Frances Yates and the Writing of HistoryAuthor(s): Brian VickersSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 2, Technology and War (Jun., 1979), pp.287-316Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1879218 .Accessed: 14/08/2011 01:28

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Review Article

Frances Yates and the Writing of History

Brian Vickers Harvard University

The publication of Frances Yates's study, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 1 has raised a number of important issues concerning the writing of Renais- sance history, the history of ideas, the history of science, and the history of politics and monarchies. With the last of these-her accounts of Frederick V of the Palatinate, the court of Rudolph II, the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War-I shall have nothing to do and await the findings of the historians.2 Setting aside these matters still leaves much to discuss: the

1 Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 269. All numbers in parentheses refer to this book.

2 The roll call of British historians who welcomed the original publication is remarkable: Christopher Hill (New York Review of Books [October 4, 19731, pp. 23-24: ' Its excitement is gloriously infectious, its scope is breath-taking"); John Kenyon (Observer [January 28, 1973]); Sir Isaiah Berlin (Observer [December 16, 1973]: "A magnificent work of imagination and learning by a great scholar"); Joel Hurstfield (Times [February 1, 1973]: "so eminent a scholar, . . . the truth, so skillfully unravelled"); Asa Briggs (New Scientist [November 23, 1972]: "brilliant analysis . . . compulsive reading"); J. H. Elliott (New Statesman [January 26, 1973]: "A brilliant book, written with an intellectual power and a verve which are likely to leave a deep impression on all those who are fortunate enough to fall under its spell"). Hugh Trevor-Roper went to the unusual length of reviewing it twice: in the Sunday Times (December 17, 1972): "A brilliant and exciting book . . . delicate scholarship and a profound study of symbolism," and in Listener (January 18, 1973): "A major work . . . exact scholarship addressed to historical detail." Other favorable reviews came from Frederick Coplestone (Spectator [January 20, 1973]), Lisa Jardine (Tablet [February 24, 19731), Anthony Powell (Daily Telegraph [December 21, 1972]), and Colin Wilson (Books and Bookmen [January 1973]: "A really scholarly book . . . a model of how such a book should be written,' and British Book News [May 19731: 'learned, original and exciting"). Among the historians of science and philosophy there was less unanimity: Charles G. Nauert noted that much of the evidence was vague or nonexistent but found it "a significant contribution to the world of learning" (Renaissance Quarterlv 28 [1975]: 366-67); C. A. Ronan, while pointing out that the new experimental science of the Royal Society was "something quite different from the mystical-magical Rosicrucian approach," declared it "another important contribution to our understanding of Renaissance thinking" (Annals of Science 31 [1974]: 85-86). Less impressed were P. F. Corbin in Modern Language ReviewR 69 (January 1974): 149-51: "Though there is much in her thesis which is stimulating it cannot be accepted as proven," the evidence is "circumstantial or speculative," "inconclusive," and "a sense of context" is often lacking; and the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement of April 20, 1973 who pointed out some crucial weaknesses in the historical sections: "A major disappointment, lacking the solid basis of research normally associated with its author . . . in some

[Journal of Modern Historyv 51 (June 1979): 287-3161 ? 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/79/5102-0033$02.28

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genesis of the Rosicrucian "movement,"' its influence, its significance for the Renaissance in general, and the development of science in particular. Almost as important as the conclusions of Yates's book are the methods by which evidence is treated in order to produce these conclusions.

The Rosicrucian movement is an extraordinary episode in the troubled history of the early seventeenth century. We do not know whether such a "fraternity" ever existed, and Yates is careful to say that she does not know either (pp. xiv, 206-7). Our only evidence for its composition is literary, being contained in two anonymous pamphlets first published at Cassel in 1614 and 1615. These are rather brief productions, the first (or Fama, to use Yates's short title) amounting to fourteen pages in a modern translation (pp. 238-51), the second (or Confessio) amiounting to nine pages (pp. 251-60). They describe the foundation and constitution of a group of initiates who devote their lives to the study of the occult and to the twin ends of praising God and helping mankind. They practice alchemy but bitterly denounce false alchemists who are greedy and fraudulent. They practice medicine and criticize those doctors who accept money for their work. Their fraternity is idealistic, philanthropic. Their doctrine belongs to the broad stream of Renaissance occultism, acknowledging Eastern influences (and, nearer at hand, finding a kindred spirit in Paracelsus). Their founder is said to have "constructed a microcosm corresponding in all motions to the macrocosm" (whatever that means) (p. 248), they use the mystical geometry of the Cabbalist traditions, are adept in magic, and await the millennium in confidence that their doctrine will be justified. Every point in their manifestos could be illustrated many times over from several centuries of the occult tradition. No one familiar with this literature could describe their doctrine as anything other than a fairly ordinary, harmless, unobjectionable adaptation of familiar materials. Yet in Yates's hands they become the exemplars of a dynamic intellectual movement which typifies "the Renaissance mind" and has incalculable influence on such men as

respects seriously misleading' (pp. 445-46). He also insisted on the fundamental differences between Andreae and Dee and between Comenius and the Rosicrucians a point made again by the Dee scholar, C. H. Josten, who declared that "there is no trace of any filiation of the contents of the two works" (Andreae's Chyinical Wedding and Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica, "which as yet defies complete and certain interpre- tation'), concluding with the hope that "nobody will take Dr. Yates's conjectures for facts" (Ambix 20 [1973]: 132-33). Charles Webster briefly noted that "the evidence remains totally unconvincing," the connections argued are "contestable ... question- able," while the work of Andreae Comenius, and Bacon is quite remote from Rosicrucianism, which "itself never occupied more than the extreme fringe of European thought," and in England "was never more than an eccentric and periph- eral phenomenon' (English Historical Review 89 [April 1974]: 434-35). A. J. Turner (British Journa lfor the History of Science 6 [1972-73]: 442-44) found the book "not very convincing," since despite much speculation "the evidence fails too often" especially for the claims of influence by Dee on Khunrath and on the whole ",movement." Turner remains "unconvinced that the Rosicrucian manifestos were anything more than a literary exercise in a mystical genre," drawing on the occult tradition, 'which gave expression to an idealistic and fantastic programme of political wish-fulfillment, entirely lacking a basis in political reality."

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Francis Bacon, Comenius, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and the whole of the Royal Society. It becomes "a whole culture," whose ruthless suppres- sion by the forces of orthodoxy marks a tragic closure of a movement whose potential can only be described as the equal of the Enlightenment. How is this imposing picture built up?

In part it is a triumph of rhetoric. Yates invests all her writing, whether historical description or philosophical analysis, with an excitement which will take many readers along with it. Prague under Rudolph II was "a melting pot of ideas, mysteriously exciting in its potentiality for new devel- opments" (p. 17); Bohemia is a world "seething with strange excitements"' (p. 28); "The strangely exciting suggestion" is that John Dee inspired "the Rosicrucian movement" (p. 40); intense excitement" was "aroused by the Fama" (p. 45); the mechanical statues at Heidelberg were "enough to excite amazement" (p. 59). Around Frederick "deep currents were swirl- ing," while "all the mysterious movements of former years . . . were gathered to a head" in the propaganda for him (p. 90). John Dee had a ''strange, explosive, religious mission" in Bohemia, perhaps affected by "the new Lurianic Cabala which was capable of exciting remarkable phe- nomena of a religious nature" (p. 228). And so on. The rhetoric of excitement, though, will not affect the reader if he is unsatisfied by the argument and its serious claims for the importance and significance of all these phenomena. Here we must record a defeat of logic, demonstrated in a number of ways. Yates states that her book attempts "to provide a histori- cal framework for this line of thinking, and it is as a historical work that I would wish it to be judged" (p. 221; cf. pp. xiii, 201). As such, then, it must be judged.

If the historian has a prime concern it must be with the meaning ot his documents. In addition to the normal respect for semantics he must faith- fully reconstruct the context in which a particular judgment is made. A simple example of both processes is Yates's treatment of Johann Valentin Andreae and his use of the word ludibriurn. Andreae (born 1586) was a Lutheran pastor from Wuirttemberg who published anonymously in 1616 a work called Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz. Anno 1459 (Stras- burg). Yates shows that it is based on the age-old alchemical use of mariiage as a symbol for the chemical process and alludes to the Rosicrucians insofar as the name of its chief character is Christian Rosencreutz, who experiences a religious vision involving a banquet, a castle presided over by a King and Queen, with various mystical experiences (pp. 60-64). When I first read her book I was skeptical of Yates's claim that this work "ranks almost as a third Rosicrucian manifesto" (p. 50). By page 65 this claim has become that it is but another version of the allegories of the Fama and the Confessio." To me it seemed to have a quite different allegorical structure (based on the six days of Creation) and to be a form of glamorous rhapsody about alchemy (in a chivalric setting) which makes opportunistic use of the recent Rosicrucian publications. The publication shortly afterward of an authorita- tive two-volume study of Andreae by J. W. Montgomery confirmed that skepticism was the right response.3 Montgomery adds to his previous

3 John Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible. Johann Valentin Antdreae (1586-1654). Phoenix of the Theologians, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1973), vol. 1. An- dreae's Life, World-View, and Relations with Rosicrucianism and Alchemy, vol. 2,

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studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheranism a detailed biog- raphy of Andreae from published and manuscript sources, a study of his scientific and religious attitudes, a commented edition of the Chvmische Hochzeit, and a fully annotated bibliography of Andreae, primary and secondary. The range and accuracy of his scholarship is impressive, not least in the way he exposes the inaccuracies and confusions of the French historian of Rosicrucianism, Paul Arnold, on whom Yates relies so heavily and uncritically.

The significance of Montgomery's book, briefly, is its demonstration that Andreae was "the chief orthodox opponent of the Rosicrucian ideology (not a supporter of it, pace most interpreters)" (p. ix). Montgomery shows that there is no evidence for Andreae's authorship of the two Rosicrucian pamphlets and overwhelming evidence of his lifelong antipathy to cabalism, astrology, magic, and other forms of the occult. Andreae was an orthodox Lutheran pastor and theologian who tried to put his ideals into practice by organizing Christian societies, noted for their serious discussion and their practical spirit of mutual aid, and by writing various pamphlets advocating a Christian reform of society. His Christianopolis (1619) is a utopia which perfectly expresses Andreae's humanitarian bent and his complete accep- tance of the "fundamental theological approach of confessional Lutheranism" (p. 127). The religious framework is central to Andreae; indeed, he "never wrote a non-theological work" (p. 55). Although some friends of Andreae had occult leanings, Montgomery easily demolishes the "Guilt by Association" technique used to align Andreae with the occult through them.

