Sometimes I should know when to stop. I was really taken up with Dame Yates' exposition of Giordano Bruno and the whole development of Renaissance Neo-Platonism as developed through Ficino and Pico. I was a little less impressed by the Arts of Memory, but I really dug into the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
This book occupies a place between Bruno and the Rosicrucians, a fascinating period, especially for some of the implications of the influences. But overall, this book as a real disappointment. Yates repeats herself over and over and uses some pretty tenuous connections between images to bolster her arguments. This book could have been much shorter and I suspect that it would not withstand serious scrutiny by someone really familiar with the sources.
In any case, she begins her exposition with Pico and his cabalistic theses. Pico sought to Christianize Cabala, combining it with neo-platonism and hermeticism to come up with the new renaissance philosophy of man--made famous in his oration on the dignity of man. He was a magus who felt that it was safe to call down daemons and astral influences since the Cabala would guard from any evil influences. These ideas was taken up by the Franciscan monk Giorgi but really developed by Agrippa who also dabbled in alchemy. John Dee picked up on Agrippa's ideas and used them to further the cult of Elizabeth as the purifier of religion and the leader of a new world order. His ideas were influential on Raleigh, Sydney, and Spencer, but his star fell after his mission to Bohemia, where his ideas crystallized into Rosicrucianism, and Elizabeth pulled back from some of her foreign adventures.
When James took the throne, believing in the reality of evil and witchcraft, Dee's ideas became suspect. The witch hunts of the counterreformation really took off about this time, and Dee's influence on the continent waned with the crushing of Rudolf and the beginning of the Thirty Years War. The heart of the book then develops influences on Spencer’s Faerie Queen, reaction by Marlowe who ridiculed Dee and Agrippa in Faustus and stirred up strong antisemitism in the Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare's play with the ideas of the magus and Rosicrucianism in the Tempest. Yates also points to parallels with Bacon's New Atlantis, and Milton's use of the ideas of inspired melancholy in his poetry. Also interesting connections to the reintroduction of the Jews in England after Cromwell and the Puritan emphasis on the Old Testament, perhaps inspired by sympathy with Cabalism. A lot of interesting connections and influences, but certainly not in the league with her other books.
Author: Yates, Francis
Date Published: 1979
Length: 222 pp
print
No comments:
Post a Comment