Leigh Penman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland. He is currently working on a project concerning Dissenting religious subcultures in Protestant northern Europe during the early modern period, focusing on transnational networks. This paper, ‘The Modernity of Lost Causes’: Frances Yates, Shakespeare and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment’, was delivered at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. In the paper, Leigh considers Frances Yates’s work The Rosicrucian Enlightenment in the context of her larger project to create a European intellectual history that revolved around hermeneutic philosophy.