A Mirror For Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon

English Historical Review Vol. CXXI No. 492 The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press.
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doi:10.1093/ehr/cel102
A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon*

In June 1914, just before the grim shadow of war fell over the world, the 700th anniversary of the birth of Roger Bacon was celebrated in Oxford. There was wide coverage of the occasion in British, American and European newspapers and periodicals. Eminent people including a former British prime minister and a future pope gathered from all over Europe to do homage to the memory of one of the greatest and most misunderstood gures in western history.1 Everyone there knew the same story about Roger Bacon, even if they had never read a word that he had written. They knew that he had recently come to the attention of scholars after centuries of obscurity. They knew that he was now recognised as a precocious gure in the development of modern scientic method. They certainly all knew the pitiful story of the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar whose advanced, independent thinking had so aroused the wrath of the medieval Church that he had been forbidden to work and imprisoned for more than a decade. They knew that he had not been vindicated after his death, like so many other geniuses, but that instead he had become a byword for vainglorious meddling in magic, alchemy, astrology and demonology. Turned by the Elizabethans into a kind of benevolent Faustus, Friar Bacon had become a gure in English folklore, while all the credit for recommending the experimental method in science was given to his namesake, Francis Bacon.2 They knew that his great works had been neglected and left unpublished until the eighteenth century, and that it was not until the intellectual revolutions of the nineteenth century that he became for the rst time an object of serious admiration and scholarly investigation. Beyond these details, they recognised that in his robust, independent, plain-spoken character, he was typically English, and some went so far as to see in him some premonition of Protestantism.3 All this was exceedingly characteristic of what Buttereld has dubbed the Whig approach to history. Bacon was important because he was one of the great minds in English history, standing alone in advance of his age; a man who would have contributed vastly to the scientic
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* I am grateful to Anna Sapir Abulaa, Hugo Azrad and Grant Tapsell for commenting on drafts of this article. 1. A vast collection of clippings and journal articles marking this event has been bound together and preserved in the Bodleian Library as Misc[ellaneous] Papers [relating to the seventh centenary of the birth of Roger Bacon]. 2. L. Thorndike, Roger Bacon and Experimental Method in the Middle Ages, Philosophical Review, xxiii (1914), 27198 at 271. 3. G. A. Tawney, The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Western Philosophical Association, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientic Methods, xi (1914), 33752 at 340.
EHR, cxxi. 492 (June 2006)
658 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: progress of the human race if he had not been obstructed by the wrongheadedness of the Roman Catholic Church. In its essentials, this was the view of the development of Bacons reputation that appeared in the volume of Commemorative Essays published later in 1914.4 The most recent popular biography of Bacon gives almost exactly the same account.5 The picture has been universally accepted and reiterated even by the best Bacon scholars.6 It has been crystallised, perhaps, by what came next. In the same year as the commemoration, a reaction against the universal admiration began to be articulated with increasing vigour. The preoccupation of Bacon scholars became, and largely remains, the question of the extent of Bacons originality and historical importance. The result has been a laborious and conscientious attempt to set right the mistakes of the past: to redress both the centuries of satire and neglect and the excesses of nineteenth-century enthusiasm, and then to nd a balance between the extremes. Yet an examination of what was actually said of Bacon from the end of the thirteenth century onwards shows that the accepted picture of his reputation is not accurate. The study of Bacon has been hindered to an unusual degree by being conducted outside the appropriate historical context. Even now, when his scientic and philosophical work has been integrated into a wider picture of thirteenthcentury science and philosophy, his objectives which were intimately bound up with his religious faith and his dedication to the Franciscan order have not been well understood. I believe that this otherwise inexplicable difculty is a direct consequence of a long historiographical tradition which has hardened in a subtle fashion around particular erroneous expectations. I hope here to be able to put the tradition itself into context, and perhaps in consequence to liberate Bacon scholarship from some of the unnecessary bonds of the past. My focus will privilege British historiography, for this is at once where the worst faults had their origins and where the most passionate commitments were to be found. The regard that the thirteenth century had for Bacon is largely a matter for surmise, since little record of it exists beyond his own writings. Also lacking is information on the circulation of his genuine works in his own lifetime, although he was anxious about the honesty of his scribes, believing that anything he wrote would be rapidly copied and plagiarised.7 Within a decade of Bacons death, copies were certainly being made of various treatises, including parts of what is now known as the Opus maius. Manuscripts of Bacons writings were kept in the Franciscan library at
4. A. G. Little (ed.), Roger Bacon: Essays Contributed by Various Writers on the Occasion of the Commemoration of the Seventh Centenary of his Birth (Oxford, 1914). 5. B. Clegg, The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon (2003). 6. For example, G. Molland, Roger Bacon as Magician, Traditio, xxx (1947), 44560. 7. Opus tertium, in Fr. Rogeri Bacon, Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer, Rolls Series, xv (1859), 15; F. A. Gasquet (ed.), An Unpublished Fragment of a Work by Roger Bacon, ante, xii (1897), 494517 at 500.