Yet Andreae did publish in 1616 the Chvmical Wedding, in which the main character is Christian Rosencreutz, the supposed founder of the Rosicrucian sect. The work itself has very slender parallels with the Rosi- crucian literature (pp. 171-72) and substantial divergences (pp. 225-30)- differences so fundamental that one critic concluded that its purpose was "to ridicule the Rosicrucian myth," and Montgomery himself notes that some aspects of it "seem in part to be a direct slap" at the Rosicrucian

"The Chvmische Hochzeit," with Notes and Commentary," giving a barely legible facsimile of the 1690 English translation by Ezechiel Foxcroft with detailed commen- tary. Cross-reference between Montgomery's book and Yates's can be very illuminat- ing. Thus Yates attempts to link Andreae with another occultist, Simon Studion, author of a complex astrologico-chiliastic work, Naometria. She writes that Andreae "undoubtedly knew the Naometria for he mentions it in his work Turris Babel," but reports only that "Andreae is very obscure in what he says about the prophecies of Naometria, which he links with those of the Abbot Joachim, St. Brigid, Lichtenberg, Paracelsus, Postel, and other illuminati" (p. 50). This of course implies that Andreae is perhaps sympathetic, perhaps affected by the same mentality, but is certainly not hostile. If one turns to Montgomery's book, however, one finds a clear account of Naometrianism, which is shown to belong to the same occult tradition as Rosi- crucianism (Montgomery, pp. 202-6), but also a summary of Andreae's written judgment on this system, which is "unqualifiedly negative" in his drama Turbo (1616-the year of his Chymical Wedding), in which its followers are lampooned. As for Turris Babel, far from being obscure, the fifth dialogue is devoted expressly to Naometrianism, whose astrological and cabalistic pretensions are dismissed: "I would deny nothing to heaven, but I am enraged at you who reads lies into the heavens" (Montgomery, pp. 206-7). Yates seems reluctant to give her readers the truth about criticism of the occult.

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manifestos (p. 227). Why, then, did Andreae take over the name Rosen- creutz and even include his putative date of birth, 1378, in a cryptogram (pp. 171-72)? Montgomery's answer is that he was attempting to supplant the occult nature of the Rosicrucian manifestos, with their "anti-papal, cabalis- tic, astrological chiliasm" (p. 169), by a Christian allegory. Rosencreutz is no longer a Mage who abandons his pilgrimage to the birthplace of Chris- tianity, acquires secret knowledge from the East with which he establishes an esoteric fraternity in the West which awaits the apocalyptic end of the world. Now he is a 'Christian Everyman' who receives God's grace "through the invitation to attend the spiritual marriage of Christ and the Church" (p. 228). Montgomery concludes that "'Andreae made Rosencreutz the hero of the HoIchzeit not simply to satirize the Rosicrucian myth, but primarily to christiatize the mvth' (p. 228).

If that was his goal it has to be recorded that Andreae failed creating confusion for centuries. Although his work is recognizably different from the Rosicrucian manifestos its first readers soon assimilated it to them, it became the source of further Rosicrucian speculations, and as early as 1699 Andreae was thought to be the author of all three. Realization that his plan had backfired came bitterly to Andreae, who in his autobiographical vita (written at the end of his life but not published until 1799) expressed his disgust that it had proved "productive of a brood of monstrosities: a ludibrium, which you may wonder was evaluated and interpreted with subtle ingenuity by some people, foolishly enough, in demonstration of the inanity of the curious' (p. 37). Montgomery translates the word Iadibrium as ""fantasy," following A. E. Waite.4 It is a word which recurs in Andreae's writings, in his references to the Rosicrucians all of which are scornful and dismissive. In 1617 Andreae published a satirical dialogue, Menippus (en- larged in 1618), which recorded a widespread feeling of disappointment that the social reforms promised by the Rosicrucians have not materialized. One of the speakers asks, "Do you believe that there really are some members-or is the whole thing a Iudibriam on the part of curiosity- mongers?" The other replies that he does not know, but regrets that so many people have suffered "through unrealized hopes of membership."" But perhaps they deserved to, says the first speaker, 'for they preferred some artificial and strange way rather than the simple way of Christ,' who can be reached "by prayers, tears, fasting, zeal, and spiritual exercises" (pp. 181-82).

Against this spurious and corrupt proposal Andreae wrote an Invitatio Fraternatis Christi in 1617-18 which he described in his autobiography as being expressly "ludibrio illi RosencruIciano opposita,' and which offers instead a Christian brotherhood which includes care of the neighbor, the sharing of wealth, and other practical humanitarian suggestions (pp. 184-85). The following year Andreae published Ti rris Babel (1619) which has the stibtitle "'sive Judiciorum de Fraternitate Rosacae Crucis Chaos." Whereas the Rosicrucians had claimed that the "general reformation' would come to all men regardless of language Andreae says that the effect of their work has been to increase chaos. At the end ' Fama' is made to admit that all her wondrous claims are worthless (p. 186). Only a year later, in De

4 See A. E. Waite, The Brotherhood (f the Rosy Cross (London, 1924) and Montgomery's comments (p. 552).

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curiositas pernicie syntagma (1620), Andreae attacked occultism in general, concluding that "unless I am mistaken, the ludibrium of the Rosicrucian fraternity is the heart and scandal of occultism in our time" (p. 186). Andreae returned to the attack in a dialogue, Theophilus (ca. 1623), record- ing the disappointment felt when the Rosicrucian millennium did not take place (ibid.).

Andreae's polemic against Rosicrucianism is the product of a serious Christian's sense of outrage that "the idea of a Christian Society" had been appropriated by a group of charlatans-always assuming that they existed. He attacked their scheme and offered concrete models of what such a society should be. The Christianae Societatis imago, discovered by G. H. Turnbull in 1944 and published for the first time in 1954,5 describes a learned society based on Lutheran reformed religion which has some simi- larities to Bacon's New Atlantis, some to the Royal Society, and belongs to an interest in learned academies which was widespread-even John Evelyn wished to found a lay monastery for retirement and study.6 Andreae not only drew the model but actually established a Societas Christiana in 1618-19, again explicitly as a counteractive measure to Rosicrucianism. Writing to Duke Augustus in 1642 he described his efforts to found a society " 'quam fictitiae Fraternitatis Rosicruciae ludibrio indigno opponeremus" (p. 213), and writing to Comenius in 1629 he records how "post famae vanae [Comenius specifies: Fraternitatis Roseae] ludibrium in hoc coivimus, ante octennium circiter. . . . Scopus fuit, CHRISTUM loco suo restituere (p. 214).

One of the striking qualities of Andreae's life is the fusion of theory and practice, the interconnection of beliefs and their realization. He not only realized an ideal Christian society but he gave it lasting dimensions in his utopia, Christianopolis, which, again explicitly enough, is closed to ""im- postors who falsely call themselves Brothers of the Rose Cross" but is open to the true Rosicrucians, namely, practicing Christians (p. 240). In the preface to that work Andreae praised his friend Wilhelm Wense, who had seen people confused and deceived by the Fama and had asked, "'If these reforms seem proper, why do we not try them ourselves?" In his funeral sermon for Wense in 1642 Andreae recorded that he had striven for improvement in society "at a time when a certain deceitful (fictitia) frater- nity" had imposed itself upon gullible minds (pp. 214-15).

It is one of the great paradoxes of seventeenth-century history that a man who consistently, throughout his life, "laughed at the Rosicrucian fable and combated the little curiosity-brothers," as he put it in his autobiography (p. 179), should have been tarred with their brush. As we have seen, Andreae twice dismisses them as fictitia and four times as the proponents of a ludibrium. Montgomery translates the first word as "deceitful," the second as "fantasy," and argues that Andreae regarded Rosicrucianism as "fantas- tic," not as a "jest." Yet why did he call his own Chvmical Wedding a ludibrium? Montgomery argues that Andreae "can use the term either

5 See G. H. Turnbull, "Johann Valentin Andreaes Societas Christiana," ZeitschriUt fur deutsche Philologie 73 (1954): 407-32; 74 (1955): 151-85.

6 See John Evelyn, letter to Robert Boyle, dated September 3, 1659, in The Complete Works of the Right Honourable Robert Bovle, 5 vols. (London. 1744), 5:397-99.

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positively or negatively-positively in relation to the Hochzeit, negatively in reference to the Rosicrucians" (p. 37, n.). This, I feel, stretches credibility. All of Andreae's uses of the word seem to me pejorative: his account of the Hochzeit, which had survived even though other works of his had perished (as if to say that this of all should have survived!) and had spawned a brood of monstrous and bizarre interpretations, is not, I think, "positive": "Superfuerunt e contra Nuptiae Chymicae, cum monstrorum foecundo foetu, ludibrium, quod mireris a nonnullis aestimatum et subtili indagine explicatum, plane futile et quod inanitatem curiosorum prodat" (p. 37). It may be possible to read this as modesty, or self-deprecation, rather than as a thoroughgoing recantation, but I find it hard to overlook a rather rueful tone, as if in recognition of the responsibility of this work, and his own misguided attempt to out-trump the Rosicrucians by appropriating the name of their hero, for giving further life to a movement which he had spent much of his life trying to stamp out.

Given that the word ludibrium has unusual importance in Andreae's attitude to Rosicrucianism, it is surprising that neither Montgomery nor Yates should give the reader any wider linguistic context. Looking it up in Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary we find it glossed as "a mockery, derision, wantonness" (cf. Lucr. 2.47; Livy 24.4.2; 30.30; Suet. Vit. 17). By transference it means "A: A laughing-stock, butt, jest, sport" (cf. Livy 1.56.9; Hor. 1.14.15; Quint. 6.1.45) and "B: A scoff, jest, sport . . . standing jest." A standard Renaissance dictionary (Thesaurus . . . post Ro. Stephani et aliorum . . . a Io. Mathia Gesnero . . . Lipsiae MDCCXLIX) defines Ilidibriu,n as "Res vana et deridenda, certa talis, qua alius ludit," and gives some interesting references from Virgil (Aen. 6.75: r-apidis ludibria i,entis, "the sport of rushing winds") and Quintilian (1.6.32:foedissima . . . ludibria, "the most hideous absurdities" as the Loeb translation renders it). At whatever level, then, the word had pejorative connotations, and Yates's first reference to Andreae's ludibrium, in his judgment of his Chy mical Wedding, glosses it as "a fiction, or a jest, of little worth" (p. 31). But in other places in her book the word's clearly pejorative meaning is ignored. On page 84 it is identified with a "serious game," on page 95 it is a "joke," and on pages 125 and 177 it is equated with "fiction, parable"; on page 129 it glosses the word "merrily," on page 140 it is a "play scene," on page 142 a "comedy," on page 144 it is glossed as "mystical joke," and a "myth." Evidently it has become for Yates a flexible concept which can be attached to the Rosy Cross fraternity at any convenient point-indeed in the index it is even described as "word used of the Rosicrucian movement" (p. 265). Both the contexts in Andreae's writings and the dictionary evidence would lead one to agree with Charles Webster that the phrases involving ludibrium are "derisive terms."'7

The importance of determining the meaning of this word is that it expresses Andreae's attitude to Rosicrucianism. For Yates it would clearly not do if what she presents as a major movement in European history were dismissed as a joke or laughingstock. In order to rehabilitate the word, and justify her thesis, she is forced to distort Andreae's actual relation to this "furore." By a series of rhetorical maneuvers she gives the impression that

7 Charles Webster, 'Macaria: Samuel Hartlib and the Great Reformation," Acta Comeniana 26 (1970): 149; quoted by Yates, p. 50.

