Editing Frances Yates (section)

===Joining the Warburg Institute: 1939&ndash;60===
One of Yates's friends, the historian and fellow Bruno scholar Dorothea Singer, introduced her to [[Edgar Wind]], Deputy Directory of the [[Warburg Institute]], at a weekend house party in [[Par, Cornwall]].{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=75}} At Wind's invitation, Yates contributed a paper on "Giordano Bruno's Conflict with Oxford" for the second issue of the ''Journal of the Warburg Institute'' in 1939, which she followed with "The Religious Policy of Giordano Bruno" in the third issue. In these articles, she did not yet associate Bruno with Hermeticism.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=76&ndash;77}} In 1941, the Warburg's Director [[Fritz Saxl]] offered Yates a job at the institute, then based in [[South Kensington]]; she agreed, taking on the post which revolved largely on editing the ''Journal'' but which also gave her much time to continue her independent research.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=77&ndash;78}} By this time, Britain had entered the [[Second World War]] against [[Nazi Germany]], and Yates involved herself in the war effort, being trained in [[first aid]] by the [[Red Cross]] and volunteered as an ARP ambulance attendant.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=88&ndash;89}} In 1941, her father died during an air raid, although the cause of death is not known.{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=93}} Yates herself continued to battle with depression, and was deeply unhappy.{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=78}}

[[File:Warburginst.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|The [[Warburg Institute]] in [[Woburn Square]], London]]
In 1943, Yates was awarded the [[British Federation of University Women]]'s [[Marion Reilly Award]].{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=99}} She also gave an address to the Federation's Committee on International Relations on "How will History be written if the Germans win this war?"{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=99}} At the Warburg, her intellectual circle included [[Anthony Blunt]], [[Margaret Whinney]], [[Franz Boaz]], [[Ernst Gombrich]], [[Gertrud Bing]], [[Charles Singer|Charles]] and [[Dorothea Waley Singer|Dorothea Singer]], [[D. P. Walker]], [[Fritz Saxl]], [[Eugénie Droz]], and [[Roy Strong]].{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=96&ndash;97}} At this time, she also developed lifelong friendships with Jan van Dorsten and [[Rosemond Tuve]], both scholars.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=97&ndash;98}}

Upon Britain's victory in the war, Yates was among a number of Warburg scholars who emphasised the need for pan-European historiography, so as to reject the [[nationalism]]s that had led to the World Wars; this approach, she believed, must be both international and interdisciplinary.{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=96}} She described this new approach as "Warburgian history", defining this as the "history of culture as a whole &ndash; the history of thought, science, art, including the history of imagery and symbolism."{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=102&ndash;103}} Connected to this, she believed that school education should focus on pan-European, rather than simply British history.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=99&ndash;100}}

The Warburg Institute published Yates's third book in 1947 as ''The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century''. She described this as "an ambitious effort to apply the Warburgian modes of work, to use art, music philosophy, religion" to elucidate the subject.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=100&ndash;101}} The following year, she began to contemplate writing a book on Bruno,{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=112&ndash;113}} and spent September 1951 in Italy, visiting places that had been associated with his life.{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=114}} By 1948, both Yates sisters had moved back to the family home in Claygate;{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=109}} however, in March 1951 Hannah died of [[leukemia]],{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=108}} and Yates's mother died in October 1952.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=111, 114}} Despite the problems in her personal life, she continued her scholarship, typically publishing two or three scholarly papers a year.{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=112}} She also lectured on the subjects of her research at various different universities across Britain; during the 1950s she lectured on the subject of ''espérance impériale'', which would later be collected and published as ''Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century'' (1975).{{sfn|Jones|2008|p=113}}

In 1954, [[Gertrud Bing]] became Director of the Warburg, overseeing the move from [[South Kensington]] to a specially constructed building in [[Woburn Square]], [[Bloomsbury]]. Bing was a close friend of Yates, and they often went on holidays together.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=104, 108}} Yates's fourth book, published in 1959, was ''The Valois Tapestries'', in which she discussed [[Valois Tapestries|the eponymous tapestries]] in the [[Uffizi]] in [[Florence]], Italy. She offered a novel interpretation of the tapestries, approaching them as if they were "a detective story" and arguing that they were meant as portraits of the French royal family.{{sfn|Jones|2008|pp=116, 117}}