Frances Yates – The Occult Philosophy in Elizabethan Age – Review

Frances Yates was a scholar of world renown most famous for her text, The Art of Memory, and the biographical study, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. In The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, what has been known as `occult philosophy' in the Renaissance, was revived by Marsilio Ficino; she explores the "Christianized" version of the Jewish Cabala and its manifestation and influential effects on religious and philosophical ideas, including the arts, during the Elizabethan Age.

Yates begins with her proposed theses that, in past analyses of occult philosophy, it has focused primarily on the Hermetic tradition. She claims that this occult tradition should be called the "Hermetic-Cabalist", as the ideas are not solely Hermetic in nature, but have a strong Jewish Cabalistic influence, albeit in a Christianized form, as formulated by Marsilio Ficino.

This text is a rich analysis on the history of ideas. Yates adeptly sketches the influences of the hermetic-cabala in the Renaissance, moving forward to one of the more influential texts that affected this tradition more than any other treatise, Henry Cornelius Agrippa's, Three Books of Occult Philosophy. She also focuses her study on three other influential personages, the Cabalist Friar, Francesco Giorgi, and his work, "De harmonia mundi", and the works of Johannes Reuchlin. Yates also looks at the mysterious Elizabethan magus, Dr. John Dee, known as the "Queen's Conjurer" citing the doctor's primary sources of his own work directly to Agrippa. Her claim is that John Dee, was in fact, along with Agrippa, Giorgi and Reuchlin, Christian Cabalists.

The theme of this work is that there was a philosophy of the occult from the Italian Renaissance that operated and was renewed in the Elizabethan Renaissance. To back this thesis, she cites examples from great works of Elizabethan literature that have strikingly blatant examples of this occult philosophy, such as Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christopher Marlowe's famous play, Doctor Faustus; and Shakespeare's A Mid Summer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear and, of course, The Tempest. What these works of literature have in common are expressed tenets of the Christian Cabalist occult tradition, alluding to the works and lives of Agrippa and John Dee. Yates' arguments are compelling and deserve, as she herself notes, further study by scholars.

This was Yates' last work. She has become one of the most read and respected scholars on the history of the esoteric tradition. This work brings to light an intellectual movement that has been suppressed or dismissed by "serious" scholars as superstitious or irrelevant at best. It is because of her research that these once suppressed intellectual movements have regained legitimacy in the history of ideas and their relevance to the development of Western thought.

The text's style is not only written for the scholar or academic but fortunately can also be read by the laymen interested in the history of the Western occult tradition.