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he was closely connected with what she repeatedly calls the "movement" (since there is no evidence of any single author, let alone two, one can hardly give it the cohesive and organized status of a 'movement'). To begin with she appropriates the Chvmical Wedding to the Rosicrucian 'manifestos": "It is the third item in the series which launched the Rosicrucian furore. The series came out annually for three years, the Fama in 1614, the Confessio in 1615, the Wedding in 1616" (p. 60). The fact that Andreae's work followed the other two does not make it a series, the product of conscious planning. But at least this gets the sequence right, which she elsewhere inverts: "The manifestoes are undoubtedly related to the Chemical Wedding, though they are probably not by Andreae" (p. 30). No, the relationship is the other way round, the Wedding alludes to the manifestos, not they to it; and they are not "probably," but certainly, not by Andreae. On the next page Andreae is described as the "propagator of 'Rosicrucian' fantasies" (p. 31); the patent differences between the Wedding and the manifestos are ignored, Andreae is said to have given "romantic allegorical expression to the themes of the manifestos" (p. 39), and his work is finally totally assimilated to the other two (pp. 50, 65), representing "the climax of the Rosencreutz myth" (p. 69).

As Yates returns to Andreae during the course of her wide-ranging narrative, any doubts or reservations about the historical evidence for his participation are swept away. "Andreae was certainly behind the scenes of the whole movement to which he frequently refers in his numerous works" (p. 50; note that nothing is said of the tone of these references); the 'Rosicrucian movement" was connected with the Elector Palatine, and "its moving spirit" was Andreae (p. 54). Though the Fama and Confessio "may not be written by the same hand as the Wedding''-the laws of historical veracity compel that qualification but seem also to permit the following groundless supposition- 'the plan of the allegories in all three works bears the stamp of minds working in concert, bent on sending out into the world their myth of Christian Rosencreutz" (p. 65). The picture is being built up-a fantasy, let us remind ourselves-of a group of occultists expressing a shared program. The fact that the authorship is multiple, not single, can now be subtly restated to suggest collaborative activity. The response to Rosi- crucianism, Yates writes, "was chiefly in reply to the Fama and the Confes- sio, the authors of which, though obviously belonging to the school of Rosencreutz mythology propagated by Andreae in the Chemical Wedding [note again how the relation between these works has been invertedj, may have been other than Andreae himself. I do not put forward any theories about the identities of the writers who may have co-operated with Andreae over the Rosencreutz propaganda" (p. 91). But that does not stop her recording other people's candidates, such as Jungius or Janus Gruter (who, she suggests. "might be watched for clues"), however tenuous or linsub- stantiatable these suggestions are. So we read that Andreae is "the person who knew most about the Rosicrucian manifestoes," he "and his circle" being in contact, open or secret, with most of the illuininati of Europe (p. 137).

This whole account of Andreae as the moving spirit behind Rosi- crucianism is based on no historical evidence of any kind other than his unhappy use of the name Christian Rosencreutz for a persona in the Chmnzical Wedding. Not only is there no evidence for it, but against it we

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have many explicit criticisms of Rosicrucianism by Andreae himself. How does Yates deal with this evidence? She reinterprets it: the word ludibrium, for instance, is used in a work (the Christian Mythology) which includes favorable references to the theater, so that this evidence 'must be taken into account" and the word ludibrium must then be not derogatory but a term of praise (pp. 140 ff.). That seems a self-evidently specious misuse of linguistic context. The fact is that Andreae here dismissed the R. C. Brothers as "mere players, comedians, frivolous and foolish people" and their fraternity as one that "plays, comedies throughout Europe," references which can only be denigratory. Yates's reinterpretation also takes the form of giving a substantial excerpt from Andreae and then in commenting, drawing attention not to the derogatory tone but to some other aspect. Thus the attack by Truth in the Christian Mythology on the ' new-fangled no- tions' of the Rosicrucians that had been occupying the "literary stage" recently, producing "altercations, . . vague hints and malicious conjec- tures" from which she has withdrawn herself "utterly, that I may not be involved in so dubious and slippery a concern -an unequivocally condem- natory passage-is taken by Yates as merely showing how much Andreae approved of the theater "as good and morally valuable," and that he only disliked others tampering with the original Rosicrucian play scene (p. 143). That seems to me a disingenuous comment, to say the least.

The most drastic of her reinterpretations of the Andreae evidence con- cerns a putative chronology. Yates suggests that Andreae had earlier ap- proved of the Rosicrucians but experienced a sudden change of heart around 1617. "The myth which he had first ardently welcomed" now "seems to be disparaged by him as a vain 'ludibrium.' In its place, he now urged the formation of 'Christian Unions, or 'Christian Societies' . . . to be inspired by aims very similar to those expressed in the Rosicrucian manifestoes" (p. 140). Several misinterpretations converge here. First, there is no evidence that Andreae had ever "ardently welcomed" the Rosicrucians; second, Yates does not remind us that since the Chymical Wedding was published in 1616 it is barely a year later that he is rejecting Rosicrucianism; third, he- did not turn to Christian societies as an alternative to Rosicrucianism-as Montgomery has shown, there was a consistent Christian humanitarianism throughout his life; and fourth, the purposes of Andreae's Christian soci- eties were not at all similar to those of the Rosicrucians. It is deceptive, then, to speak of Andreae in 1617 beconming "extremely anxious about the course" of a movement which he had earlier supported (p. 143), and it is even more deceptive to turn his peJorative references into laudatory ones.

The most extreme instance of this tactic occurs in Yates's treatment of Christianopolis, that Christian scientific utopia in the preface to which Andreae dismissed the R. C. Fraternity as "a joke" that had nevertheless produced 'confusion among men . . . conflict among the learned" and 'an unrest and commotion of impostors and swindlers," created by "some society (if there really is such a one), hazy, omniscient only in the eyes of its own boastfulness," who put their own "foolish ceremonies" above "Him who is himself the Way the Truth, and the Life" (pp. 145-46). From this unambiguous denunciation Yates extracts a single and positive conclu- sion, that "according to Andreae, the furore has had at least this good result, that it has made people think and realize the need for reform" (p. 146). If the reader thinks that conclusion flies in the face of the evidence, he

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will be more amazed when Yates, having claimed that Andreae's work is inspired by "Hermetic-Cabalist, magico-scientific" trends initiated by Dee, Fludd, and Campanella, concludes that "Andreae is, then, repeating in a disguised form in Christianopolis the secret themes of the Rosicrucian manifestos and of his own Chemical Wedding. He disguises it by his apparent rejection of Rosicrucians, not only in the preface [the passage just quoted] but also in the text of that work." She is referring to the sequence where the guard at the eastern gate refuses entry to certain low classes of people, including "stage-players" and "impostors who falsely call them- selves the brothers of the Rosicrucians." Again, an unequivocal rejection of this fantasy, in line with Andreae's lifelong pronouncements. But Miss Yates can cope: "We have to move carefully here because this is an Andreaen joke. It is the false R. C. Brothers who are excluded from Christianopolis, not the true ones" (p. 150). Quite so . . . and by the same token, the putative change of attitude was also illusory. It transpires that Andreae was working for Rosicrucianism all the time, as a kind of double agent.

II The sequence discussing Andreae is typical of a rather disturbing aspect of Yates's work-her treatment of critics of Rosicrucianism (or the occult, or magic generally). Either she dismisses these critics by casting them as violent enemies or terrified neurotics or, as here, she first ignores the criticism, then gives a "neutral" summary of the attack, and finally takes it merely as proof that a serious discussion was going on. Thus a series of rather caustic satires on Frederick of the Palatinate for his presumed associations with the Rosicrucians (pp. 55 ff.) are taken in a completely solemn manner, as an actual account of the Fraternity's doctrines. To perform this maneuver she has had to empty the satires of their mockery and almost invert them into panegyrics. As she puts it herself, the "satirical and contemptuous account" of the movement in these documents, "if divested of the satirical tone and read in a positive sense, gives an impression of Frederick as a religious and reforming leader which fits in well with the visionary and reforming tone of the Rosicrucian manifestos" (p. 58; my italics). One does not have to be a literary critic to perceive that this is an illicit maneuver: "A parodies B's extravagant claims: remove the parody and you have an accurate account of B." But if you "remove" the satire from a satire, what is left? Later in the century, this time in England, another satiric attack on the Rosicrucians appeared, a pamphlet dated 1676, from which Yates quotes this announcement: "To give notice, that the Modern Green-ribbon'd Caball, together with the Ancient Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross; the Hermetick Adepti and the company of Accepted Masons intend all to dine together on the 31 of November next. . . . [A comic menu is then described and those who think of going are advised to wear spectacles] 'For otherwise 'tis thought the Said Societies will (as hitherto) make their Appearance Invisible' " (p. 211). The jest in grouping all these invisible secret societies together is plain, but perhaps only Yates could take it as serious evidence that "a whole group of esoteric societies" were regarded as having something in common.

The issue is not as trivial as that last example might suggest. It has long

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been known that Sir Isaac Newton was extremely interested in alchemy, but the significance of this interest has-of course-been interpreted variously. To understand it we would need to know far more than has yet been made clear of Newton's attitude toward that activity. Happily, Newton has left us his opinion of the Rosicrucians in his copy of Vaughan's translation of The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity R.C. (1652), now in the Yale Library. Newton has copied into this book some other information about the Fraternity and ends his note with the following brusque remark: "This was the history of that imposture," on which, however, Miss Yates comments: "This, however, need not necessarily imply contempt; it could merely mean that Newton knew that the Rosencreutz story was a myth, a ludibrium" (p. 200). There is a curious combination of qualities in Yates. She is sufficiently widely read as a scholar to know of this note; she has the integrity to publish, and not to suppress it; yet she finally interprets it in this perverse manner, to the opposite of its declared meaning, and goes on to a further rash of speculation (pp. 201-2). The danger of this approach to history is that all the positions and polarities can be reversed: black becomes white if we divest it of the satire, words do not mean what they appear to mean. If cardied out with sufficient energy this would produce a massive falsification of the evidence; and Yates's book is not without traces of this effect.

As a final example of this inversion of negative criticism into the claim for the existence of positive "recognition" we might consider the stated opinion of Comenius. As we have seen with Andreae, one reaction to the Rosicru- cians was of serious disappointment: despite the admirable Christian philan- thropy of the manifestos the millennium had not arrived, indeed nothing had changed. The R. C. Brothers had failed to appear. In The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (written 1623, printed 1631) Comenius records the appearance of a man in a marketplace calling the people together and describing the accomplishments of a new group of seven men who know all the secrets of nature and can overcome all human limitations. The people are delighted to think that they could now "without error, know everything . . . live for several hundred years without sickness and grey hair, if they only wished it" (p. 163). Hopes grow enormously and each man desires to partake, each writes his petition to be received into the group, but each petition "was returned without an answer; and their joyful hope was turned to grief" (ibid.). The disappointment was so great that men "ran from one region of the earth to another, lamenting their misfortune that they could not find these happy men" (p. 164).

But then another trumpet called, another man appeared, selling his wares from the Rosicrucians: "Now everything that was sold was wrapped up in boxes that were painted and had various pretty inscriptions, such as Portae Sapientiae; Fortalitium; Gymnasium Universitatis; Bonum Macro-micro- cosmicon; Harmonia utriusque Cosmi; Christiano-Cabalisticum" (ibid.), and so on. All who purchased were forbidden to open their boxes because otherwise the "secret wisdom" in it "would evaporate and vanish." But some men did, and "finding them quite empty, showed this to others." All, incensed, cried "Fraud!" to the salesman, who managed to calm them by saying that the magic objects were really there but that "they were invisible to all but 'Filiae scientiae' (that is, the sons of science)" . . . (p. 164). The fuss died down, the salesman went away, and the people who had sought these mysteries were "sitting in corners with locked mouths."

