I have already introduced Dr Nelson’s book Shakespeare and Religio Mentis: A Study of Christian Hermetism in Four Plays, Brill, 2022 – see https://www.josephazize.com/2025/04/03/nelson-shakespeare-and-hermetism/

I now come to chapter 2, “The Transmission and Reception of Christian Hermetism in France and England in the Long Sixteenth Century.” The “long” 16th century is the period 1494-1614 (79). Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas were known to  John Colet, St Thomas More, and Erasmus; although to say that they knew some of the ideas does not mean they were impressed, let alone swayed by them: and to point to a similarity of concepts and themes is not to say much at all, unless the coincidence could be explained in no other way. Quite different, however, is the case of Agrippa (87) who was clearly a Christian Hermetist of a sort.

Symphorien Champier of Lyon played a role in introducing Neoplatonism to France, and may have been a student of John Colet. He shared the Hermetic view of music as potentially healing, and notes that so too did Shakespeare, citing Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. (91) We could add Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. Nelson’s survey reveals that: “… in France, the Hermetic texts were openly received at the highest levels by both the episcopate and the court.” (94) With reference to Love’s Labours Lost, Nelson states:

It is certain that there were some in Shakespeare’s audience who recognized the Catholic Armand de Gontaut, duc de Biron, in Berowne. The other lords attending the king in Shakespeare’s play are Dumaine who was Charles de Lorraine, duc de Maine or Mayenne (1554–1611), the Catholic younger brother of Henri de Guise …. and Longaville who was Henri d’Orléans, duc de Longueville and whose sister was married to Navarre’s cousin Henri, Prince of Condé (1552–1588). With this knowledge we see that Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the king and his friends swear to devote themselves to self-improvement, self-denial and contemplation in order to achieve the promised god-like status, unites Catholic and Protestant in the same way as the real court at Nérac promoted religious toleration. (98)

See also the reference to the academy at Navarre, mentioned also in LLL  1.1.12-14. After noting French intellectual influences in England around the year 1580, she comes to the “Family of Love,” whose ideas, had significant Hermetic analogues (102-104). They seemed to appear in 1579 and after 1582 went underground.

Giordano Bruno is mentioned, with a promise to return to his possible influence on King Lear. He is described as “… neither a non-magical religious Hermetist nor a true Christian.” (106) But the apogee of this chapter is John Dee. Nelson states:

Taken as a whole, the body of evidence suggests that in Calvinist England, Hermes Trismegistus was known to an educated few, such as members of the Inns of Court, and that the Corpus Hermeticum was discussed privately in ‘little academes’, by men such as the Sidney circle, with Dee at Mortlake, or at Durham House in the Strand by Ralegh’s coterie of friends. Dee, Ralegh and even the queen have been suspected of sympathising with the Familists. And the possibility that the tolerant and clandestine sect in their pursuit of individual perfection and god-like status constituted a viable alternative religion with an affinity to Hermetism cannot be excluded. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that the Familists, who were revealed in the nineteenth century to have had a presence in France and in the Netherlands, had also a clandestine presence in England and that they were effectively closet Hermetists. (112)

It is possibility, but I do not know that it can be rated highly. Nelson ends the second chapter with her programme for the balance of her volume:

I discuss four of Shakespeare’s plays: Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Othello and The Tempest. Each play deals in different ways with the key motifs of Hermetism: knowledge and love, the mind and its attributes, free will and choice, thought, imagination and memory. Love’s Labour’s Lost, to which I turn first, concerns different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of love in a small French kingdom practising religious toleration. (113)