modern science, represented in his day by the work of Copernicus.” She added that “Mental excitement gained on Bruno as he realized more and more clearly that the old fixed heavens with this world as their center were an idle dream and that the world is only a speck in the vastness of space. By a leap of the imagination he extended the Copernican theory far beyond the limits laid down by its author, and stated that the stars were all suns with planets revolving round them, worlds peopled like our own…There can have been few other men in London at that date who looked up at the night sky with such thoughts in their minds.” How was Bruno’s thoughts so widely known? Frances wrote that, “It is a remarkable testimony to the widespread diffusion of Italian culture in England at that time that more than half a dozen books by Bruno were published in London in Italian during those two years. In one of these, the Cena de le ceneri, Florio is mentioned.” Frances describes the effect of Bruno on Florio, “Bruno made a great impression, the effects of which are visible in his [Florio’s] later publications.” It is also likely that Bruno was making an impression on Frances, but she was not ready to write a book about him even though she was aware of others who had like: J.L.McIntyre, Giordano Bruno (1903), W. Boulting, Giordano Bruno, (1916), and V. Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno, (1921). She cited these in her footnotes in John Florio.
Frances’s success with Florio led to pressure to publish a second book quickly to capitalize on her sudden recognition. Unfortunately, she described A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost published in 1936 as, “the worst of my efforts. It failed to develop forcibly and clearly good points which it glimpsed and it was lamentably ignorant of Renaissance thought and Renaissance magic.” In her “Autobiographical Fragment,” “This theme [about language and the difference between poets and pedants in their use of language] became obscured in the detail of the book…The author (myself in those days) has little knowledge of what Giordano Bruno is talking about, and seems never to have heard of Hermes Trismegistus.” During the next twenty-five years, she would remedy those deficiencies in knowledge to craft what is considered her finest work, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, but there remained many articles and books for her to write in the interim that would increase her understanding of the Renaissance, including two books: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (1947) and The Valois Tapestries (1959) and numerous articles on some aspect of Giordano Bruno, Shakespeare, and Paolo Sarpi as well as book reviews on subject related to English, French, and Italian studies. However, one book eluded her and may have contributed to her delay in completing Bruno before 1961. She believed that Bruno’s Cena held the answer to understanding him, but as she tried to translate it, she became puzzled because, “The weird text did not seem at all what one would expect from a philosopher bursting out of the Middle Ages with his enlightened acceptance of Copernicus,” but she could not find the necessary proof, so “she built her case instead on circumstantial evidence uncovered in her research, enlivened with a ‘powerful imagination.’ This willingness to use her lively imagination and create scenarios that could not be documented became a hallmark of Yates’s scholarship and the source of considerable criticism of her methods.” This probably was the main reason that her manuscript for The Ash Wednesday Supper was rejected and ultimately never published.
There was a silver lining to that rejection. She met Dorothea Singer who would publish her own biography of Giordano Bruno in 1950 which Frances would be able to read and learn from, but more importantly, “Singer introduced Frances to Edgar Wind, Deputy Director of the Warburg Institute.” Wind invited her to write an article about Bruno and when she submitted it for his review, he sent her a letter “which proved key to her evolving understanding of Bruno’s worldview and the Hermetic tradition.” Wind believed that Bruno was caught in an internecine conflict within Catholicism between supporters of the Platonic tradition and those of the Aristotelian tradition and he suggested that Frances portray “Bruno as the champion of the universal Church rather than the martyr for modern science.” Bruno was searching for the earliest religion, the one that connected to the omnipresent God and not to the man-created God. The one that he believed would connect all humans as Wind had surmised. In his dedication to Rudolph II, Bruno described “his favorite theme, that one must study the vestiges or footprints left by Nature, avoiding the strife of religious sects.”
Frances’s articles for Wind brought her to the attention of another member of the Warburg Institute. “In 1941, Director Fritz Saxl offered Yates a position at the Warburg,” and she accepted. This would give her gainful employment during WWII and access to a treasure trove of over 60,000 books and documents secretly removed from Germany before the onset of the war. Her only stipulation before accepting the job was that she be allowed time to continue her research and writing while satisfying the requirements of her position; her request was granted. Yet, she was still twenty years away from writing her masterpiece on Bruno, but she was now where she needed to be to gain the support and encouragement of colleagues to pursue it.