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Comenius's pilgrim, narrating all this, draws two conclusions: "Either they had been admitted to the mysteries (as some believed of them), and were obliged to carry out their oath of silence, or (as it seemed to me, looking without any spectacles) they were ashamed of their hopes and ot their uselessly expended labour" (p. 165). The pilgrim asks his guide whether nothing will come of all their hopes and receives the unsatisfying answer that perhaps something will come if one waits, for perhaps these men know the time when it will happen. But the pilgrim refuses to "continue gaping here" since he does not know "of a single example of one [man] who succeeded": "Let us proceed hence."

To the reader who knows anything of millenarian movements this passage has a familiar ring. Those who have faith that the time will come can be patient, accepting all difficulties; those who do not believe are always torn by the suspicion that it is all a hoax, a case of "imposture held up by credulity''-in Bacon's striking phrase-that the whole operation has been performed by a mountebank. But what is Comenius's own attitude? Yates argues that the specific allusions to Rosicrucian texts show that "the young Comenius had evidently steeped himself in all this literature, and had hoped for much from it," but was then disappointed (pp. 165-66). Yet it seems to me that the passage is written from the outside, without any sense that "Comenius" (or the Narrator) had ever been a would-be member of the group. What we are given is a view of other men's hopes and credulities, possibly satisfied, but-it seems to the Pilgrim--ashamed of their hopes and of their uselessly expended labour." I see no grounds for Yates's literalist interpretation of this passage as autobiography, establishing that Comenius was a "follower" of Andreae; nor, even less, do I see that Comenius's final vision of angels protecting the chosen has anything to do with "Hermetic-Cabalist Christian angelology" (p. 169). What I do find striking in a number of these critiques of Rosicrucianism is not so much the total skepticism about whether there was such a fraternity at all as the deep disappointment that none of its promises had been fulfilled. The composers of the manifesto, then, coulld be seen as genuine Christian occultists who hoped for what they could not achieve; or they could be seen as frauds who had perpetrated a practical joke, perhaps for gain, perhaps for fun. Either way the result was disillusioning and could only arouse suspicion about the whole process.

III Yates observes that in due course the Roscrucian "furore" died out, and she has an explanation for it. Part of her explanation concerns Eur-opean history and the Thirty Years' War, on which I am not competent to pronounce, but another part concerns the general nature of the occult in this period and the reactions against it. In her earlier essay on hermeticism in science she wrote that the Rosicrucian "tends to have persecution mania.''8 Here she drops that objective account and claims, in effect, that the Rosicrucian (whoever he was-there seems a distinct shortage of draimatis

I F. Yates, "The Hennetic Tradition in Renaissance Science," in Art. Science and Historv in the Renaissance, ed. C. Singleton (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 255-74: quote from p. 263.

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personae) had every reason to feel persecuted since he was in fact hunted. We have heard of the conspiracy theory of history; this is its first cousin, the persecution theory. Here again Yates's rhetoric can be seen. She is continually polarizing a situation, rendering it as a violent conflict, imputing anger, malice, to the participants. She uses metaphors derived from wars to account for-dare one say, create?-an animus against these forces of what she calls enlightenment. In two successive sentences she uses the word "enemies" ("of the movement"') three times-a man such as Libavius is not just a critic but an enemy (p. 51). and there are other "enemies" (e.g., p. 57). Mersenne makes an "onslaught' on the Rosicrucians, writes various "attacks" in which Casaubon's redating of the Hermetica to a post- Christian period becomes "a weapon" (p. 111). The Rosicrucian movement suffered a "-total collapse . . . with the defeat at Prague in 1620" which " ushered in a great satirical campaign" against it, "the campaign of the conquerors" (112). Such metaphors may seem merely signs of stale writing, but they have some serious consequences. One is that the emotions of stress and combat are nourished by being indulged and result in a falsification of particular reactions. Thus the sustained challege to the pseudo-sciences made by Mersenne is presented in violent terms, as if Mersenne were a totalitarian concerned with extermination policies. He is supposed to have said that the occult sciences 'must be eliminated, root and branch . . . destroyed . . . severely repressed" (p. 112). To see how false that picture is it is necessary to read Mersenne.

This giving-in to violence is dangerous. In a number of places Yates puts side by side the Rosicrucian movement and "witch-scares," which, accord- ing to her (using Trevor-Roper as an authority) were growing in size and ferocity during the seventeenth century. As historians will say (have said), that interpretation of the witch-scare is extremely doubtful, and like so much else in Yates's book it deals with the contrary arguments by the simple device of never considering them. But it is the connection of all this with Rosicrucianism that is especially disturbing. Chapter 8 is called "The Rosicrucian Scare in France." In two works published in France in 1623 we find allegations that the Rosicrucians are in league with the devil (pp. 103 ff.) and are themselves witches. This is a familiar accusation against the occult sciences, notably astrology, alchemy, and magic and has been heard in every period since Saint Augustine. But Yates argues that this is peculiarly fitting to the mood of the 1620s and that both these pamphlets "are really working up a witch-craze" against the Rosicrucians. This claim is made four times on page 105; on the next page it is repeated just as often and is linked up to a German witch-craze with the suggestion that this was all perhaps part of a conspiracy to stamp out "the Palatinate-Bohemian movement with its connections with the Rosicrucian manifestos." Yates then amplifies this claim by examining the polemics of Naude, and by the time she reaches Mersenne she has created a picture of a country paralysed by fear. Mer- senne's reaction is said to be "'influenced by fear' (pp. 112). Further: 'The failure of the Rosicrucian movement in Germany, its suppression by firce and by savagely adverse propaganda, affected the tone of thought in the early seventeenth century, injecting into it an atmosphere of fear' (p. 113; I have italicized the grossly overstated emotive gestures). The R. C. Brothers "4could easily be turned into sorcerers by witch-hunters' (p. 124). In the ".earlier and more terrible times' of the early seventeenth century relations

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between secret societies "would have been deadly serious and full of danger" (p. 217). The philosophers about to found the Royal Society 'had to be very careful. Religious passions were still high, and a dreaded witch-scare might start at any moment to stop their efforts" (pp. 188-89).

One can only deplore this kind of writing. It works in much the same way as the witch-craze itself: impute violence, oppression and persecution to those who disagree with you and you more or less give yourself carte blanche for dealing with them as you will. Yates is always ready to attack witch-hunters, but in the process she runs the same danger: where the witch-hunters created witches to fulfill the needed role, she is creating witch-hunters. If we actually compare her account of Mersenne or the Royal Society with her dark hints ("the Society had many enemies in its earlier years; its religious position seemed unclear; witch-scares were not altogether a thing of the past," p. 189) then we soon see where the truth lies-the phantoms fade away, daylight returns. But this persecution theory has another and perhaps even more serious consequence in that it psychologises all critics of the movement. In this climate of fear no one can be allowed to criticize an occult group because he has substantial and serious intellectual objections to its ideology or its methods. He criticizes it because he is afraid of it; or because he is afraid that other people will thlink he is a nmember of it; or becauise he is secretly attracted to it.

James I published a book attacking magic. In Yates's world this has to be understood as follows: "James was desperately afraid of anything savouring of magic; this was his most deep-seated neurosis. . . . Mersenne, too, was afraid. He had to protect his own interest in mathematics and mechanics from any taint of conjuring. This gave an asperity to his anti-Renaissance movement . . ." (p. 113). This type of historiography is pernicious because it implies that the critic's response was not objective but personal, inspired by irrational motives, so that his judgments can be taken less seriously-in fact, he may not reallv be opposed to the movement at all. . . . Yates even uses this critical model to account for the makeup of the Royal Society. The "Oxford group," a number of scientists who were among the founding members of the Royal Society, are said to have been acting to dissociate themselves 'as completely as possible from imputation of magic, still a danger for scientific groups" (p. 187). For this reason, she suggests, they intensify their praise of Bacon's experimental method, and "carefully" dlraw away from the occult mathematics of Dee and Fludd (ibid.). The evidence for their association with this tradition is too superficial to be worth discussing.9 Now comes the proof: "The way was now prepared for the unleashing of a witch-scare" (ibid.). This witch-scare-a term implying, I take it, the active hunting down and brutal examination of persons thought to be witches-consisted in no more violent event than the publication in 1659 by Meric Casaubon of Dee's own Spiritual Diary, recording his "supposed conversations with angels." (Yates gives us no details of this work, but it would seem that Dee was the pathetic victim of an unscrupu- lous imposture.) Casaubon's act in publishing this book is now given the crudest personal interpretation: 'It appears that Casaubon had personal

9 Wilkins is supposed to have been "drawing quite openly on the Dee-Fludd tradition for his work on 'mathematical magic' " (187): Yates cannot see that one can borrow one idea from a man without taking all the others too.

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reasons for the publication, through which he hoped to establish his own orthodoxy . . ." (p. 188). First create a witch-scare, then find someone to exploit it. Is this a fruitful way of writing history? Surely not.

The dramatization and polarization of all the parties concerned creates an image which does not correspond to reality. This is a technique which defenders of the occult have used before. An example close at hand is the controversy between John Webster and Seth Ward which Miss Yates discusses (pp. 185 ff.). In his attack on the Universities, Academiarimn Exvamiieni (1654), which includes an apologia for the hermetic tradition, Webster denounces the "Schools" (i.e., Universities) for their attitude to the occult: "that noble, and almost divine Science of natural Magick, is by them not only repudiated, abominated, and prosecuted with fire and sword, but also the very name seems nauseous and execrable unto them. .10 Webster was refuted, point by point, by Seth Ward (in his Vindicae Academiariun [1654], who on this point simply called his opponent's bluff:

It is surely a wonderful thing, that natural Magick should not only be prosecuted with fire and sword, but that it should be execrable also. Yet notwithstanding this lamentable persecution, I dare adventure my life, That M[r.] W. may passe safely with this Examen, carrying it either in his pocket, or in his hand, or in his mouth through both the Universities of this Nation, the severall Colledges of Eaton, Winchester &c. the College of Physicians at London, and all the rest, (provided he have a care how he passes by the College at Bethlem) without any danger of Bell, Booke, or Candle, Fire, Sword or Execration."

Ward states that Webster's great authorities in magic are disregarded not "because of the name of Magick, much less for any conjuring they teach, but for the cheat and imposture which they put upon us," unlike the true "natural magic' of science. He is willing to give Webster the benefit of the doubt as to whether he wrote maliciously, to whip up feeling, or just out of ignorance: "But M. Webster knew not this, 'tis plaine therefore he is no Witch, and is therefore free from persecution.''12 That is a clear and relaxed statement of the tolerance to be expected in the 1650s: Miss Yates seems to me to have seriously misjudged the intellectual climate in France and England in the seventeenth century.

IV Given the paucity of the evidence, it will by now be clear that Yates has set herself a very difficult task indeed: we only have two documents produced by or for the Rosicrucians (whoever they were) and, as we have seen, much contemporary comment expressed disappointment at the nonmaterialization of either acts or persons. Yates does not seem daunted by the slenderness of the evidence. But the reader who approaches her book as a serious historical study will be bothered by the amount of sheer speculation in it, by the uncritical ways in which the Rosicrucian movement is defined, and by

" John Webster, Academiaruin E.xamen, p. 68. This and Seth Ward's reply are reprinted in facsimile by Allen G. Debus in his Science and Education in the Seventeentlh Centurv. The Webster-Ward Debate (London, 1970), hereafter cited as SES. This quotation is on p. 150.