659 Oxford in the fourteenth century and are known to have been in use.8 Given the many traces of his inuence, accessibility must be assumed. He was used as an authority whether acknowledged or not in mathematics, optics, astrology, astronomy, calendar reform and medicine.9 To give a few prominent examples, the lawyer and pamphleteer, Pierre Dubois, expressed admiration for his writings, citing him by name in several works, including the De Recuperatione Terrae Sanctae (c.1306), and used arguments from Bacons Opus maius.10 Substantial elements of the Opus maius appear without acknowledgement in the work of the physician Arnold of Villanova (d. 1311).11 Pierre dAilly (13511420), Chancellor of the University of Paris and later a cardinal, was greatly inuenced by Bacon, quoting his opinions without mentioning his name.12 Meanwhile, a growing number of manuscripts by other authors were circulating under Bacons name. They were usually concerned with necromancy, the occult, the practice of magic and similar topics. By the mid-sixteenth century, John Bale (14951563) was able to assemble a formidable and damning list of such works.13 Both the plagiarism and the use of Bacons name suggest that his work was admired where it was read and that his name might be expected to impart gravitas to the most frivolous texts. In 1369, it was recorded in the Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum that Bacon had been condemned and imprisoned by the Franciscans in 1277 for some suspected novelties in his work. The ministergeneral of the order, Jerome dAscoli, had then applied to the pope, Nicolas III, for endorsement of the condemnation.14 The passage gives no information about the popes response, but his involvement was assumed by many later commentators. This account rapidly became a crucial element in the mythology surrounding the gure of Bacon, and was accepted as fact until it was challenged in the early twentieth
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 8. A. G. Little, Franciscan Papers, Lists and Documents (Manchester, 1943), 70; M. B. Parkes, The Provision of Books, in J. I. Catto and R. Evans (eds), Late Medieval Oxford, ii, The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1992), 40783, at 4378. 9. J. D. North, Natural Philosophy in Late Medieval Oxford and Astronomy and Mathematics, in Catto and Evans, Late Medieval Oxford, 65102; 10374, at 967, 115, 1324; F. M. Getz, The Faculty of Medicine before 1500, in Catto and Evans, Late Medieval Oxford, 373405, at 395, 398, 4034; J. R. Clark, Roger Bacon and the Composition of Marsilio Ficinos De vita longa (De vita, book II), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xlix (1986), 2303. 10. P. Dubois, De Recuperatione terre sancte, in Ch.-V. Langlois (ed.), Collection de textes pour servir ltude et lenseignement de lhistoire (Paris, 1891), 65, 68. 11. A. G. Little, Annual Lecture on a Master Mind: Roger Bacon, Proceedings of the British Academy, xiv (1928), 1. 12. L. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre dAilly: Chancelier de lUniversit de Paris, vque du Puy et de Cambrai 13501420. Publication de la Socit dtudes de la Province de Cambrai, XXXV (Tourcoing, 1932), 298309, 346. 13. J. Bale, Illvstrivm Maioris Britanniae Scriptorvm, hoc est Angliae, Cambriae, ac Scotiae Summarium (Gippeswici, 1548), fo. 114v115. Bales later and much longer list omitted some of the more scandalous titles. R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (eds), Index Britanniae Scriptorum: Quos ex variis bibliothecis non parvo labore collegit Joannes Baleus, cum aliis: John Bales Index of British and Other Writers (Oxford, 1902), 3928. 14. aliquas novitates suspectas: Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum, Analecta Franciscana, iii (Quaracchi, 1897), 360.
660 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: 15 century. Alternative information about Bacons activities in the period has not come to light, so the story continues to hold a position of considerable importance, if only by default. Recently, some historians have begun to look in Bacons work for causes of such a condemnation without, however, providing fresh justication for taking the very late testimony of the Chronica seriously.16 The general tendency of the author of the chronicle to mix up fact and legend without much distinction, has not been clearly noted when Bacon scholars have used the source.17 Certainly by this time Bacons reputation was beginning to be coloured by strange stories. In 1385, another Franciscan chronicler, Peter of Trau, wrote of him:
He was so complete a master of optics that from love of experiment he neglected teaching and writing and made two mirrors in the University of Oxford: by one of them you could light a candle at any hour, day or night; in the other you could see what people were doing in any part of the world. By experimenting with the rst, students spent more time in lighting candles than studying books; and seeing, in the second, their relatives dying or ill or otherwise in trouble, they got into the habit of going down, to the ruin of the University, so by common council of the University both mirrors were broken.18
This seems to be the earliest known account of Bacon the Oxford magus. The old story of the construction of the Brazen Head did not yet belong to Bacon: in the same decade John Gower credited Robert Grosseteste with its construction.19 Many of the main themes in the history of Bacon are therefore visible by the end of the fourteenth century: scholarly admiration for his work; desire to preserve his writings; extensive, unacknowledged borrowing of them; the confusing circulation of falsely ascribed texts; the account of Bacons condemnation by the Franciscan order; and picturesque stories of his magical exploits. Too much emphasis has been laid on the last two of these developments, and almost none on the others.20 A survey of
15. L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era (8 vols, 192358), ii, 6289. 16. P. L. Sidelko, The Condemnation of Roger Bacon, Journal of Medieval History, xxii (1996), 6981; J. Hackett, Roger Bacon, Aristotle, and the Parisian Condemnations of 1270, 1277, Vivarium, xxxv (1997), 283314; idem, Aristotle, Astrologia, and Controversy at the University of Paris (12661274), in J. Van Engen (ed.), Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University (Notre Dame, 2000), 69111. 17. Quotation from J. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford, 1968), 396. 18. Peter of Trau, Zara, 1385, quoted from Little, Annual Lecture, 5. The source of the quotation is Bodl[eian Library, Oxford] ms Canon. Misc. 525, fos 202v203v. 19. J. Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. R. Pauli (2 vols, 1857), ii, 9. 20. Typical is R. Adamsons entry in the old D[ictionary of] N[ational] B[iography]: the historical reputation of Roger Bacon inadequately represents, and in many ways misrepresents, his real work and merit. Not till the eighteenth century was it known, nor from the scanty references in the older authorities could it have been gathered, that Bacon was more than an ingenious alchemist, a skilled mechanician, and perhaps a dabbler in the black arts.
