Frances Yates Selected Works Volume Viii Lull And Bruno Frances Amelia Yates by Frances Amelia Yates 9780203708989, 0203708989 instant download after payment.

The studies reprinted here demonstrate not only the range of their author’s learning but her determination to go to the root of a problem. In order to understand the thought of Giordano Bruno, Dame Frances found it necessary to investigate the role of Lullism in the Renaissance and this led her back three centuries to the origins of the Art of Ramon Lull. The first two articles in this volume took her into a region of European thought that, in the 1950s, was virtually unknown to scholars outside Spain. The fact that the Lullian Art and philosophy were at the heart of all Lull’s writings had been perceived by very few scholars. It is characteristic of Dame Frances that she set out, undaunted by the lack of guides, to explore the ‘huge unclimbed mountain’ of Lullian thought. 

The first article here, by its discovery of the cosmological basis of Lull’s philosophy, especially his elemental theory, placed him squarely in an intelligible intellectual tradition. Not satisfied with having thus ‘re-opened the problem of Lull and his Art’, Dame Frances went on (in the second article here) to suggest a source for the Art’s most striking feature, the connexion between the divine attributes and the elemental theory. This she found in the great Irish philosopher of the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena. The revelation that Lull not only drew on the general Neoplatonic tradition but on the mystical version of Neoplatonism represented by Erigena goes far to explain his attraction for such Renaissance thinkers as Giordano Bruno, in whom Neoplatonic ideas are combined with Hermeticism and Cabalism. Dame Frances has acknowledged that writing her two articles on Lull was ‘the hardest task I have ever undertaken’. The task proved worthwhile. Erigena, Lull and Bruno, often viewed as isolated figures in the history of ideas, were illuminated anew by being seen as linked in a Coherent line of development.