" Seth Ward, Vindicae Academiaruni, p. 34; SES, p. 228. 12 Ibid.. p. 35; SES, p. 229.

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the indiscriminate claims for its influence. In many places argument disap- pears altogether. Some of the recurrent words are "if," "may," "perhaps," "would have," "surely," "must have," a sequence which often culminates in the positive form "was." Of very many examples-the process is cumulative, as speculations at first tentative gradually harden and then become the base for further speculations-I select but a few: "Inigo Jones, if he came to Heidelberg . . . would surely have been interested in . . . Salomon de Caus" (p. 12). "Surely the visit of the Garter embassy . . . must have been an immensely stimulating and exciting event for . . . Andreae?" (p. 33). (There is no evidence that either of these contacts took place.) Newton, in reading Ashmole's collection of alchemical tracts, "would have observed" a quotation from the Fama, "would have realized" this, "would have read" that piece of occult lore, and so on (p. 201), so it "'might be of use"' to approach Newton's alchemy from Rosicrucianism. Newton was interested in God-evidently mathematics "had not entirely satisfied him. Perhaps he entertained, or half-entertained [a telling qualification], a hope that the 'Rosicrucian' alchemical way through nature might lead him even higher." "At any rate," Newton drew on Ashmole, who drew on Maier, who drew on Dee, so that it would "not be historicallyfantastic to entertain as a hypothesis basis for future study, the possibility that a 'Rosicrucian' element, in some revised or changed form no doubt, might enter into Newton's interest in alchemy" (p. 202). Note that despite the tentative expressions, which I have italicized, all the suppositions and speculations are allowed to stand, often in the form of a rhetorical question. Yates has a great penchant for the unanswered (and unanswerable) question-as she says herself at one point, "I am glad to leave this in the form of a question!" (p. 87). But it is not enough to ask questions that neither you nor anyone else can answer, and the cumulative effect of these speculations is to create a structure which has a charm and excitement of its own but which has lost contact with the realm of the knowable or visible. In a passage such as the following we seem to be hovering on the verge of the ineffable: '"We cannot reconstruct the vanished glories of Heidelberg, but the Chemical Wedding may give us some idea of what their aim may have been. to present the encyclopedia [of all knowledge] in symbolic form, and also, perhaps, to induce an atmosphere through which occult relationships might be perceived, and the hidden harmonies of the universe might be heard" (p. 68). As she writes in the preface, "The doubt and uncertainty which beset the seeker after the invisible Red Cross Brothers are themselves the inevi- table accompaniment of the search for the Invisible" (p. xiv).

To return to the question of evidence, we note at times the argument ex silentio. Libavius attacked Dee's monas hieroglyphica in 1594 and "would thus certainly have been able to recognize the influence of Dee's Monas in the Rosicrucian manifestoes, which would confirm him in his disapproval of them" (p. 52). By the same token, then, we might have expected Libavius to say so. Elias Ashmole's comment that Maier was not properly rewarded for his scholarly labors in England (slight though they were) reveals a whole stratum of history (it begins, as do so many of these dangerous passages, with the words "the impression is gained"), in which Maier is the inter- mediary between England and Germany to establish an alchemical-political axis for "an Anglo-Palatinate-Bohemian alliance." Unknown to him, Elias Ashmole is thus attempting to "restore, or to contine" a huge international

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movement (p. 196). I find no evidence for any of these speculations. Where evidence actually exists it can be interpreted in opposite ways: take for instance the significance of dedicating a book to James I. Fludd dedicated his History of the Macrocosm to James I in 1617, and this is seen as a sinister attempt to involve James in Hermetic philosophy, "attempting by that dedication to draw him into that point of view, or to give the impression that he is favourable to it" (p. 78). Yet six pages later Casaubon's dedica- tion of his attack on the pre-Christian date of the Hermetica, also dedicated to James, thus seemed "to put James into the anti-Hermetic camp . . ." (p. 84). Kepler, too, "like Fludd''-but unlike Casaubon, it seems-also dedi- cated a book to James (p. 223). Such evidence is of almost no value. Where the evidence is patently insufficient Yates sometimes takes refuge in the phrase "I believe" (e.g., pp. 51, 205), although in some cases it is joined at once to the less certain "may" form (e.g., p. 83).

Equally unsatisfactory are her attempts to claim that certain ideas or attitudes are peculiar to the Rosicrucian movement. In these passages no attempt is made to survey the field in other directions; there is no indepen- dent evaluation of the topic, merely the assertion of one's own case and the ignoring of everyone else's. In an alchemical work by Khunrath (1609) there is an illustration of a cave through which "adepts" are moving toward light: "This may well have suggested imagery in the Rosicrucian Fama" (p. 38). But the metaphors of darkness and light, and indeed caves, as images of knowledge and ignorance, are extremely old and extremely widely dissemi- nated. The Farna's call for a new science to break the influence of Aristotle and Galen in the universities is described by Yates as "a thrilling call to attention, that trumpet call which was to echo throughout Germany, rever- berating thence through Europe" (p. 42); it is in fact one of the stock positions in the criticism of the Universities which had been made time and again in the centuries before the Fama. That trumpet had been blown since Petrarch at least. The emblems using Christian images of dew descending from heaven (p. 46) and of Jehovah's wings as a symbol of protection (pp. 55 ff.) are stated to be specifically Rosicrucian, without any attempt at an inquiry into their tremendous dissemination in emblem literature and indeed in Christian art and literature for several centuries beforehand. We are not given any account of the completely traditional nature of the symbolism in the Christian Wedding (p. 60), nor are we told that the "emphasis on the practical utility" of knowledge (p. 150) does not exist as a unique and specific link between Bacon's New Atlantis and the Christianopolis but goes back to Saint Augustine, the Bible, and the Stoics and was propagated by Humanists throughout the Renaissance, especially in the shape of the vita activa.

A final, and particularly striking, example of this tendency to appropriate general and familiar images to her specific argument, cutting their prehistory away (history is reborn from 1613 on), occurs in her comment on the "familiar frontispiece" to Sprat's Historv of the Royal Society. This plate shows a 'bust of Charles II, the royal founder, with Francis Bacon on his left, and William Brouncker, the first president, on his right." The engraving was made by Wenceslaus Hollar, "a Bohemian artist who left Bohemia, presumably for religious reasons, in 1627" (my italics), and what Yates calls "this history" makes her look more closely at the engraving: "One now notices the prominent winged angel, blowing a blast on a trumpet, and

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crowning Charles II with a wreath of fame as the founder of this famous Society. Bacon is under the angel's wing. One cannot help noticing this now, and wondering whether it could be an allusion to 'under the shadow of Jehova's wings,' and whether the trumpeting angel was meant to recall the Fama, and those hopes of long ago, so long deferred and now, at last, realized" (pp. 191-92). The rhetorical close is impressive, but certain doubts remain. Great significance is attached to the trumpet and to the angel, both of which feature in the Rosicrucian manifestos. The ordinary reader, with- out the engraving in front of him, can at once perceive the logic behind the connection: "All angels are winged; many angels blow trumpets; ergo, any winged angel with a trumpet must be a Rosicrucian one." Yet if we go on to look at the plate "with renewed interest," as Yates puts it-and she reprints it (pl. 30) that we may check her interpretation-we notice two odd things. The angel is not blowing its trumpet; it is holding it over its right shoulder with its right hand while placing the wreath with its left hand. And Bacon is not under its wings; allowing for perspective he is about three to four feet in front of the angel's left arm. These are, I know literal-minded objections, sadly lacking in the spirit of ludibrium, but after all Yates has few peers in her knowledge of philosophy and the visual arts in the Renaissance. One can only conclude that the drive for proof is stronger than the senses, or that this is a field in which the historian can (must?) be satisfied with evidence at a far lower level than usually available.

It does seem, indeed, that Yates has suppressed her critical faculties. Admittedly she is dealing with the occult. and not every aspect of that activity is susceptible to rational explanation. But even after making such allowances there are passages in which the entire absence of any skepticism about the occult's methods and aims must raise the reader's concern that on this level, too, normal processes of evaluating evidence have been tem- porarily suspended. Thus in the preface we are told that in his Mollas hieroglvphica John Dee "believed that he had discovered a formula for a combined cabalist, alchemical, and mathematical science which would en- able its possessor to move up and down the scale of being from the lowest to the highest spheres. And in the supercelestial sphere, Dee believed that he had found the secret of conjuring angels by numerical computations in the Cabalist tradition" (p. xii, my italics). The student of the Renaissance occult will be prepared to grant that much indulgence to the beliefs of Dee. especially if he has read that strange work, the Monas. 1' But what are we to make of the later discussion of the Monias as a "mysterious epitome" of alchemy combined with mathematical formulae, where all qualifications have disappeared'? "The adept who had mastered these formulae could move up and down the ladder of creation, from terrestrial matter, through the heavens, to the angels and God" (p. 198; my italics). What now'? Has Yates identified with Dee's beliefs'? Does she simply accept them, and has she deliberately converted them from the possible-but as yet untried-to the actual'? It seems as if she has, for a few pages later she writes, without any qualifications or reservations, that in Rosicrucianism "magic was a dominat- ing factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mathematics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the

13 For a translation of the Monas by C. H. Josten, see that stimulating journal devoted to early chemistry, Ambix 12, nos. 2 and 3 (June-October 1964): 84-221.

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supercelestial world" (p. 223). There the matter-of-fact word "working" leaves no doubt as to her acceptance of the actual existence of magical operation, with perhaps even a suggestion of its efficacy. Later on in that page Dee is described as a "bold operator," attempting ''supercelestial mathematical magic," who believed that he had '"gained contact with good angels." Of course, Yates continues his claims to be in contact with the angels were bound to arouse suspicion as to his modes of action, but she does not allow that suspicion to diminish the status of his "technology,"' which was "practical and successful and entirely rational in its new under- standing of mathematical techniques. Again the inference that some- thing (whatever it was) worked, was "practical, successful, rational"; again we miss the absence of any caveat to the unwary or innocent reader.

The absence of such qualifications is to be noted at every level in this book. The suspension of disbelief occurs so often that it begins to suggest an absence of disbelief, an uncritical indulgence of the occultists' claims. She writes with glowing approval of John Dee (e.g., pp. 37 ff.) and approves of Oswald Croll for having cited the Hermetic texts "with reverence" and for being "imbued with respect for the great Renaissance Neoplatonists" (p. 52). The Christian Wedding is said to be "the work of a deeply religious genius, transcending all political and sectarian labels to become an allegory of progressive spiritual experience comparable in its intensity to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress" (p. 69). To be able to make such a judgment means that all sense of perspective has been lost. But then everything produced by this "movement" is given the same indiscriminate enthusiastic praise: the "'movement" has "a body of serious literature behind it," their emblems reach "a high point of artistic expression" (p. 70). The "movement" may have failed but it "created a culture" (p. 90) and is, as such, eminently worth "serious study" (p. 92). No longer just a "movement" it now becomes "the Rosicrucian age" (p. 177)-perhaps this is the motivation behind her remark, "We know that the later sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century was an age of secret societies . . . (p. 217) ("secret societies" evokes the world of the old-fashioned thriller, John Buchan, and Edgar Wallace). Finally, Yates claims that her book has "uncovered a lost period of European history. Like archaeologists digging down through layers, we have found under the superficial history of the early seventeenth century, just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, a whole culture, a whole civilization, lost to view, and not the less important because of such short duration. We may call it a Rosicrucian culture . . ." (p. 231). It seems hardly worth engaging in detailed argument with such a claim. Yates must know what a culture or civilization looks like and might some day concede that the purely verbal references to the existence of the Rosicrucian "'movement"-whether hopeful, naive, disappointed, credulous, or skeptical-cannot possibly constitute more than a patch of foam or a single wave of European culture.