661 allusions to Bacon occurring in published material from the end of the fteenth century onwards shows that he was much discussed in a variety of contexts. References generally fall into two rough groups: those condemning or mocking Bacon for his dabbling in the arcane arts; and those complaining that he was misunderstood and neglected. It seems that far from being forgotten, every generation throughout this period thought it necessary to have an impassioned argument about him. Instances of the rst kind of reference those accusing Bacon of nefarious activities are by far the best known. The ambiguity of Bacons status had intensied by the middle of the sixteenth century, particularly as a result of his treatment by Pico della Mirandola (14691533), one of the leading intellectuals in Renaissance Florence. Pico had used Bacon positively in his earlier works, but altered circumstances later in his life led him to criticise Bacon for being a great supporter of astrology, as opposed to a patron of truth.21 Both approaches were noted by later writers. By way of contrast, the German scholar and writer on the occult, Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (14861535), was censorious of Bacons writings for falling short of what he desired in a treatment of magic.22 Probably the earliest edition of the pseudo-Baconian De mirabili potestate artis et naturae was published in 1542 together with a summary of Nicolas Oresmes attack on astrology: an interesting pairing.23 Classifying Bacon was not easy. The tension is perhaps best illustrated by the volte-face of John Bale, who wrote in 1548 that Bacon was an illusionist and magus necromancer, not by the power of God, but by the operation of evil spirits.24 His objection to Bacon seems to have arisen partly as a result of his impassioned antiCatholicism.25 The second edition of the same work was published in 15579, a period which for Bale encompassed the grave danger of a successful Marian restoration of Catholicism and the relief of Elizabeths ascension. Bale entirely revised his estimate of Bacon, saying that he: had incredible skill in mathematics and was without necromancy, although
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON
21. magnus astrologiae patronus (64), veritatis patronus (532): G. Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, ed. E. Garin. Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano, IIIII (2 vols, Florence, 194652), i, 64, 116ff., 616ff.; ii, 5302. S. A. Farmer (ed.), Syncretism in the West: Picos Nine Hundred Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, CLXVII (Tempe, Arizona, 1998), 1445. See also P. Zambelli, Lapprendista stregone: Astrologia, cabala e arte lulliana in Pico della Mirandola e seguaci (Venice, 1995), 523. 22. C. G. Nauert, Jr, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought. Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, LV (Urbana, 1965), 2034. 23. De his quae mundo mirabiliter eveniunt, ubi de sensuum erroribus et potentiis animae ac de inuentiis caelorum, F. Claudii Caelestini opusculum. De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, ubi de philosophorum lapide, F. Rogerii Bachonis, Anglici, libellus (Paris, 1542). 24. praestigiator et magus necromanticus, non in virtute Dei, sed operatione malorum spirituum: Bale, Illvstrivm Maioris Britanniae Scriptorvm, fo. 114v. 25. In his play Three laws. Moralities, rst performed in 1538, Bale had the character Hypocrisis plan to awaken some medieval masters, including Bacon, to advaunce the Popes decrees in order to work against Christ and the Gospels. P. Happ (ed.), The Complete Plays of John Bale (2 vols, Cambridge, 19856), ii, 109.
662 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: many have defamed him with it. He took care to emphasise that Bacon had incurred the wrath of the pope.26 In preparing the second edition, Bale made extensive use of the manuscript notes of the antiquary, John Leyland (1506?1552), who was an admirer of Bacon and who had apparently searched the libraries of Oxford colleges associated with Bacon.27 These ambivalences found their way into the popular consciousness of the English in the course of the century.28 Bales account of Bacon was an important source for Robert Greenes c.1592 play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This play is usually treated by historians as if it were not merely the best, but the sole, representation of perceptions of Bacon in the period from his death until the nineteenth century.29 The main source was the prose work entitled: The famous historie of Fryer Bacon Containing the wonderfull things that he did in his life: also the manner of his death; with the lives and deaths of the two conjurers, Bungye and Vandermast. Very pleasant and delightfull to be read. The earliest known edition of this work was printed in 1627, but it is clear that there must have been at least one earlier edition. It was printed again and again in the next two centuries, often as part of collections including stories such as those of Faustus and Robin Hood, and the lives of saints. There is debate about whether the play was written before or after Marlowes Dr Faustus, but they were certainly written within the same ve years.30 The prose work purported to be a narrative of Bacons life, but although it began with a rather imaginative biography, it soon became a loosely connected series of stories about Bacons fantastic activities. Bacons father opposes further education for his precocious son, so Bacon runs away to a Cloyster (later versions specify the order of Augustinian canons) where, after further education, he becomes so famous that he is sent to Oxford, and grows so excellent in the secrets of Art and Nature, that not England onely, but all Christendome admired him. The king hears of him and wishes to see him, whereupon he is called to entertain the royal court. He performs various tricks, each of which have a moral
26. Accessit ei in Mathesi peritia incredibilis, sed absque Necromantia: quamuis ea multis infametur: J. Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant (Basel, 1557), 342. 27. Lelands work was later published as Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, ed. A. Hal (2 vols, Oxford, 1709); DNB q.v. Roger Bacon; Bodl ms Selden supra 109, fo. 434, Gerard Langbaine to Selden, 20 Jan. 1653. 28. It is thought that the earliest reference to Bacon in English literature is Gavin Douglass 1520 verse beginning: The Nigromansie thair saw I eik anone/Of Benytas, Bongo and Freir Bacone . The Palice of Honour, in The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. P. J. Bawcutt (Edinburgh, 1967), 109. 29. Representative is Butlers statement: Although Bacon lived in the thirteenth century, he came of age as a hero of legend in the sixteenth century: E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge, 1948; 1993 edn), 144. 30. Introduction in Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J. A. Lavin (1969); W. F. McNeir, Traditional Elements in the Character of Greenes Friar Bacon. Studies in Philology, XLV (1948), 1729; K. Assarsson-Rizzi, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: A Structural and Thematic Analysis of Robert Greenes Play. Lund Studies in English, XLIV (Lund, 1972), 1115, 249, 1479.
