Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition by Frances A. Yates

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition by Frances A. Yates

This book emphasises the primary importance of Hermeticism in Renaissance thought. The Hermetic treatises were believed to be by an ancient Egyptian, prophet of Christianity; these associations strengthened their enormous impact on Ficino and the Neoplatonic movement. Pico della Mirandola yoked Hermeticism with Cabalism and the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition continued as an 'occult philosophy' both magical and mystical. Giordano Bruno is here for the first time placed within the context of this tradition of which he represents an original variation. He emerges as a Hermetic philosopher and magician with an unorthodox religious message. Even his support of Copernican heliocentricity is associated with Ficino's solar magic. This revolutionary reinterpretation profoundly affects our understanding of Bruno and of his death at the stake.

The Hermetic tradition is followed beyond the death of Bruno into the seventeenth century, particularly in Campanella. The correct dating in 1614 of the Hermetic treatises marked the end of the dominance of Hermeticism though it continued to exert a hidden influence. The controversies of Fludd with Mersenne and Kepler are seen as a conflict between a late revival of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition and the seventeenth-century scientific movement.

Renaissance Hermeticism stimulated new attitudes towards the cosmos and towards operating with cosmic forces. It affected the religious issues, making towards toleration; Bruno's message on its religious side was a variant of the religious Hermeticism widespread in the sixteenth century. His use of magically-significant imagery and language raises the question of his influence on the poets of the English Renaissance.

The Author

Frances A. Yates, DBE, D Lit (London), was formerly Reader in the History of the Renaissance at the University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute, and of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has had honorary degrees conferred upon her by the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, East Anglia and Exeter, and is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Frances Yates won the major Wolfson Historical Prize of 1973 for her work on the history of European thought and iconography, and was awarded a DBE in 1977 for her services to Renaissance studies. Some of her publications appear on the inside of the back cover.

Details

• Paperback 
• Condition: Good, has a old price sticker on the pastedown, the spine is bleached and cracked open, otherwise clean copy, no notes/stamps 
• IBSN: 0710000510
  
• Publishing House: Routledge & Kegan Paul