It is astonishing that such a judgment could be arrived at. Looking back it seems that one of the main factors encouraging it was her indiscriminate claims for influence, either on the R. C. movement or of it on the rest of the world. Extremely slender evidence is presented for these influences-that of John Dee, for instance, seems to rest mainly on his Monas hieroglyph. It is characteristic of Yates's whole approach that claims are advanced and then magnified at each subsequent reappearance. There is never-not even in the

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first instance-any truly critical, independent weighing up of the evidence. Dee is said in the preface to have "importance . . as an influence behind the Elizabethan Renaissance," and she announces that a book on Dee by her pupil Peter French has substantiated those claims (p. xii). French's book is referred to later, and Dee's "influence in England" is said to have been "so profoundly important" that "it is certain that the Dee influences would have reached" Anhalt in Bohemia (p. 37). Dee actually 'passed near" those territories in Germany "which, twenty-five years later, were to be the scene of the outbreak of the Rosicrucian movement" (ibid.; my italics), a remarkable instance of delayed combustion. French is quoted as testimony that on this European trip Dee was "in an 'incandescent' state" (p. 221). Dee "must have made a great impression in those parts" (p. 38), and his influence is to be found in the Rosicrucian manifestos "without a shadow of doubt" (p. 39). In the final chapter Yates records how she has "'plunged into the daunting morass of the Rosicrucian literature, there to make a discovery that the major influence behind the German Rosicrucian movement was undoubtedly John Dee. One can hardly as yet realize what this means. John Dee now becomes a towering figure in the European scene" (p. 221). Such claims have yet to be justified at any level. Nor, might I add, have her claims that Dee's "esoteric and mystical" thought "'inspired Sidney and his circle and the Elizabethan poetic movement which they led" (ibid.). Sir Philip Sidney's name keeps popping up as a kind of cultural talisman, but the sympathetic magic has not worked. Despite all the simultaneous exposures none of Dee has rubbed off.

V

One might expect by now that Yates would show rather less of the historian's true judgment when dealing with her occult figures. This is regrettable, of course, but we might still hope that when she movedi out of that area into general cultural history judgment and discrimination would return. But we would be disappointed. The case of Francis Bacon is instructive.

Chapter 9 is called "Francis Bacon 'Under the Shadow of Jehova's Wings' " (pp. 118-29) and attempts to prove that Bacon's Nevt Atlantis is a Rosicrucian work. But Bacon enters her story well before that. In the opening chapter Yates describes the marriage in February 1613 of I'rincess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, with Frederick V, Elector Palatinate of the Rhine, during the festivities of which the members of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn put on a masque by John Beaumont. Yates tells us that Beaumont dedicated the masque to Bacon in these words: "You that spared no time nor travail in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this masque" (p. 6). Yates quotes from an early nineteenth-century edition,14 and this may simply be a case of reproducing a textual error; but she could have been expected to at least turn up the appropriate volume of James Spedding's Letters and Life of Francis Bacon. There on page 343 in volume 4 we find that the text, and the inference she draws from it, are both wrong. Beaumont's dedication actually reads: "To THE WORTHY SIR FRANCIS BACON HIs MAJESTY'S SOLICITOR-GENERAL, AND THE GRAVE AND

1'4 John Nichols, The Progresses of James I (London, 1826), vol. 2.

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LEARNED BENCH OF THE ANCIENTLY ALLIED HOUSES OF GRAY'S INN AND THE INNER TEMPLE, THE INNER TEMPLE AND GRAY'S INN. Ye that spared no pain nor travail in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this Masque, (being the first fruits of honour in this kind which these two societies have offered to his Majesty). At once we see that the work is not dedicated to Bacon alone but also, most properly, to the "Bench''-the teachers, officers-of the two societies jointly: it is "ye" not "you." Bacon is singled out, because he was one of the most distinguished lawyers in the land with a lifelong connection with Gray's Inn. Further, the dedication goes on, "and you, Sir Francis Bacon, especially as you did then by your countenance and loving affections advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it....' There is no evidence that Bacon did any more than encourage the venture, for as Spedding notes, "we have no means of knowing" what Bacon said or did on this occasion since he has left no record of it (ibid.).

Yates was perhaps unfortunate to use a bad text, but the full dedication ought to have corrected her first impression. However, she goes on to make a mountain of inference out of it: "If [sic] Francis Bacon devised [sic] the whole [sic] of this entertainment, he must have [sic] taken the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth very seriously [sic] and have been profoundlv in sympathy [sic] with the alliance which it represented. That the author of The Advancement of Learning, which had been published eight years previously, in 1605, took time off from his other studies [sic] to work for [sic] this wedding" (p. 6) makes it an even more significant event. The references to the Advancement and his 'studies" are fine examples of irrelevant association used to build up a sense of Bacon's supposed serious intellectual involvement with this whole political situation. A few pages later this utterly unsubstantiated inference sets more firmly: "Francis Bacon had shown himself very well disposed towards the Princess and her husband in his enthusiastic interest in a production for their wedding" (pp. 13-14). No longer the tentative inference, "must have"; now the definite "had." Indeed the second-stage speculation has hardened so quickly that any qualification about whether Bacon had "devised" this entertainment or was merely interested in it can be shrugged off altogether. Francis Bacon "composed one of the entertainments for her wedding" (pp. 121-22; my italics).

Equally indiscriminate are her claims for Bacon's wholesale influence on the occultist groups (e.g., pp. 86, 97, 181)-clearly Bacon's European reputation was very high, but it was very high with everybody. That the occultists mav have been influenced by him (the evidence cited includes a number of ideas that Bacon shared with many others) does not prove that there was anything specifically meaningful about his doctrine for them. Yates practices a form of influence by contamination: by citing an author's name sufficiently often in the same context there is a chance that the inattentive reader will think that there was indeed a substantial connection. Thus in the main discussion of Bacon she seizes on two points made in The Advancement of Learning, first that there ought to be "a fraternitv in learning and illumination," second that this intellectual unification would duplicate the generation of knowledge made by God, "who is called the father of illumination or lights."15 Both, of course, are commonplace ideas in

's Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding et al., 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), 3:327. Future references to this edition will be included in the text as FB.

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the Christian Humanist tradition. Yet Yates immediately interprets them in the narrowest specific way as being "significant" in the context of Rosi- crucianism, which was to have "a fratemity of illumination" (pp. 118-19). Here a significant distinction is lost: Bacon always argued that learning should be available to all,16 but the Rosicrucian magicians restricted com- munication "to one another." In Miss Yates's own words, they were "illuminati" in a specifically esoteric sense, not in the terms of Bacon's more general and traditional metaphor for knowledge as light. In any case it is difficult to see what the supposed "parallel" is meant to do, unless perhaps to insinuate that these two ideas of Bacon inspired the "outbreak" of "the Rosicrucian movement," "nine years later." If this is an attempt at tarring with the Rosicrucian brush it is oblique, to say the least. Subse- quently we are reminded of the chronology of Bacon's later works (Novum Organum, 1620; De Augmentis, 1623), and what I have called "influence by contamination" appears again: "It is important to realize that the Rosicru- cian movement is contemporary with the Baconian philosophy, that the strange Rosicrucian excitements were going on in Europe during the years in which the works of Bacon were appearing in England" (p. 121). Well, we must reply, it might be important to realize that point if you were able to show any traces of influence of the one on the other. Otherwise it is no more relevant than it would be to suggest parallels between any two groups of works published on the same continent in a twenty-year period-with John Taylor the Water Poet, say, or Cervantes's Don Quixote.

The actual detail of the writing in the paragraph beginning the attempt to link these two "movements" is a morass of hints, insinuations, and half- inferences: "We may speculate on how [Bacon's] influence mav have been imported. Both Frederick and Elizabeth were readers." We know that they owned Raleigh's History of the World, ergo, they are 'likelv to halve had works by Bacon with them at Heidelberg" (p. 121). Elizabeth "would have known Bacon in England" (ibid.). "Perhaps another transmitter of Baconian influence might have been Michael Maier" who "may well have also carried books by Bacon to Germany," for Bacon's Wisdom of' the Ancientis "may well have had a fascination for Maier and his school" (p. 122). To support these unprovable speculations Yates claims that "Bacon, too [like Maier], had sought for his own natural philosophy in mythology." This is to get the structure of The Wisdom of' the Ancients, in which Bacon uses myth to illustrate his philosophical ideas, not to create them, quite wrong. In the absence of any evidence Yates dismisses the whole concept of evidence: "However we need not particularize too much as to what the points of contact may have been" (p. 122). We can simply take it for granted that the Palatinate's intellectual climate "would have included an interest" in Bacon. So much for the facts.

To attempt to strengthen this link between Bacon and the occult Yates now faces the difficulty that Bacon delivered some violent attacks on alchemy and other occult sciences, while he "nowhere mentions Dee, and nowhere cites his famous Monas hieroglvphica" (p. 122).I To answer this

16 See the admirable account by Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon. From Magic to Science, trans. S. Rabinovitch (London, 1968), chap. 1.

17 Incidentally, "famous" seems an extravagant claim. Dee's Monas is possibly the most obscure work ever written by an Englishman: even its modern editor C. H. Josten, well versed in alchemy though he is, has to confess bafflement in places. How

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objection she uses another favorite tactic, claiming that a critic avoids mentioning the occult because he is afraid of being linked with it. Yates reminds us that she had used this argument once before, in 1968: "I suggested that Bacon's avoidance of mathematics and the Copernican theory might have been because he regarded mathematics as too closely associated with Dee and his 'conjuring,' and Copernicus as too closely associated with Bruno and his extreme 'Egyptian' and magical religion. [By not referring to] Dee and his mathematics . . . Bacon may have been evading what seemed to him dangerous subjects in order to protect his programme from witch- hunters . . ." (p. 123). This is a fantastic suggestion, for which there is no evidence of any kind in any language at any level. Bacon had no reason to fear witch-hunters. All his work expresses an untrammelled confidence in the creative power of the human mind, indeed a too naive confidence that truth would prevail on its own. His lack of interest in mathematics can be seen from his earliest work, long before "Rosicrucianism" (in the 1597 Essay "Of Studies" he wrote "the Mathematickes [make men] subtle" [FB 6:525]; he had nothing else to say on the topic), and is to be explained by the inferior role given to mathematics in the sixteenth-century universities (Bacon was only briefly at Cambridge) and by its pejorative associations with the thick thumbs of artisans and navigators. Clearly the cabala was associated with conjuring, but Bacon knew the difference between cabala and mathematics, even if Yates seems to have forgotten it.