663 intent behind them. As well as magically humiliating his manservant for breaking holy fast, he outwits the Devil, thereby saving the soul of a young man. Notable among these episodes was the famous story of the Brazen Head. Friar Bacon creates the Head in order to learn from it how to build a wall of brass around England for protection from invasion. It was made very clear that his motivation was at once patriotic and vainglorious he wanted to use his art for the good of England, and so that his name would never be forgotten. The later versions of the story end with Bacons failure.31 The earlier versions go on with more stories of magical exploits, culminating in the deaths of two young men who kill each other after looking into the glass described by Peter of Trau, an event which causes Bacon such acute repentance that the nal chapter was entitled: How Fryer Bacon burnt his Books of Magicke, and gave himselfe to the study of Divinity onely, and how hee turned Anchorite. Here Bacon is caused to meditate on the vanitie of Arts and Sciences, condemning himself for studying of those things that were so contrary to his Order, and soules health, admitting that Magicke made a Man a Devill. He has himself locked away in a cell, where he occupies himself in digging his own grave with his ngernails: Thus was the Life and Death of this famous Fryer, who lived most part of his life a Magician, and dyed a true penitent Sinner, and an Anchorite.32 There is a certain irony in the fact that this late-sixteenth-century narrative alone brought Bacons views on learning into line with those of the Spiritual wing of the Franciscans. Greenes use of his source is elegant, showing the process by which, like Faustus, Bacon becomes increasingly intoxicated by his arts and powers, but unlike Faustus, is brought to repentance.33 The story was so widely known by 1604 that a satire entitled A Piece of Friar Bacons Brazen-heads Prophesie used the enigmatic words spoken by the Brazen Head as the basis for the censure of society.34 This representation of Bacon must be understood, not as indicative of serious views on Bacon at any time in history, but as the emergence of Bacon as a comic-hero in English literature. He was rewritten as a quintessentially English character, losing all connection with crucial historical facts of his life: his intellectual milieu at the University of
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 31. The History of the Learned Friar Bacon (c.1775), 24. 32. Edition cited is The famous history of Fryer Bacon contayning the wonderfull things that he did in his life: also the manner of his death, with the lives and deaths of the two conjurers, Bungey and Vandermast (1640). 33. The contrast was well-understood: for example, in F. Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen (1673), 289: one of my School-fellows lent me Docter Faustus, which also pleased me, especially when he travelled in the Air, saw all the World, and did what he listed; but I was as much troubled when the Devil came to fetch him; and the Consideration of that horrible end did so much terrie me, that I often dreamed of it. The next Book I met with was Fryar Bacon, whose pleasant Stories much delighted me. 34. W. Terilo, A Piece of Friar Bacons Brazen-heads Prophesie, in J. O. Halliwell (ed.), Friar Bakons Prophesie: A Satire on the Degeneracy of the Times AD 1604 (1844). Bacon is not mentioned in this poem, except in the title.
664 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: Paris; his religious vocation as a Franciscan friar; his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. Free of these encumbrances, he increasingly became a focus for national pride. His triumph over the conjuror Vandermast a German born, passed into Padua,/To Florence, and to fair Bolonia,/To Paris, Rheims, and stately Orleans was a triumph for Oxford and for England.35 Yet it remained a light-hearted pride. Bacon and his Brazen Head were for centuries a standard subject for mildly erudite punning and witticisms in drama and poetry such as in a play rst performed c.162142, where one character observed of another: Frier Bacon was but a brazen/head, in comparison with him.36 Samuel Bishop (173195) found Bacon a worthy subject for an epigram:
Friar Bacon formd by spells, were told, A brazen jobbernole, of old, That should great Truths have spoken; But while the drowsy sage delayd, Time comes, time is, times past, it said; And vanishd into smoke. Skill like the Friars, would gold surpass, Who manufacturing vulgar brass, Could such an head produce ont; But, sure, whateer his skill might be, Twas wooden wit, youll all agree, To make no better use ont!37
From the more sophisticated pen of Byron came this stanza:

Now, like Friar Bacons brazen head, Ive spoken, Time is, Time was, Times past. A chymic treasure Is glittering youth, which I have spent betimes, My heart in passion and my head on rhymes.38
He also served more generally whenever a magician was wanted, for example, in c.1633 a character pondered: yf fryar/Bacon weare now aliue that could make dumbe thinges/speake, what would my basket saye at rst word?39 The popularity of the comic gure Friar Bacon was noted with irritation by English and Continental scholars alike.40
35. Greene, Friar Bacon, 26. 36. J. Ford, The Queen, Or the Excellency Of Her Sex. An Excellent old Play. Found out by a Person of Honour, and given to the Publisher, Alexander Goughe (1653), Act 1, l. 428. 37. Epigram 69, in The Poetical Works of the Rev. Samuel Bishop (2 vols, 1796), ii, 2089. 38. Byron, Don Juan, Canto 1, verse 217. 39. W. Mountfort, The Launching of the Mary, ed. J. H. Walter (Oxford, 1933), 44. 40. Joannis Seldeni I. C. de Dis Syris Syntagmata: Aduersaria nemp de Numinibus commentitijs in Vetere Instrvmento memoratis. accedunt quae sunt reliqua Synorum (1617), 32; G. Naud, The History of Magick By way of Apology, For all the Wise Men who have unjustly been reputed Magicians, from the Creation, to the present Age, trans. J. Davies (1657), 2302. One of his more recent appearances was in John Cowper Powyss novel, The Brazen Head (1956).
