November 28, 1899

Frances Yates (November 28, 1899 to September 29, 1981) was an English scholar whose association with the Warburg Institute exemplifies that institution's original and important work. Her bibliography contains works on figures of Renaissance hermetic significance, such as Dr. John Dee.

Her book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), concerns that doctor who she contends was 'one of the most influential figures in the thought of Elizabethan England'.

A more detailed account of the importance of Yates' research is available at Slate. There we learn of the historian's life:

Yates, who was born in 1899 and wrote most of her major works in her 60s, had no formal education until she enrolled at the University College London in the early 1920s. (Her father, a shipbuilder, was also self-educated, having taught himself to read.) After getting an M.A. in French, she worked as an independent scholar, publishing books on Renaissance history and culture while caring for her ailing parents, until she found an intellectual home at the Warburg Institute, an interdisciplinary research institution loosely affiliated with the University College. “Warburgian history,” as Yates called it, sought to transcend nationalism by emphasizing pan-European ideas and culture. This unifying dream was exactly what Yates needed, in her head and in her heart. The two world wars had traumatized her—her brother was killed in the first, and her father during the Blitz, while Yates herself volunteered as an ambulance attendant—exacerbating her already melancholy temperament.


Yates’ illustrious friends included the likes of Franz Boas, Ernst Gombrich, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as several close female companions, but she never married or had any romantic relationship that we know of. (Her diaries contain oblique references to an early devastating “event.”) A former student remarked, “It wasn’t an interesting life in the emotional or physical sense, only in the mental,” but Yates’ biographer Marjorie Jones disagrees, describing Yates as a solitary yet “passionate” figure who fits 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 from which they usually were excluded.” Yates, Jones also writes, was a “depressive, moody, frequently unhappy woman whose salvation until her death was incessant work and an intense spiritual life.” She died in 1981.

It is in Marjorie Jones's biography of Yates,  Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (2008) that we find a diary entry by Yates mentioning her "little cat."