This is not the whole of Yates's argument, though. Let us recall that James I, when presented with a copy of the Novum Organum in 1620, dismissed it with a joke: it was a work 'like the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." Let us forget other possible explanations of James's inability to grasp that essay in iconoclasm and induction; let us instead press on with the previous argument: "It has never, I think, been suggested that James's doubtful attitude towards Baconian science might be connected with his very deep interest in, and dread of, magic and witch- craft. These subjects had a fascination for him which was tied up with neuroses about some experiences in his early life . . ." (p. 123). This made James an unsuitable critic of the "Renaissance Magia and Cabala," espe- cially when they "verged on sorcery" (p. 123). It is not actually stated, but the whole bent of that passage is to suggest that Bacon's Nov,um Organiim is a cabalist, hermetic work, the perusal of which might raise "the problem of defining the difference between good magic and bad magic" (p. 124). If Yates means to suggest that, then we have one of the most bizarre of all the checkered accounts of Baconian science yet given. But she does not stop to discuss the point, inserting instead a paragraph on John Dee, who is then associated with both James I and Bacon. James refused to have anything to do with him-very useful evidence, of course-so therefore Bacon "must have taken good note of James's attitude to Dee, and he must also have noted" that men like, Raleigh, Harriot and Northumberland were also not encouraged by James. Ergo: "Bacon would have been careful to avoid, in works intended to interest James, anything savouring of Dee and his suspicious mathematics. Even so, Bacon did not succeed in allaying James's suspicions of scientific advancement, however carefully presented" (p. 124).

could we estimate its "fame," then? Are there 1,000 references to it in the seven- teenth century? 100? even ten?

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The second of these two sentences is based on the nonexistent premise of James's "suspicions" of the concealed magic and witchcraft in the Novum Organumr and can be simply dismissed. The first sentence is no less insubstantial, but more pernicious. Not only does it crudify the discussion by suggesting purely personal, psychological reasons for Bacon's intellectual attitude to the occult, but it overlooks Bacon's many free-spoken critiques of that tradition. Further, it imputes to him a despicable intellectual coward- ice in that he is supposed to have been attracted to the tradition but judged it better for his own self-interest to conceal his predilections. Yates puts this insinuation more clearly later on, referring to "the witch-crazes which Descartes so prudently avoids, which Francis Bacon has prudently in mind

(p. 224). This seems to me a pretty desperate maneuver, to argue ex silentio that a man is secretly attracted to magic but prudently conceals it. It is only a fantasy, but it is a harmful one, and the tradition that produced it is intellectually bankrupt and morally dubious. The next three paragraphs (pp. 124-25) add further insinuations that Bacon was moving "warily' in a climate where "witchcraft hysteria was mounting,' which accounts for his devious behavior.

So far, Yates tells us, we "have been moving cautiously," thinking that it "might" be illuminating to study Bacon side by side with Rosicrucianism. Now, however, she has "evidence of a most striking kind" for his debt to that movement, namely, the New Atlantis. In this posthumously published work Bacon describes his ideal scientific community, "Salomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Work,' located on a utopian island which has been discovered by some sailors driven off course by winds. It is a work devoted to, the new science yet full of biblical echoes, like much of Bacon's work, appropriately here because of the derivation of the scientific commu- nity from King Solomon (praised by Bacon as having compiled the first natural history); typical of Bacon, too, is its interest in pageantry and sensual splendor. If we were to compare it in a free and open manner with the Rosicrucian manifestos we would observe some general parallels, such as the notion of philanthropy common to them both-and to innumerable other works of the Christian Renaissance-and some clear differences. In place of the Rosicrucian hermeticism and mysteries, everything in Bacon's community is designed to be communicated; and whereas the accounts of science in the Fama and Confessio are vague in the extreme, with the usual alchemists' prevarications (cf. pp. 247, 250, 258) Bacon offers an extremely particularized thumbnail sketch of a high-powered scientific research insti- tute.

Yates's technique for aligning the two "movements" takes various forms. First she summarizes Bacon's work in such a way as to make it appear closer to the Rosicrucians: it is a community with an "evangelical Chris- tianity" of "'brotherly love," run by "priest-scientists." Second she draws attention to the scroll of instruction which one of the officials hands the travelers, described by Bacon as being "signed with a stamp of cherubin's wings, not spread but hanging downwards, and by them a cross' (FB, 3:130). This is her comment: "So was the Rosicrucian Fama sealed at the end with the motto 'Under the shadow of Jehova's wings,' and the wings, as we have seen, often appear as characteristic emblems in other Rosicrucian literature" (p. 126). It is misleading, first, to describe the Fama as being "sealed" with its motto; the motto merely appears as a quotation at the end

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of the text. Bacon's scroll, by contrast, has an actual emblem drawn on it (not stated to be sealing it). The image of the wings is common (I suppose) to hundreds of non-Rosicrucian emblems throughout the Christian tradition. The wings in Bacon are explicitly said to be of a cherubin, not of Jehova. These are not the same. If Bacon had wanted them to be Jehova's wings he would have said so. The significance of their being cherubin's wings may be evident to those more learned in Christian symbolism, but I would draw attention to a passage in Exodus where God describes to Moses the sumptuous offerings which he must take from the children of Israel in order to build the Tabernacle. In the midst of the Ark18 they are to place a "Mercy seat of pure gold" (a "covering or propitiatorie" as the marginal gloss informs us), on top of which shall be placed two cherubims of beaten gold: "And the Cherubims shal stretch their wings on hie, covering the Mercy seat with their wings, and their faces one to another . . .' (Exod. 25.17 ff.; see also 37.9). It might conceivably be relevant that the New Atlantis is one of the best loci for observing Bacon's stress on the scientist as an embodiment of mercy toward mankind, a well-known feature of his philosophy (one of the "Fathers of Salomon's House" has "an aspect as if he pitied men" [FB, 3:1541). Other explanations would be possible, of course, but they would need a rather higher content of evidence than the one favored by Yates.

As for the phrase "under the shadow of Jehova's wings,' it may be a text appropriated by the Rosicrucians but it had an enormous dissemination in Christianity. It could never have been seen as distinctively Rosicrucian, could never have been their trademark. The text is biblical, and many instances of "shadow" as a metaphor for protection easily come to mind.19 To be hidden "under the shadow of thy wings" is found in Psalm 17, verse 8; the true believers "put their trust under the shadow of thy wings" in Psalm 36, verse 7; in Psalm 57, verse 1 the psalmist's soul "trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge" (similarly Ps. 91:1). One of the finest sermons by John Donne is the second Prebend sermon, preached at St. Paul's on January 29, 1625/6. The text is the seventh verse of Psalm 63: "Because thou hast been my helpe, Therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoyce." In his introduction Donne says that although the Psalms in general are "the Manna of the Church," an ointment and balm that heals all wounds, "so are there some certaine Psalmes, that are Imperiall Psalmes, that command over all affections, and spread themselves over all occasions, Catholique, universall Psalmes, that apply themselves to all necessities. This is one of those; for, of those Constitutions which are called Apostolicall, one is, that the Church should meet every day, to sing this Psalme. And accordingly, S. Chrysostone testifies, That it was de- creed, and ordained by the Primitive Fathers, that no day should passe without the publique singing of this Psalme. "20 Further, for Donne himself

lx 18 quote from the Geneva Bible, STC 2202, the English translation which Bacon would have known in his youth.

19 See, e.g., Gen. 19:8; Judg. 9:15; Cant. 2:3; Isa. 4:6, 25:4 30:2 32:2, 49:2; Ezek. 31:6, 12, 17; Hos. 14:7.

20 Donne's Prebend Sermons, ed. Janet M. Mueller (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 91. Mueller's edition reproduces the text of the standard Potter and Simpson edition and adds to it a useful introduction and commentary. See pp. 220-21 for the relevant quotations from the documents referred to by Donne: the late fourth-century Apostol-

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as Dean of St. Paul's, this "is one of those five psalmes, the daily rehearsing whereof is injoyned to me, by the Constitutions of this Church. "21 This must have been, then, one of the best-known psalms, as it is one of the most widely used metaphors for the protectiveness of God: neither is the property of any one sect.22

Yates next draws attention to the fact that in the New Atlantis the sick sailors will be cared for at the Strangers' House, and that one of the officials entrusted with meeting them refuses to accept payment for having brought news that they are to be allowed to land. As Bacon's narrator describes it, "when we offered him some pistolets, he smiling said, 'He must not be twice paid for one labour': meaning (as I take it) that he had salary sufficient of the state for his service. For (as I after learned) they call an officer that taketh rewards, twice paid" (FB, 3:132). Clearly and unequivocally this is a moral point concerning politics, extremely relevant to all men in public service (as who should know better than Bacon?). Yates, however, com- ments: "The Fama, it will be remembered, lays it down as a rule for the R. C. Brothers that they are to heal the sick gratis" (p. 126). Unfortunately, in her desire to make her case she has not read Bacon's text attentively. First, this incident takes place before the travelers land and not, as she implies, after "their sick were cared for." Second, it has nothing to do with medicine, but with the bribery and corruption of public servants. Third, Bacon twice explicitly identifies the official concerned as "a notary" (FB, 3:132, 133). He is a lawyer, not an alchemical doctor. This passage has been misinterpreted at every point.

Yates reads on and notes that "another official," as she calls him, visits them later, wearing a white turban "with a small red cross on the top" (FB, 3:135). To her this is "further proof that Bacon's shipwrecked travellers had come to the land of the R. C. Brothers" (p. 126). Yet he is not simply another official. He tells them that "by vocation I am a Christian priest" (ibid.). It is rather appropriate, then, that he should wear a cross. That it is a red cross can hardly be proof that this is a specifically Rosicrucian emblem, not least after Yates's own wide-ranging survey of the tradition of the Red Cross, from Saint George to the Garter, to Elizabethan chivalry and the Faerie Queene (pp. 3, 66, 69, e.g.)-not to mention its dissemina- tion throughout Europe in the Crusades, nor its adoption as a badge by other groups, nor, last, its use in Renaissance painting as a symbol of active Christianity.

ical Conistitutions, which lays down that this psalm is to be sung every morning, and Saint John Chrysostom's Exposition of Ps. 140, which "commands on the authority of the Antiochene Fathers the daily recitation" of this psalm in the early morning and goes on (in what seems to be a fragment of a now-lost commentary on the whole psalm) to praise it for "its intense, eloquent expression of the soul's desire for God."

21 Ibid., p. 92. 22 Montgomery (n. 3 above), p. 194, n. 122, notes that F. Lundgreen "has argued in

all seriousness that the presence of two overarching white wings in the Andreae seal means that the motto of the crest was Ps. 17:8 ("Sub umbra alarum tuarum''-which appears at the close of the Fania), and thus that Andreae wrote the Rosicrucian manifestos. Needless to say, wings were a common, not necessarily Biblical, heraldic device, and there is no historical evidence that the Andreae crest had Ps. 17:8 as a motto."