665 The second group of references to Bacon those praising Bacon and lamenting that he had been neglected and misunderstood arose partly in response to these vulgar presentations of Bacon although the earliest were written against the story recorded by Peter of Trau, rather than The famous historie.41 The wonder might perhaps be that scholars bothered to contest hotly what was being said frivolously of Bacon in pamphlets and the playhouses. In fact, defences of Bacon were related to one of the burning preoccupations of the day, usually occurring where an author was trying to show that science was not magic, or that learning was not ungodly.42 The tradition was self-referential, with each author quoting previous defences of Bacon. All stressed that Bacon had been falsely associated with magic by people too ignorant to distinguish between marvels accomplished through science and those accomplished through black arts and dealings with the devil. Nearly all of them maintained that the hostility of Bacons contemporaries was motivated by jealousy. Usually a broader accusation was being made: that progress in learning had always been hindered by this kind of slander. The best example is perhaps the 1625 work of the French scholar-librarian Gabriel Naud: Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont est faussement soupconn de magie, a critical and contextual analysis of allegations of magic.43 A related genre was Protestant anti-papal polemic, in which Bacons imprisonment was presented as yet another instance of the infamous tyranny of popes. One such was the Disputationum theologicarum & scholasticarum de Antichristo & eius Ecclesia of the polemicist, Gabriel Powell (15761611). Here Bacon was said to have aroused the popes wrath by his sharp criticism of contemporary society, the errors of which he attributed to the presence of Antichrist.44 In the early days of the Reformation, mathematics and other sciences had been seen as either popish, diabolical or both, and books on these subjects had been burned in great numbers.45 The association between Catholicism and suspect sciences probably underlay the popular mythology of Bacon, even if Bacon was presented as a virtuous friar. It is clear that the emphasis in many seventeenth-century English accounts of Bacons life was laid where it would best suit the climate of virulent anti-Catholicism.46 It is extremely
41. For example: R. Record, The Pathvvay to Knowledge (1551), fo. 3v. 42. A more unusual context, employing the same arguments, was R. Fludd, Tractatus apologeticus integritatem Societatis de Rosea Cruce defendens (Leiden, 1617), 224. 43. N. Siraisi, Anatomizing the Past: Physicians and History in Renaissance Culture, Renaissance Quarterly, liii (2000), 130 at 25. Naud was highly inuential in the transmission of Italian learning to France. See P. O. Kristeller, Between the Italian Renaissance and the French Enlightenment: Gabriel Naud as an Editor, Renaissance Quarterly, xxxii (1979), 4172. 44. Gabriel Powell, Disputationum theologicarum & scholasticarum de Antichristo & eius Ecclesia (London, 1605), 14. 45. P. J. French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (1972), 267. 46. C. Z. Wiener, The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean AntiCatholicism, Past and Present, li (1971), 2762.
666 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: noticeable that the fourteenth-century source for the story of Bacons imprisonment accepts that if Bacon was censured and punished by his Franciscan superiors and through them, by the pope, it must have been because he failed in orthodoxy. Post-Reformation authors right up until the present day, it might be added make the opposite assumption: invariably implying that if Bacon was imprisoned by the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, then the Church must have erred against not merely Bacon, but against the very forces of history and progress. The themes were united in the specic defences of Bacon, such as the one that John Dee wrote in 1557, no longer extant, but listed by him as: The Mirror of Unity, or, Apology for the English Friar Roger Bacon; in which it is taught that he did nothing by the aid of demons but was a great philosopher and accomplished naturally and by ways permitted to a Christian man the great works which the unlearned crowd usually ascribes to the acts of demons.47 Dee was a mathematician and astrologer and as well as being a great admirer of Bacons works, he felt that he had himself suffered from the same atmosphere of suspicion which he saw tarring Bacons memory.48 He seems to have become interested in Bacon in the mid-1550s, possibly as a result of his engagement with the optical interests of Mercator, Frisius and Gogava in Louvain.49 His library contained a vast collection of Bacon manuscripts, including what is now the oldest surviving manuscript of the Opus maius.50 He probably encouraged other Englishmen to read the works of Bacon, including his friend Leonard Digges (d. c.1571), whose skill in optics was said to derive partly from one of Bacons treatises.51 Dee may have been the rst Englishman to identify so strongly with Bacons life, work and subsequent reputation. His defence of Bacon seems to have been mounted along the lines subsequently followed by editors and translators of Bacons works. The Preface to the 1659 edition of Frier Bacon his
47. Speculum unitatis: sive Apologia pro Fratre Rogerio Bachone Anglo, in qua docetur, nihil illum per Daemoniorum auxilia fecisse, sed Philosophum fuisse maximum: naturaliterque, & modis homini Christiano licitis, maximas fecisse res: quas, indoctum solet vulgus in Daemoniorum referre facinora: John Dee on Astronomy: Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558 and 1568), Latin and English, ed. and trans. W. Shumaker (1978), 11617. 48. N. H. Clulee, John Dees Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (1988), esp. 6572. See J. P. Zetterberg, The Mistaking of the Mathematicks for Magic in Tudor and Stuart England, Sixteenth Century Journal, xi (1980), 8397. 49. Clulee, John Dees Natural Philosophy, 278, 60; N. H. Clulee, Astrology, Magic and Optics: Facets of John Dees Early Natural Philosophy, Renaissance Quarterly, xxx (1977), 63280 at 6389; D. J. Struik, Mathematics in the Netherlands during the First Half of the XVIth Century, Isis, xxv (1936), 4656. 50. J. Roberts and A. G. Watson (eds), John Dees Library Catalogue (1990); W. H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture (Amherst, 1995), 85. 51. F. R. Johnson, The Inuence of Thomas Digges on the Progress of Modern Astronomy in Sixteenth-century England, Osiris, i (1936), 390410 at 398; D. N. Livingstone, Geography, Tradition and the Scientic Revolution: An Interpretative Essay, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Ser., xv (1990), 35973 at 3623; DNB q.v. Leonard Digges.
