Dame Frances Amelia Yates papers

Frances Yates was born in Hampshire and completed a degree in French which was achieved through part-time correspondence study at University College London (1924). She completed an MA in 1926 at University College with a thesis on the French social drama of the sixteenth century and spent time in the Loire valley to improve her French. She then taught French at North London Collegiate School (late 1920s and 1930s) and became part-time Editor of Publications at the Warburg Institute in 1941 having been associated with the Institute since 1937. She volunteered in the ambulance service during the Second World War. When the Warburg Institute was incorporated in the University of London in 1944 she retained her post of Editor of Publications (she remained editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute until her death). She was appointed Lecturer (1950), Reader (1956) and Reader in the History of the Renaissance (1962). Retired in 1967 and that year was elected Honorary Fellow and occasional teacher. She was a visiting professor at other universities, notably Cornell, and contributor to the then newly established New York Review of Books. She received a D.Litt. from the University of London (1965, on the basis of published work) and received honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Oxford, East Anglia, Exeter, and Warwick. She held foreign membership of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy and received the Senior Wolfson History Prize (1973) and Premio Galileo Galilei Prize (1978). She was also an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and received an OBE (1972) and DBE (1977).