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Yates's final piece of evidence for "Bacon's Rosicrucianism" derives from the explanation given by the governor of how it is that New Atlantis has retained its secrecy until now. He jokes with the travelers, reproving them for implying that this is a "land of magicians," and explaining that Solomon's edict laid down that the inhabitants of the island should live in happy self-sufficiency, removed from the risk of war and destruction by other lands (FB, 3:144). Their isolation is a moral choice, designed to preserve them from human rapacity. But every twelve years, he laid down, an expedition was to be sent out to collect knowledge from the outside world. This is how Yates summarizes and interprets the passage: "Travel- lers were sent out from New Atlantis to collect information; they dressed in the dress of the countries they visited and adopted their habits, and so passed unperceived. In terms of a Rosicrucian manifesto, this means that they followed one of the rules of the R. C. Brothers, to wear no special habit or distinguishing mark but to conform in dress and appearance with the inhabitants of whatever country they were visiting" (p. 127). But here again the desire to prove her point has blurred the evidence of the text open in front of Yates. Bacon says nothing about adopting the dress of the country they visit. He writes simply that those who "must be put on shore for any time colour themselves under the names of other nations" (FB, 3:146). That is, if they go to England they might pretend to be Dutch or German. It is, heaven knows, a trivial enough point, but as it is one of the keystones in Yates's argument that "though the name Rose Cross is nowhere mentioned by Bacon in the New Atlantis, it is abundantly clear that he knew the Rose Cross fiction and was adapting it to his own parable" (ibid.), then we must conclude that that whole structure is a fantasy. There is no evidence that Bacon knew of the Rosicrucians.

The remaining three pages (pp. 127-29) merely repeat these arguments until, once again, they harden into certainty. These are now "undeniably influences." Well, I deny them, and so will anyone else who approaches the topic with an open mind. When Yates writes that "this fact will have to be studied very seriously in the future by historians of thought," I am afraid that historians of thought will be perfectly justified in ignoring her discus- sion. I dare say that Rosicrucianism will not be recognized, as she assumes it will, "as a legitimate branch of history of thought or science," since who can claim that it contributed an iota to either of these disciplines? The fact that John Heydon in his Holv Guiide (1662) identified the New Atlantis with the Rosicrucians (a fact to which Miss Yates devotes most of p. 128) is of interest to students of Bacon's transmogrification by an appalling range of cranks and eccentrics. Yates magnanimously concedes that Heydon's argu- ment is "not a proof that Bacon belonged to some Rosicrucian or masonic secret society" (p. 128), but I cannot see that there is any substantial difference between that position and he'r own description of the "invisibility of the Brothers" in Neiw Atlantis-who are nowhere called Brothers and are nev er said to be invisible-a description to which she adds with great insistence "whom we now know to have been R. C. Brothers" (p. 129). Both seem to me equally "unverifiable claims" (which is how she dismisses Heydon and another "crank" [p. 129]), both are "fanciful theories which have prevented serious historians from taking proper note" of this phenom- enon. That may seem like an unkind comment on the work of a distin-

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guished scholar, but I confess I can see no alternative; there is not the slightest shred of evidence that Bacon alluded to the Rosicrucians in this work. He may well have heard about the sect, but if he did he felt sufficiently indifferent to it never to have mentioned it in any of his extensive wntings.

Yates may be the most insistent, but she is not the first writer to claim that the Neit' Atlanitis is Rosicrucian, nor am I the first to reject the claim. One of the earlier historians of Rosicrucianism cited by her is J. G. Buhle, whose account of its origins was freely translated and plagiarized by Thomas De Quincey in 1824.23 Yates quotes Buhle-De Quincey on Andreae as the imputed author of the tracts and records De Quincey's theory that English Freemasonry derived from Rosicrucianism via the influence of Fludd (pp. 208-9). What she does not tell the reader, however, is that at the end of his essay De Quincey has two appendices "In Refutation of Certain Speculations." The first of these24 is 'that the object of the elder Free- miasons was not to build Lord Bacon's imaginary temple of Solonmon,' as proposed by Nicolai in 1806. "Whoever has read the New Atlaintis of Bacon," De Quincey begins, "will discover in this romance a gigantic sketch from the hand of a mighty scientific intellect, that . . . indulged in a dream of what might be accomplished by a rich state under a wise governor for the advancement of the arts and sciences." The object of Solomon's house in the fable is "the extension of physical science," and r-omance though it was, "it led to very beneficial results; for it occasioned in the end the establishment of the Royal Society." De Quincey's claim is too simple, but he is right to align Bacon's plan with the establishment of scientific societies for public 'experiment and research" and not with the closed world of the occult.

De Quincey gives a compact summary of the main differences between the scientific society of the News Atlantis and that of the Freemasons. Whereas the lodges are open to "every decent workman who is sl/i jluris" and differentiate members into higher and lower degrees, Solomon's House is open only to "learned men," who are then "divided into classes accord- ing to the different objects of their studies": "Only the exoteric knowledge of nature, not the esoteric, is pursued by the House of Solomon. The Book of the Six Days is studied as a book that lies open before every man's eyes; by the Free-masons it was studied as a mystery which was to be illuminated by the light out of the East" (p. 430). Had the Freemasons really wished to appropriate the Baconian tradition, they might have followed his concrete proposals for research. But the "eldest Free-masonry was indifferent with respect to all profane sciences and all exoteric knowledge of natur-e" and wished to propagate only "a secret wisdom" for the initiates. De Qtiincey's clear recognition of the fundamental differences between the Nell Atlantis and the occult tradition deserved at least a mention in Yates's history.

23 Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Ueber den Ursprung lind die l'ornehnsten Schicksale der Or-den der Rosenkreluzer unld Frevmaurer (Gottingen, 1804); Thomas De Quincey, "Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Free- Masons,' Londoon Magazine (January-June 1824); reprinted in and cited from The Collected Writings of' Thiomas De Quincev, ed. D. Masson (Edinburgh, 1890; New York, 1968), 13:384-448.

24 De Quincey, pp. 429-30.

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VI At whatever points we have been able to examine Yates's thesis we have found a notably uncritical and indiscriminate accumulation of "evidence" to make a case, without any other form of qualification or correction. Two large issues remain to be noted rather than discussed at length, issues which it would take a. book-length study to deal with.

The first of these concerns Yates's placing of the Rosicrucian phenome- non within the context of Renaissance thought. All that I can do here is to note that she simplifies that sentence radically: Rosicrucianism is the Re- naissance. That pioneer chemist Libavius attacked the Rosicrucians sys- tematically, it seems, perceiving the interconnection of occult assumptions and authorities within it. As Yates says, he "raises serious objections" and "is strongly against theories of macro-microcosmic harmony, against 'Magia and Cabala,' against Hermes Trismegistus . . . , against Agrippa and Trithemius-in short he is against the Renaissance tradition . . .' (p. 52). That one example shows her claim that the occult or hermetic tradition is the Renaissance-all other groups, all other philosophies or literatures fall away, this is the one central, defining element. Main Mersenne also criticized "animism, Hermetism, Cabalism, and all their attendant manifes- tations": he is said to have made an 'attack on the whole Renaissance tradition . . . an onslaught on the Renaissance tradition" (p. 111). To Mersenne are ascribed, in consequence, a number of most violent opinions, namely, that because ' Magia and Cabala" have grown then "the Renais- sance ways of thinking must be eliminated . . ." (p. 112), and so on, with increasingly emotive and intolerant language. Newton's interest in myth is said to show "the Renaissance type of thinking at the back of Newton's scientific efforts" (p. 204). The conflation of Hebraic, Egyptian, Mosaic, and Hermetic lore is said to have 'fascinated the Renaissance," a point then expanded with some repetition (p. 219). It is perfectly correct of Yates to refer to "the Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalist tradition" (p. 220), but it is only one tradition of many and must not be identified with the Renaissance as a whole. Given the eclecticism and pluralism of Renaissance educational, philosophic, and literary methods, it is clear that no monist definition of the Renaissance has any substance.

The final large issue, on which I can only report here, is Yates's wish to rewrite the history of science in this period. In Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), she claimed that the so-called Magus of the Renaissance "Hermetic-Cabalist tradition,' with his essentially "reli- gious attitudes" actually ".operated" on the world, thus creating a wholly new "turning towards the world," which fundamentally affected science. Her argument had been severely questioned by Charles Trinkaus and Mary Hesse before her latest book appeared,25 and Yates must know of both

25 Professor Trinkaus's objections can be found in his magisterial book, "In Our Image and Likeness." Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London, 1970), pp. 498-503. Hesse's criticisms were made first in a paper read in 1970 to a meeting of the History of Science Seminar in Cambridge University (attended by Yates) entitled "Hermeticism and Historiography: An Apology for the Intemnal History of Science," subsequently published in Historical and Philosophical

316 Reviewt, Article

scholars, who are among the most distinguished in their fields. Now, however, she writes that her "belief' is "indeed now largely accepted by historians of thought . . ." (p. 226). She reverts to this thesis throughout the present book with increased polemical energy. She speaks slightingly of the "so-called scientific revolution' (pp. xi, 220) and suggests that the new science emerged out of magic, of which Rosicrucianism is a peculiarly important case-indeed a crucial phase, one of "the vital steps by which the European mind moved out of the Renaissance into the seventeenth century" (p. 117); she subsequently discovers "a chain of tradition leading from the Rosicrucian movement to the antecedents of the Royal Society" (p. 83).

There would seem to be little, if any, basis for such claims. Yates's proposed rewriting of Renaissance history is an edifice built not on rock nor on sand but on air. All scholars who are concerned with the historiography of the Renaissance must take note of her work. She has great learning in some of the most recondite areas of human thought, and the prestige of her early work and that of the Warburg Institute will continue to ensure that her writings receive eager attention. While her book on Bruno, and her French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (1947) are necessary reading, it seems to me that the historical methods used for The Rosicrucian Enlightenment represent a great falling off, and that if the findings and methodology of that book came to be accepted or used as models for imitation the results could be disastrous. It is easy to understand how the infectious energy of her style, and the need to meet editors' deadlines, could account for part of the acclamation her book initially received. But a sober weighing up of the evidence has produced a very different picture. It has been, unfortunately, rather lengthy, and apologies are due. But the length was unavoidable, in the nature of things. As the eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholar, Joseph Ritson, put it, having been moved by the errors of recent editors to write a book-length refutation of them: "The opposing and refuting of general charges by proof and circumstance commonly requlires much more time and space than the making of them.' '26

Perspectives of Science, ed. R. H. Struever, which is vol. 5 of Minlntesota Stuldies in the Plilosophlx of Science (Minneapolis, 1970), pp. 134-60. This volume also includes (pp. 163-71) Edward Rosen's witty and searching paper, "Was Copernicus a Her- metist?" discussing that claim advanced by Yates, which computes that "the hermet- ic association amounts to about 0.00002% of the Revolutionls p. 169). Other criticisms of the Yates thesis in recent years include Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance. A Studv in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley, 1972), an original and independent survey: the papers by Paolo Rossi (pp. 247-74) and A. R. Hall (pp. 275-82) in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea, eds., Reasonl Experimenit, atnd Mysticismn in the Scientific Rev olution (New York, 1975); and Hernmeticisin andtl the Scientic Revollution (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977), a most important volume, which consists of two papers read at a seminar in March 1974: Robert S. Westman, "Magical Reform and Astronomical Reform: The Yates Thesis Reconsidered" (pp. 1-91), and J. E. McGuire, "Neo- platonism and Active Principles: Newton and the Corpuls Herineticumn (pp. 93-142).

26 Joseph Ritson, Remtiarks Critical and Illustrative, oni the Text anld Notes of the Last Edition of Slhakespeare (London, 1783), p. 224.