667 discovery of the miracles of art, nature, and magick provides a reasonably standard example:
A Prejudicate eye much lessens the noblenesse of the Subject. Bacons name may bring at the rst an inconvenience to the Book, but Bacons ingenuity will recompense it ere he be solidly read. This as an Apology is the usher to his other Workes, which may happier breathe a more free Air hereafter, when once the World sees how clear he was, from loving Negromancy. Twas the Popes smoak which made the eyes of that age so sore, as they could not discern any open-hearted and clear-headed soul from a heretical Phantasme. The silly Fryers envying his too prying head, by their craft had almost got it off his shoulders. Its dangerous to be wiser than the multitude, for that unruly Beast will have every over-topping head to be lopped shorter, lest it plot, ruine, or stop the light, or shadow its extravagancies. How famous this Fryer is in the judgment of both godly and wise men, I referre you to the Probatums of such men, whose single Authorities were of sufciency to equalize a Jury of others; and as for the Book, I refer it to thy reading.52
When faced by these several types of reference, most of which could easily have been found, and sometimes were found, by previous Bacon scholars, the obvious conclusion may be that there was simply a genre of complaint at work, in which Bacon played as stereotyped a role as he did in Greenes play.53 That it may also be evidence for intellectual engagement with Bacons work has been largely disregarded. I think that the reason for this is our failure to take seriously people who took the issue of magic seriously. For the last two centuries, Bacon scholars have been, to say the least, fastidious about that aspect of Bacons interests. No one likes to see a hero of scientic progress proposing to prolong human life with the aid of a potion containing specially prepared dragon-esh.54 Yet it is clear enough that both his Renaissance detractors and defenders did associate him with the subject. As a consequence, it has been anachronistically assumed that the mere association indicates that he was misunderstood and held in disrepute, and there the matter has been allowed to rest. For some decades it has been a commonplace among historians of the Renaissance that many intellectuals in that period were deeply preoccupied with a whole range of subjects including mathematics, optics, astronomy, astrology, alchemy and some forms of magic. Yet in
52. Dee, Frier Bacon his discovery of the miracles of art, nature, and magick. Faithfully translated out of Dr Dees own copy, by T.M. and never before in English (1659). See also Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baconis, De secretis operibus artis et naturae, et de nullitate magiae opera Johannis Dee (Hamburg, 1618), 1112. 53. Molland, for example, characterised them as arid discussions given more body by a rich legendary tradition. Roger Bacon as Magician, 446. 54. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, ed. J. H. Bridges (3 vols, Oxford, 18971900), ii, 21112.
668 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: many respects, as Geneva points out, there has been a failure to integrate this new perspective into discussions of mentality, except in a peripheral manner.55 This is certainly true in Bacons case. Even a supercial examination of what Renaissance intellectuals read and wrote leaves no doubt that he was admired in many circles precisely for his writings on magic and natural science. The work most frequently printed under Bacons name throughout the seventeenth century was The cure of old age and the preservation of youth, closely followed by The Letter of Roger Bacon concerning the marvellous power of art and of nature and concerning the nullity of magic. In these, as well as in Bacons unquestionably authentic works, the discussion was not merely about the subjects themselves, but also addressed concerns about the likelihood of these arts being exploited by unscrupulous practitioners and about the risks of using them beyond what was acceptable to a devout Christian. In this, he was speaking straight to some of the deepest fears of the Renaissance. His anxieties were their anxieties. Between editions of his works, and editions of the prose and drama versions of his life, at least one, and sometimes as many as four books bearing Bacons name were printed in every decade from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Bacon had become a compelling gure, reecting from several different angles the pride, the achievements, the curiosity, the ambivalence and the unease of an age in which concepts of the powers and limitations of humanity were at war. In the seventeenth century, the preoccupation with whether Bacon was a magician began to yield to a more familiar preoccupation: the originality of his thought. The shift could perhaps be illustrated with Lockes ippancy: There are millions of truths that a man is not concerned to know; as, whether Roger Bacon was a mathematician, or a magician.56 To demonstrate the process, it is necessary to abandon printed sources which were largely carrying on the old debate and consider other evidence. Only a narrow selection of Bacons works was in print, but the bulk of the material known to us today was in circulation in manuscript form. John Bale gave a list of eighty-one separate works in the 1557 edition of his opus on British writers. The catalogues of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century libraries record similar numbers of titles, and the owners such as Robert Cotton and Kenelm Digby were generous about letting people use their collections. Most of those who wrote about Bacon owned or had access to manuscripts. Perhaps most prominent among them was the eminent lawyer John Selden, who formed a great admiration for Bacon on the basis of his
55. A. Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester and New York, 1995), xiv. See also B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newtons Thought (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 16, 2505. 56. Quoted under magician in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols, 1755), no page nos.
669 reading in these collections. Despite the vigour of his challenging approach to history, his early defences of Bacon were not remarkable.58 In De Dis Syris Syntagmata, written by 1605, published in 1617, he castigated the vulgus of England, and everyone who denounced Bacon as a magician, pouring particular scorn on the legend of the Brazen Head. He pointed out that no historian had mentioned any of Bacons magical acts: they merely existed in the popular imagination.59 He was not the rst to defend Bacon from the legends that had grown up about his name, but he may have been the rst to make this observation, believing as he did in both the use, and the critical interrogation of primary sources.60 In his 1618 Historie of Tithes, he attributed Bacons suffering under the suspicion of the Church to his most noble Studies being out of the rode of the lazie Clergie of his time.61 His remarks, in the 1631 Titles of Honour, are more interesting. He made one of the very few pre-modern references to Bacons moral philosophy. He had read all six books of the moralis philosophia (the 18971900 edition of the Opus maius contained only the rst four) and used some of Bacons opinions briey in the argument of his Preface.62 By 1637, he and Digby were engaged in the project of publishing Bacons works, together with an account of Bacon written by Selden.63 It is not clear what kind of account it was, but it may have been the Life mentioned by Seldens collaborator, Gerald Langbaine, Provost of Queens College, Oxford.64 The project does not seem to have come to anything at that time, but was revived again early in 1653, when Selden asked Langbaine to look for Bacon manuscripts in the libraries of Oxford colleges associated with Bacon. Langbaine found nothing and wondered if the manuscripts had been destroyed during the purges of libraries under Henry VIII, although he thought that probably they had not been there even before.65 However, the following week, he reported to Selden that he had shown some judicious friends passages from his ep[is]t[l]e to pope Clem[en]t (w[hi]ch I perceive is the same with that you call De utilitate Scientiar[um]). This was, of course, the Opus maius. The friends were much taken with them & suitor to me for a publication. Langbaine had some reservations about Bacons
57
57. D. S. Berkowitz, John Seldens Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early SeventeenthCentury England (Washington DC, 1988), 257; Bodl ms Ballard 11, fo. 22, Langbaine to Digby, 26 Aug. 1656. 58. Quotation from Berkowitz, John Selden, 41. 59. John Selden, De Dis Syris Syntagmata, 24, 32. 60. Naud acknowledged Selden as his source for this particular observation: The History of Magick, 230; Berkowitz, John Selden, 423. 61. J. Selden, The Historie of Tithes (1618), xv. 62. J. Selden, Titles of Honor (1631), fo. g2. 63. Bodl ms Selden supra 108, fo. 78, Digby to Selden, 11 Feb. 1637. 64. Bodl ms Bodl.1022, fo. 7v. 65. Bodl ms Selden supra 109, fo. 434, Langbaine to Selden, 20 Jan. 1653.