The long delay in placing “Bruno in the context of the Hermetic tradition…lies partly in the changes in post-war historiography and particularly in the work of several contemporaries who strongly influenced her interpretation of Bruno,” and in part because of her own standards for research, “In about 1949, I began to work on what I hoped would be a book on Giordano Bruno, making abstracts of his Latin works. In these, I found many references to Ramon Lull, and resolved that I must investigate Lull before going further with Bruno.” Once again this strategy had a benefit beyond her desire to write a book on Bruno. It led to a second book immediately after she completed Bruno, The Art of Memory which expanded her view of the interconnectivity of individuals before and during the Renaissance. Memory was vital to those like Bruno who needed to communicate their arguments as he did in England and to Shakespearean actors who needed to remember their lines. As Frances continued her research she received help from her colleagues at Warburg and other Renaissance scholars like P.O. Kristeller, Eugenio Garin, and Lynn Thorndike. They guided her into finding what she considered the missing clue - “the significance of the influence of Hermeticism in the Italian Renaissance.”
From those scholars who reviewed her book shortly after it was published, like Dr. Marjorie Nicolson, PhD Yale 1920, “The appearance of a new book by Frances Yates has become a signal event to Renaissance scholars, who are assured of excitement from the moment of opening it.” She went on to say that she believed that it “may be of absolutely basic importance for the history of thought—namely Renaissance magic as a factor in bringing about fundamental changes in the human outlook,” to individuals who knew her personally like her colleague, Dr. D.P. Walker, scholar and renowned author, who express reservations about anyone “putting Bruno’s thought into a rational framework;” Frances did, and according to Walker “the scope and importance of Dr. Yates’s book go far beyond Bruno.” Hilary Gatti, an English professor, recognized the literary as well as historical value of Frances’s book, “For Bruno as Hermetic magus was a Yatesian ‘discovery’, correctly heralded as a dramatic innovation with respect to the preceding critical tradition.” Gatti added the pioneering aspect of what Yates had accomplished, “Yates’s book, then, can undoubtedly claim the merit of having started off a new inquiry into Bruno which has had far-reaching effects.” Gatti’s comments were written over thirty years after the book was published. Marjorie G. Jones was also intrigued by what she had read about Frances Yates and she pursued her research by examining primary sources at the Warburg Institute. In her biography of Yates, she looks at her in the context of the time:
For several reasons, the story of Frances Yates’s life is important. Intertwined as it was with the vibrant intellectual circles of post-war England, America, and Europe, it affords a glimpse into some of that period’s most brilliant characters. It is also significant for women’s history. To better understand Frances Yates, it is important to examine her own historical context, just as she did with Giordano Bruno. She seems to fit comfortably in the long line of independent women historians of the Victorian Age who researched and wrote history on their own, outside the constraints of formal education and the academic establishment from which they usually were excluded.
Frances was a non-conventional historian. She always strived to answer the question of what went before to understand what happened later. When timelines are drawn to depict people and events, the tendency for conventional historians is to identify a starting point of a historical event, e.g. The Thirty Years War which most books will assign a period from 1618 to 1648. Frances wanted to search for what occurred before 1618 that was instrumental and interconnected with what happened during that period. It was not enough to know that Giordano Bruno lived from 1548 to 1600. She wanted to know what he read and with whom he studied and interacted that impacted Renaissance history. She wanted to know who and what preceded him that would later capture his thoughts and make him who he was to become and in retrospect, that in part was the Hermetic Tradition.
Bibliography
Carlyle, Thomas, Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel. 1993. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
Gatti, Hilary. "New Developments in Bruno Studies: A Critique of Frances Yates." Intellectual News no. 4/5 (March 1999): 11-16.
Jones, Marjorie G. Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition. Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2008.
Nicolson, Marjorie. "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Frances A. Yates." Renaissance News no. 3 (1965): 233-236.
Singer, Dorothea Waley. Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought. London: Henry Schuman, Inc. 1950.
Walker, D. P. "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Frances A. Yates." The Modern Language Review no. 4 (1966): 719-721.
Yates, Frances A. Collected Essays, I: Lull and Bruno. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Yates, Frances A. Collected Essays, II: Renaissance and Reform. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Yates, Frances A. Collected Essays, III: Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Yates, Frances. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
Yates, Frances A. John Florio. The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.
