The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Important synthesis of Renaissance history
Review: As the title states this book sets out to find the philosophical roots of Elizabethan culture of the late XVI and early XVII century. The question posited by Dame Frances Yates is : What was the underlying Philosophy of the Elizabethan age and she points unmistakably to the occult philosophy i.e. Hermeticism tempered by Christian Neoplatonism and Qabbalah. Origins of the Elizabethan culture are traced straight to the Medici court, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Yates being no believer of the operative work of magic, still provides enough food for thought for the student of Renaissance humanism, history of ideas or budding hermeticist. Although this book grew out from a series of lectures on "Inspired Melancholy" it still manages to tie in such diverse subjects as historical background of Ben Johnson's The Alchemist and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Henry Cornelius Agrippa seen as the inspiration for the character), philosophico/magical/religious meaning of Elizabethan poetry (Spencer, Raleigh), the dramas of Shakespear (specially the Tempest and King Lear) and content of Durer's famous print Melencolia. The strengths of Frances Yates writing is precisely the ability to show the unifying idea behind these seemingly diverse works of art and philosophy. An important part of this book is connected to the destiny of the exiled Spanish Sephardim jews who spread the medical writings of Avicenna and rich literature of Iberian Qabbalism.

Yates history provides an alternative view of English history at the time of Tudor and Stewart dynasties most importantly in their relation to Ecclesiastical powers and politics of continental Europe.

This is a wonderful book that will stimulate a fundamental rethinking of the view of European Political and intellectual history.

Writer of this review is the translator of the book into Serbian .

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not Yates at her best
Review: Dame Frances Yates had an incredible impact on the study of early modern magic and occultism. Although she wrote on other subjects, her primary legacy is in this field, particularly her books _Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition_ and _The Art of Memory_. For anyone interested in the occult Renaissance, these books are both absolutely required reading.

As a scholar, Yates had some bad habits, and these are most obvious in _The Rosicrucian Enlightenment_ and, to a lesser extent, _The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age_. In these books, we see her habit of beginning with a "What if?" proposition, then repeating it in stronger and stronger formulations until it has become an accepted fact.

_The Occult Philosophy_ has this problem to some degree, but the primary problem is that Yates tries to deal with a subject on which she is not qualified to pronounce: Kabbalah. As she asmits, she is not a Hebraist, and her only access to Kabbalah comes from reading some of Gershom Scholem's work. Of course, she cannot be faulted for writing on the subject before Kabbalah became a large and accepted field of study within Jewish Studies, but Yates here displays her usual tendency to overstate her case.

A related problem is that she can be rather offhanded in her treatment of figures peripheral to her obsessions (i.e. anyone not John Dee or Giordano Bruno), and this can lead her to distort matters by repeating others' second-hand analyses.

Having said all this, bear in mind that it's Frances Yates we're talking about here. Stacked up against her best books, _The Occult Philosophy_ looks pretty sad; stacked up against almost anything else in the field, it's drop-dead brilliant: it's very well written, charming, stimulating, and extremely accessible. If you like Yates, read this book now, just take it with a little grain or so of salt; if you haven't experienced Yates yet, DON'T buy this --- read _Giordano Bruno_ NOW!

Yates had her faults, certainly, but she almost singlehandedly invented a field of study. This is an important part of the Yates corpus, but by no means its core.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not Yates at her best
Review: Dame Frances Yates had an incredible impact on the study of early modern magic and occultism. Although she wrote on other subjects, her primary legacy is in this field, particularly her books _Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition_ and _The Art of Memory_. For anyone interested in the occult Renaissance, these books are both absolutely required reading.

As a scholar, Yates had some bad habits, and these are most obvious in _The Rosicrucian Enlightenment_ and, to a lesser extent, _The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age_. In these books, we see her habit of beginning with a "What if?" proposition, then repeating it in stronger and stronger formulations until it has become an accepted fact.

_The Occult Philosophy_ has this problem to some degree, but the primary problem is that Yates tries to deal with a subject on which she is not qualified to pronounce: Kabbalah. As she asmits, she is not a Hebraist, and her only access to Kabbalah comes from reading some of Gershom Scholem's work. Of course, she cannot be faulted for writing on the subject before Kabbalah became a large and accepted field of study within Jewish Studies, but Yates here displays her usual tendency to overstate her case.

A related problem is that she can be rather offhanded in her treatment of figures peripheral to her obsessions (i.e. anyone not John Dee or Giordano Bruno), and this can lead her to distort matters by repeating others' second-hand analyses.

Having said all this, bear in mind that it's Frances Yates we're talking about here. Stacked up against her best books, _The Occult Philosophy_ looks pretty sad; stacked up against almost anything else in the field, it's drop-dead brilliant: it's very well written, charming, stimulating, and extremely accessible. If you like Yates, read this book now, just take it with a little grain or so of salt; if you haven't experienced Yates yet, DON'T buy this --- read _Giordano Bruno_ NOW!

Yates had her faults, certainly, but she almost singlehandedly invented a field of study. This is an important part of the Yates corpus, but by no means its core.

Rating:
Summary: Tip of the iceberg
Review: Frances Yates was first recommended to me more than a decade ago and I'm sorry that I waited so long to read her. THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE challenged many things I thought I knew about the Renaissance and Reformation, and it more than whetted my appetite for Yates's biography of Giordano Bruno.

Beginning with the strange figure of Raymond Lull, a 13th-century Spanish mystical philosopher who could read both Arabic and Hebrew (an unusual accomplishment for a Christian of his or any other time), Yates traces the influence of the "occult philosophy" on Western Christendom through the Italian and continental Renaissance to Elizabethan England. "Occult philosophy" seems to me be the wrong terminology for the Hermetic/Cabalistic spiritual science that inspired some of the greatest minds of the age, if for no other reason than that it rather discredits the whole enterprise from the outset. Part of Yates's design, after all, is to remind us that there was a time when science and religion were not at loggerheads with one another, a time before "the connections of the psyche with the cosmos" were cut off at their roots.

In the first part of the book, Yates sets the stage with brief discussions of the thought of Lull, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Giorgi, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and she offers a new interpretation of an engraving by Albrecht Durer. At the heart of what Yates calls Christian Cabala were two central ideas: that the name of Jesus is the Tetragrammaton, the "ineffable name" of God; and that there is a unity of truth behind the appearance of things accessible to those afflicted (or blessed) by "inspired melancholy".

In the second part of the book, Yates examines the influence of Christian Cabala on English philosphers and poets, including John Dee, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. The backlash against the occult philosophy -- signalling the end of the Renaissance -- is also examined.

You will walk away from this book with a profound sense of the largely unrecognized contribution made by Jewish culture to the development of modern Western philosophy and science. The expulsion of the Jews (and the Moors) from Spain after 1492 (not to mention the unintended consequences of forced conversions) takes on new meaning in the light of Yates's researches.

One weakness of this book, however, is its failure to consider the possible Islamic influence on the development of the occult philosophy in Western Europe. Lull, after all, studied not only Cabala but also the great Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). While one cannot discount the enormous influence of the exiled Sephardic Jews, one should also remember that medieval Spain was home to a most fruitful cross-fertilization of Jewish and Islamic thought. Yates admits that she's no Hebrew scholar, but a knowledge of Arabic might also have been of benefit here.

Another weakness is Yates's rather prosaic and unengaged approach to her subject matter. This is understandable perhaps in a scholar, but her reluctance to let slip her passion is our loss.