670 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: writings on grammar, but felt they were counterbalanced by other parts which were so considerable as the com[m]on interest of papists & others will hardly permitt them to publish it. He also noted that many titles attributed to Bacon by his biographers were falsely ascribed.66 Seldens reply encouraged Langbaine to resume those thoughts (w[hi]ch I had lyd aside) of publishing that piece of Roger Bacon.67 The next week found Langbaine unwell, and in receipt of two Books of fryer Bacon from Selden which did more chere and revive me than either the doctors, or Bacons own cordial pro retardanda Senectute. He sought Seldens permission to have one of these books transcribed for publication, for I judge it well deserves to be more publique.68 This seems to be the last mention of the project in the extant letters between the two men, and Selden died the following year. Selden housed a number of Bacon manuscripts with Langbaine, who may have retained them.69 In 1656, he wrote to Digby saying that he was still eager to publish a good part of Bacons works. He had transcribed the Opus maius from Cottons copy (owned before him by Dee), and as much as was left of the Compendium studii theologiae. He had sent someone to work on the Dublin manuscript of the Opus maius. Finally, he hoped that Digby might be able to provide additional works for publication.70 Yet, as in 1637, nothing seemed to come of the project, possibly because Langbaine himself died two years later. Regardless of the lack of success in publishing Bacons works, it is clear that Bacon was being taken very seriously indeed. In March 16678, John Evelyn, one of the founding members of the Royal Society, included Bacons name in a list of learned Englishmen whose portraits he advised the Lord Chancellor to add to his collection of paintings in Clarendon House.71 Evelyn gave no justication for his selections, but he must have seen the portrait of Roger Bacon that hung in the collection of portraits at Knole in Kent, the home of the Sackville family. A series of about forty paintings had been commissioned in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, mostly of Protestant notables, but with some Catholic martyrs such as Thomas More and John Fisher among them. Those of Bacon and Wycliffe stand out, since they are the only two in this sequence who lived much before the sixteenth century.72
66. Ibid., fo. 444, Langbaine to Selden, 30 Jan. 1653. 67. Ibid., fo. 376, Langbaine to Selden, 9 Feb. 1653. 68. Ibid., fo. 380, Langbaine to Selden, 20 Feb. 1653. 69. Bodl ms Selden supra 111, fo. 108 (list of John Seldens Books and mss, c.1654). 70. Bodl ms Ballard 11, fo. 22, Langbaine to Digby, 26 Aug. 1656. 71. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. A. Dobson (3 vols, 1906), ii, 293. Clarendon does not seem to have taken his advice. R. Gibson, Catalogue of Portraits in the Collection of the Earl of Clarendon (1977). 72. I would like to thank Kate Heard for drawing the collection at Knole to my attention. At present the Bacon portrait is no. 38 in the Brown Gallery at Knole. See R. Sackville-West, Knole, Kent, National Trust (1998), 16.
671 Tourists interested in Bacon could look around his study at Oxford, in a tower over the gateway of Folly Bridge. Pepys visited it in 1668 and the antiquarian, Anthony Wood, described it, although he admitted that the association with Bacon was meerly traditionall.73 Twenty years after Langbaines death, the idea of publishing Bacons works was revived at a meeting of the Royal Society after someone had observed that Bacon had known how to make gunpowder. It was desired by that Society, that as many books, as could be procured of the said ROGER BACON should be perused; and it was wished, that they were all collected and printed, as being supposed to contain very many curious and useful things.74 The matter was discussed with great enthusiasm during the weekly meetings through March and April of 1679. Various members reported on the location of Bacon manuscripts, a matter about which they seemed to know far less than had Langbaine and Selden. Their interest was of a different kind and their objective in collecting and publishing Bacons works seemed to be to establish that Bacon had conceived of various inventions long before others had known of them.75 They hoped that his writings might prove an honour to the English nation; especially as he appeared to be the rst, who had begun experimental philosophy.76 Unfortunately, the well-known difculty of compiling a complete list of Bacons works seems to have caused the project to founder, and the excitable members of the Society were rapidly diverted into other lines of research.77 The subject of Bacons precocity was not forgotten entirely. In July 1682 the minutes noted with some satisfaction after a reading of Thomas Digges Stratioticos that: it seemed evident, that Roger Bacon was the rst inventor of telescopes, and Leonard Digges the next reviver of them, both Englishmen.78 The nationalistic preoccupation was to become central to English interest in Bacon. The connection between these two attempts to arrange Bacons works for publication was not entirely tenuous. Digby and Langbaine
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 73. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, (11 vols, 1976), ix, 19; A. Clark (ed.), Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford , composed in 16616, by Anthony Wood (3 vols, Oxford, 188999), i, 425. Pencil sketches of the study and the bridge beneath it appear in B[ritish] L[ibrary, London] Add. ms 36374, fos 51, 52. The second of these is dated to 1701. 74. T. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for improving of Natural Knowledge, from its rst rise in which the most considerable of those Papers communicated to the Society, which have hitherto not been published, are inserted in their proper order, as a supplement to the Philosophical Transactions (4 vols, 1757), iii, 470. 75. Ibid., 472. 76. Ibid., 479. 77. Ibid., 473. Leland had written gloomily that it would be easier to collect the leaves of the Sibyl than Bacons works. Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, ii, 258. The atmosphere in the Society in those days is described in L. Mulligan and G. Mulligan, Reconstructing Restoration Science: Styles of Leadership and Social Composition of the Early Royal Society, Social Studies of Science, xi (1981), 32764 at 3445. 78. Birch, History of the Royal Society, iv, 1567.
