The Peripeteia of Frances Yates

Frances Yates: The Art of Memory (1966)

And what, pray tell, does 'peripeteia' mean when it's at home?

a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional narrative

is the best definition the online dictionary can provide.

I guess, in the case of Frances Yates, it refers to her transformation from an immensely learned but fairly dry-as-dust scholar of the intellectual life of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe (with particular reference to the flourishing of hermetic and magical discourses in the allegedly proto-scientific late Renaissance) into a kind of pop culture guru: the High Priestess of the more respectable side of New Age Occultism.

Dame Frances Amelia Yates (1899-1981)


Southsea, Portsmouth

Her earlier books, on John Florio, the first translator of Montaigne into English (1934); Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, 1936), and such apparently recondite subjects as The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (1947) and The Valois Tapestries (1959), gave few signs of what was to come.

Reviewers were cautious about some of her 'wilder' conjectures, but for the most part she appeared just another habitué of Aby Warburg's superb library, transferred to England to avoid Nazi repression in 1933, and (as the Warburg Institute), affiliated with the University of London in 1944.

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (2008)

1. John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. 1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.


2. A Study of Love's Labour's Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.


3. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. 1947. London: Routledge, 1989


4. The Valois Tapestries. 1959. London: Routledge, 2010.

A Study of Love's Labour's Lost (1936)

The sea-change came with her next two publications: the double-whammy of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Art of Memory (1966). Wow! Talk about time, place and opportunity all coming together.

It was the age of The Morning of the Magicians (UK, translated as 'The Dawn of Magic': 1963 / US: 1964), Louis Pauwels' and Jacques Bergier's 1960 bestseller about the wilder side of twentieth century occultism. It all sounds familiar enough nowadays, but at the time most people had never even heard of the 'Vril Society' or the 'Thule Spceity" - let alone their philosophical connections with Nazism.

Le Matin des magiciens mixed up information about "conspiracy theories, ancient prophecies, alchemical transmutation, a giant race that once ruled the Earth, and the Nazca Lines" into what (in retrospect) seems a kind of blueprint for New Age nuttiness generally. Some of it may actually have been true, mind you.

It's not, I hasten to say, that Frances Yates's serious study of the memory systems of Ramon Lull and Giordano Bruno, and of the Renaissance Hermetic tradition generally had anything in common intellectually with Pauwels and Bergier's rather formless compendium of mid-twentieth century bugaboos and conspiracy theories, but it's impossible to deny that the same readers were attracted to both.

The Art of Memory in particular, outmoded though it may be in some few particulars fifty years after its publication, remains one of the most exciting books of intellectual history I've ever read. Its devotees are many, and the number of memory system addicts it has spawned must be many (even TV mentalist Derren Brown has claimed to practise its precepts).

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964)

1. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul / Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1982.


2. The Art of Memory. 1966. A Peregrine Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

The Art of Memory (1966)

All of which brings me to the second meaning of peripeteia in my title above.

I wish I could date it precisely, but it must have been sometime in the mid-1980s that I was browsing through Anah Dunsheath's Rare Books on High Street, when I stumbled across a little pile of books shoved to one side of the entrance to her shop.

They were, in fact, four. As well as the two books mentioned directly above, there were also:

Lull and Bruno (1982)

1. Frances Yates. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays 1 (of 3). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.


2. Scott, Walter, ed. & trans. Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. Vol. 1: Introduction / Texts and Translation. 4 vols. 1924. Boulder: Hermes House, 1982.

Hermetica, vol. 1 (1982)

All in all, it looked as if some budding Occultist had bought a bunch of exciting looking books about all sorts of esoteric matters, and had either found them too boring and abstruse for their taste, or else found a more desperate need for ready cash. Reader, I bought them.

Bought them and took them home with me and immediately started in on The Art of Memory and, really, nothing has been the same for me ever since. It was just so strange and fascinating: it gave an entirely new angle on classical antiquity, on figures as well known as Simonides and Cicero, but then - in the later chapters - it completely overturned any notions I'd had that Giordano Bruno had been a martyr to science, or that any number of my Renaissance heroes had been devoted to "reason" in any modern sense of the term.

It was, I must confess, a long time before I read the first part of her diptych, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which seemed to me then (it doesn't now) a bit anticlimactic after the highs of The Art of Memory. Nor did I get very far with the rather boring translation of the Hermetica. The book of essays, Lull and Bruno, was very good value indeed, though, and offered a whole series of new perspectives on this matter of the Hermetic tradition.

There is a certain amount about Ramon Lull in The Art of Memory, but the essays collected here gave a glimpse of her mind at work: her painstaking way of collecting evidence, venturing conjectures, and building on them to make immensely pleasing - if not always entirely convincing - wholes.

