Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE FBA (28 November 1899 – 29 September 1981) was an English historian of the Renaissance, who wrote books on the history of esotericism.

After attaining an MA in French at University College London, she began to publish her research in scholarly journals and academic books, focusing on 16th-century theatre and the life of the linguist and lexicographer John Florio.

In 1941, she was employed by the Warburg Institute in London, and began to work on what she termed "Warburgian history", emphasising a pan-European and inter-disciplinary approach to historiography.

It seems to me now the Golden Age, in which the security and stability of the Victorian era were still intact and seemed the natural state of affairs, which would continue for ever (though in a less severe and easier form).

[11] The family moved regularly over the coming years, from a farmhouse in Ingleton, Yorkshire, to Llandrindod Wells, to Ripon, to Harrogate, and then to Oxton in Cheshire.

[11] Despite a lack of formal education, she read avidly, impressed by the plays of William Shakespeare,[16] and the poetry of the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, in particular that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats.

[22] Her sisters had moved away, leaving Frances to care for her ageing parents,[23] although she also regularly took the train to central London, where she spent much time reading and researching in the library of the British Museum.

Her thesis was titled "Contribution to the Study of the French Social Drama in the Sixteenth Century", and in it she argued that the plays of this period could be seen as propaganda aimed at the illiterate population.

Although authored for a degree in French, it was heavily historical, and showed Yates's interest in challenging prior assumptions and interpretations of the past.

[38] One of Yates's friends, the historian and fellow Bruno scholar Dorothea Singer, introduced her to Edgar Wind, Deputy Directory of the Warburg Institute, at a weekend house party in Par, Cornwall.

[40] In 1941, the Warburg's Director Fritz Saxl offered Yates a job at the institute, then based in South Kensington; she agreed, taking on the post which revolved largely on editing the Journal but which also gave her much time to continue her independent research.

"[45] At the Warburg, her intellectual circle included Anthony Blunt, Margaret Whinney, Franz Boaz, Ernst Gombrich, Gertrud Bing, Charles and Dorothea Singer, D. P. Walker, Fritz Saxl, Eugénie Droz, and Roy Strong.

[58] In 1954, Gertrud Bing became Director of the Warburg, overseeing the move from South Kensington to a specially constructed building in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury.

[77] Yates was promoted in the Queen's Birthday Honours 1977 to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to Renaissance studies.

[80] In 1974, an academic conference was held at UCLA's Clark Library in Los Angeles, California, that debated and discussed what was termed the "Yates thesis".

[81] The last decade of her life saw her critics become both more numerous and more outspoken;[82] however, she gained a champion in the form of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who positively reviewed her works and became a personal friend.

[84] It was during the early 1970s that she began writing an autobiography, inspired by E. M. Forster's biography of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson; it was left unfinished on her death, although portions were published posthumously.

[93] With the publication of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Yates highlighted the hermeticism within Renaissance culture, and spoke of the interest in mysticism, magic and Gnosticism of Late Antiquity that survived the Middle Ages.

Yates suggested that the itinerant Catholic priest Giordano Bruno was executed in 1600 for espousing the Hermetic tradition rather than his affirmation of cosmic eccentricity.

Her works drew attention to the role played by magic in early modern science and philosophy, before scholars such as Keith Thomas brought this topic into the historiographical mainstream.

Thomas references Yates, alongside Piyo M. Rattansi, for the basic point that hermetic thinking fed into the foundations of modern science, before being dispelled later.

[94] The seminal studies of Michel Foucault and Frances Yates, even if not fully persuasive in every aspect, have made it impossible for historians ever again to ignore the role of various forms of magical thinking and practice in the Renaissance understanding of the natural world.

Paolo Rossi identified two key points in it: the past importance and later loss of mnemotechnics as a human power, where he argues that she overstated the occult or "Jungian" aspect; and the subsequent marginalization of the area, which he considers valid and of wider applicability.

This is a view that Wouter Hanegraaff has put forth, starting with Yates as the scholar first to treat Renaissance hermeticism, integrated with Rosicrucianism, as a coherent aspect of European culture.

The arguments surrounding this questioning of Yates include Lodovico Lazzarelli and the rival views of Antoine Faivre, who has proposed a clearer definition of esotericism.

[104] Yates's scholarship was often criticised for using what she termed her "powerful historical imagination"; she put forward scenarios that could not be proved using documentary evidence, something that many other historians saw as a flaw in her methodology.

"[106] John Crowley drew extensively on Yates for the occult motifs in Little, Big (1981) and the Ægypt series (1987–2007) in which she briefly appears as a character.

[108] Yates's biographer Marjorie G. Jones described the historian as a "deeply emotional, even passionate" woman, who was "depressive, moody, [and] frequently unhappy",[109] as well as being fiercely determined and hard working.

[112] In 1942, she commented that "I am an Anglican who takes the historical view that the Nazi [i.e. Protestant] revolution of 1559, and all the miserable complications which ensued, deprived me of part of my natural and native inheritance as an English Catholic.