Blackwell Reference Online

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Renaissance historian who, after an unconventional early education, began to live on small family resources as a private scholar. Her first academic appointment, in 1941, was to the staff of the Warburg Institute, which had escaped from Germany in 1933 but was not yet part of the University of London. Frances Yates's London MA thesis on sixteenth-century French social drama led her to the religio-political refugee language teachers of Elizabethan England, particularly John Florio (1553?-1625), the subject of her first book (1934) and his father, as well as to the Italian heretical philosopher, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). In A Study of Love's Labour's Lost (1936) she attempted to revise current views of Florio's influence on Shakespeare, seeing the opposition of poetic and pedantic language as a chief theme of the play and proposing for it a relevance to contemporary religious thought. In 1937 these interests brought her into contact with the Warburg and kept her associated with it until her death. She learned to apply the pragmatic, encyclopedic, historical approach and European outlook of its members to her lifelong preoccupation with the religious, cultural, and intellectual milieu of Elizabethan England. Her influential essay on Queen Elizabeth I as Astraea (1947), later issued (1975) with her other studies of Renaissance imperial aspirations as expressed in SYMBOiism, W ritings, ... log in or subscribe to read full text