Anyone who's at all familiar with my own fiction (a somewhat select group, admittedly) will have observed the pervasive Yatesian influence. It's particularly strong in my first two novels, Nights with Giordano Bruno (the title is a bit of a giveaway), and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (which lent its name to this blog), but also in the novella Trouble in Mind (2005).

After that the fever subsided a bit, but Frances Yates still is my go-to gal when it comes to any kind of abstruse or coded information. Her work has its ups and downs, definitely, but basically I consider her both completely intellectually honest and greatly gifted creatively - the models she came up so regularly with in her works of intellectual history have a huge mythopoetic force to them.

Her later work is more of a mixed bag. It was assured of a much wider sale than most historians of ideas enjoy, which led to jealousy from less fortunate colleagues. It also, at times, advanced some rather dubious conjectures on such subjects as the underlying design of Shakespeare's Globe theatre, and the precise influences at work in the court of King Frederick of Bohemia (whose ousting from the throne led directly to the Thirty Years War in Germany).

Here are her five late books, copies of all of which I've collected along the way:

Theatre of the World (1969)



1. Theatre of the World. 1969. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.




The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972)



2. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. 1972. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1975.




Astrea (1975)



3. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. 1975. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.




Shakespeare's Last Plays (1975)



4. Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach. 1975. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.




The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)



5. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she was having fun in these last books. They touch on all the themes dear to her heart, and they're all exhaustively researched, and yet they're not quite so convincing as the best of her mature work. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, in particular, is a dazzling read. Whether or not "Christian Rosenkreuz" and the various strange letters circulating around the continent in the early seventeenth century can really be explained by reference to the politics of the Holy Roman Empire may seem doubtful at times, but certainly nobody else has succeeded in making more sense of that strange tangle of esoteric philosophy and partisan religious politics.

Similarly, I'm not sure that she proves her point about the shape and structure of Shakespeare's various theatres, but she brings in Robert Fludd, John Dee, and an awe-inspiring range of learning which gives one some idea of just how complex and delightful such intellectual puzzles can be.

Nowadays, of course, these things have been vulgarised and made ridiculous by such absurd gallimaufries of half-digested platitude and pointless factoid as The Da Vinci Code and its progenitor The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. When Yates was writing, though, one could still theorise without the haunting shadow of Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon, and Benjamin Gates (from National Treasure).

By contrast, it's never safe to assume that Yates has gone out too far on a limb, or that she doesn't really know what she's talking about. All of her books, in the final analysis, constitute tentative suggestions for future researchers in the field. She's no crank, but is always evidence-driven and willing to change her mind as and when new facts and theories emerge.

I've often dreamed of completing my Frances Yates collection: buying up all the older books I don't have, as well as the remaining volumes in her collected essays. They are quite expensive, for the most part, though, so I guess I'm still waiting for some blessed windfall like that day 35-odd years ago when I bent over to look at a stack of dusty-looking books on Anah Dunsheath's floor.

Frances Yates: Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution (1983)

1. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays, vol. 1 of 3 (1982)


2. Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, vol. 2 of 3 (1983)


3. Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance. Collected Essays, vol. 3 of 3 (1984)

Frances Yates: Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance (1984)

•

Dame Frances Yates

Ramon Llull and Curriculum Mapping

Ramon Llull: Ars magna (1305)

Yesterday I went to an interesting meeting where it was explained to us just how the - relatively new - concept of curriculum mapping could help us improve our teaching programme. There are many forms that this can take, but the one which was explained to us consisted of a listing of the "graduate attributes" considered essential for students in particular degrees or subject areas within degrees, together with a list of the papers we teach, and a series of boxes to fill in confirming that we do indeed teach those particular things.

So far, so harmless: useful, even (perhaps). I note in particular the following passage from the wikipedia article on curriculum mapping, which concludes:

The curriculum needs to be perceived as a 'work-in-progress', a 'living and breathing' document, whose ultimate owners are students. Curriculum mapping is a 'process', not a one-time initiative. Traditional curriculum mapping software are just tools available to make the review process easier.

There's no doubt that obtaining an overview of something as complex as a major within a degree can be very difficult - and hence an impressionistic sense that "we must talk about that somewhere" often stands in for certainty that we really do cover things with the requisite detail and emphasis.

DePiep: Periodic table (polyatomic)

One example of a dynamic system which functions extremely well would be the periodic table of the elements. Dmitri Mendelev originally lined up the elements (on little cards) according to their atomic weights as a kind of after-dinner parlour game. He observed that at a certain point he needed to start a new row in order to match up the same kinds of elements with one another: in his system there were six rows, but this has been subsequently enlarged to fit in hydrogen and helium.

The point is that it wasn't till some time afterwards that the reasons for this periodicity were discovered: the fact that it was the number of protons in each nucleus that dictated their place in the scheme. The atomic weight, the factor he was using, was a far cruder indicator. Nevertheless, the whole system - with certain modifications - worked, and enabled him to predict the existence of various new elements which were subsequently discovered in nature (or, in some cases, fabricated in the laboratory).

Ramon Llull: Tree and Wheel (1305)

I guess the other thing curriculum mapping reminds me of, though, is the Catalan polymath Ramon Llull's wheels (and trees) of science from his 1305 work the Ars Magna (or Great Art). Basically his idea was that if one could summarise all the attributes of God - which come down to Goodness, Greatness, Duration, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, and Glory - into one wheel, which interlocked with other wheels of natural elements, planetary influences, and bodily humours, it should be possible to make a kind of machine for generating knowledge.

Any question (theoretically) could be coded onto the wheels and receive a satisfactory answer which must be demonstrably true, since these things were guaranteed to be so by the very nature of the First Cause.

I suppose it's apparent at once how much information theory and digital computers owe to Llull's pioneering work (not dissimilar, in its way, to that of Alan Turing: at any rate in the over-simplified form portrayed in The Imitation Game, the recent film about him).

The Imitation Game (2014)

I guess the main problem with Llull's system, from a modern point of view, is the arbitrariness of the terms he was using. How, for instance, does God's Glory differ from his Virtue? Llull could no doubt have explained the distinction with great cogency, basing it on the best models of theological commentary available to him, but the results might still be a bit unconvincing.

He himself felt no doubts, however. When he visited Tunis in 1314 and tried to explain to a crowd of Muslims that the logic of his system demanded that they all immediately renounce their beliefs and convert to Christianity, he was greeted with a volley of stones. Though rescued by a group of Genoese merchants, he died the next year, probably as a result (though he was in his 80s, so it may not have been).

His other model for generating truth from interlocking ideas is the Tree of Knowledge (L'arbre de ciència). This, too, suffers from the lack of an empirical basis for the words and concepts he regarded as primary and undeniable.

Curriculum Mapping (civil engineering) (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)

Now my own feeling about all such exercises in codification is that they tend to promote uniformity and lessen creativity and originality. It isn't that I think that either of these aspects should predominate in any course design: institutions must maintain some control over just what is being taught in its classrooms, and how that ties in with other classes in the same discipline. By the same token, though, teachers are individuals, and teach in their own ways - and have to teach differently according to the particular students they're faced with.

There's no reason per se why a system such as curriculum mapping should interfere with that necessary freedom a teacher must feel to temper their teaching style to particular complex circumstances. That is what we're hired to do, after all. But (as a colleague of mine has put it): "templates control pedagogy." Once you have a particular model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that set of predetermined categories.

Nor is it enough to ask teachers to list all the possible variations from the existing curriculum categories and try to revise them accordingly. The mere fact of having to list such categories puts the assumptions behind them further and further off the agenda. The categories become real. Departures from them have to be justified and explained. What began as mapping has become prescription.

In this particular case, the battle is already lost (or won: depending on how you look at it). The curriculum mapping exercise will go ahead, and we're all soon going to be spending a good deal of time debating just how the projected learning outcomes of our courses match up with the graduate profiles of our degrees. And it's hard to argue against that process - in the abstract, at any rate.

I do feel a niggling doubt when I think of Ramon Llull, however. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder always increases. While there can be local exceptions to that rule (the entire evolution of life on earth, from less to more complex organisms, might be seen as one such exception), it's beyond doubt that chaos tends to increase, and that attempts to arrest it in its tracks can have strange consequences.

For myself, I would predict that the more regimented course content and course outcomes become, the more creative classroom practice will become. If one wished to draw an analogy with poetry (as I so often do), it's just as futile to privilege content over form as it is to prefer form over content. Neither can function without the other, and it's only the proportions and relationship between the two which is really worthy of debate.

Our accountability as teachers to the students we teach must be taken very seriously: this does entail looking carefully at what we cover and how. On the other hand, bored, unmotivated students learn little. Nor do they rejoice at the idea of being cogs in some giant wheel of information. The best way to convince students that you really have something of value to teach them is to invoke your own creativity by learning along with them.

For Llull, the universe was sewn up. Everything that needed to be known was already known - it was just a matter of explaining that clearly, in words of one syllable, to potential dissenters, and then the millennium could be proclaimed!

That's not how knowledge works, though. Ideas change. Models shift. What we teach in 2015 is very different from what we were teaching even a couple of decades ago. Who would ever have though of demanding "digital literacy" from students then? We have to leave some space to react to changes when it comes, and any new mapping systems we devise must start with that very firmly in mind.

Llull in North Africa (1314)