672 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: were both associated with the Royal Society in its earliest days.79 Thomas Gale, who was one of the chief contributors, had already collected as many of Bacons works as he could, mentioning that one of his books had belonged to Langbaine who had been very diligent and curious in that respect. The antiquarian Robert Plot was also familiar with Langbaines summary of Bacons works and had already made the claim that Bacon invented the telescope.80 Finally, the President of the Royal Society at that time was Joseph Williamson, who had been a student of Langbaines, and later a Fellow of Queens.81 He is said to have copied out some of Bacons treatises with his own hand.82 Momentum was gathering, despite the failures. In 1689 the Historia dogmatica of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, appeared posthumously, including several pages from Bacon on scripture and languages. In 1705 the biblical languages scholar, Humphrey Hody, published some lengthy extracts from the Opus minus on the same subject, hailing Bacon as the wonder of his own century and likewise our own.83 The Voyages fait principlement en Asia of the geographer Pierre Bergeron (d. 1637) was published in 1729 containing Quelques observations du Moine Bacon, Touchant les Parties Septentrionales du Monde, extracted from the geographical section of the Opus maius.84 In the same year, another member of the Royal Society, Richard Mead, encouraged the scholar Samuel Jebb to undertake the editing and publication of the Opus maius. Jebb reported to a friend: Dr. Mead has engagd me at present to rescue from obscurity the Works of Roger Bacon, who appears to have been a very learned Man in a very ignorant Age, & of whom we have several very valuable remains, w[hi]ch have not yet been publishd.85 The work took Jebb three years during which one of the valuable remains was badly damaged by the re in the Cotton library but in 1733, Bacons most famous work was in print.86 The Dictionary of National Biography inaccurately stated that it was the rst edition of Bacons work, and
79. A. S. Reid, Hawthornes Humanism: The Birthmark and Sir Kenelm Digby, American Literature, xxxviii (1966), 33751 at 339; R. G. Frank, Jr, John Aubrey, F.R.S., John Lydall, and Science at Commonwealth Oxford, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xxvii (1973), 193217 at 2034. 80. Birch, History of the Royal Society, iii, 4701; R. Plot, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, being an essay towards the natural history of England (Oxford, 1677), 21421. 81. DNB, q.v. Joseph Williamson. 82. R. Steele, Roger Bacon, Quarterly Review, ccxxi (1914), 25074 at 253. 83. Jacobi Usserii, Armachani Archiepiscopi, Historia dogmatica controversiae inter orthodoxos & ponticios de Scripturis et sacris vernaculis, ed. H. Wharton (1689), 4204; ipse itidem noster, sui seculi stupor: Humredi Hodi Linguae Graecae Professoris Regii Et Archidiaconi Oxon. de Bibliorum Textibus Originalibus, Versionibus Graecis, & Latina Vulgata (Oxford, 1705), 41930, at 419. 84. P. Bergeron, Voyages fait principlement en Asia dans les XII, XIII, et XIV sicles (2 vols, Paris, 1735), ii, ch. 7, cols 322. 85. Bodl ms Eng.th.c.30, fo. 503, Samuel Jebb to Thomas Brett, 18 March 1729/30. 86. Fratris Rogeri Bacon, Ordinis minorum, Opus Maius ad Clementem Quartum, Ponticem Romanum. Ex MS. Codice Dubliniensi, cum aliis quibusdam collato, nunc primum edidit, S. Jebb (1733).
673 as eminent a scholar as Thorndike perpetuated the common belief that until Jebbs edition, Bacon was unappreciated and unknown.87 These errors have persisted, emphasising the lack of value placed on earlier interests and achievements. It is assumed that there was at this point an inexplicable lull in interest in Bacon until nineteenth-century scholars resurrected him from centuries of obscurity and regarded him with profound admiration.88 This characterisation is inaccurate in both directions. Profound admiration had been manifested in earlier centuries, and it was not lacking in the eighteenth century. As a direct result of Jebbs publication, one of the most comprehensive and detailed articles ever written on Roger Bacon appeared in the Biographia Britannica a mere fourteen years later.89 The author had read a great many of Bacons writings, and produced an account of him that barely fell short of hagiography but it was highly informed hagiography. It contained a lengthy summary of the Opus maius and shorter descriptions of the contents of other texts, given in English: absolutely necessary for the use of such, as cannot with facility go through a folio volume in that [Latin] language.90 Most of the points in Bacons biography still regarded today as problematic were identied and treated in substantial discursive notes lled with citations of previous writers. The author believed himself the heir of a long tradition of the deepest regard for Bacon, concluding:
Thus it appears that the reputation of this extraordinary person, has not risen from any superstitious regard to antiquity, or the prejudices of a few great men in his favour, but is truly founded on merit, and has been cherished and maintained, from a principle of justice, by the ablest men, and the most competent judges in all ages, and of all countries, from the times nearest his own, down to those in which we live.
He was particularly conscious that Bacons merit duly weighed, together with the glory which results to this nation from having produced, and that too in one of the darkest and most unlettered ages, the brightest and most universal genius, that perhaps the world ever saw made the study worth undertaking.91 Here we seem to have the Victorian stereotype aloft, a century early, and with a far better appreciation of previous traditions perhaps the last accurate understanding of the longevity of esteem for Bacon.
87. DNB, q.v. Samuel Jebb; Thorndike, Roger Bacon and Experimental Method, 271. 88. (A)nother century had to elapse before any further notice was taken of Bacon: W. L. Courtney, Roger Bacon (A Forgotten Son of Oxford), Fortnightly Review, xlvi (1889), 25462 at 257. 89. Biographia Britannica or the Lives of the Most eminent Persons who have ourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the earliest Ages down to the present Times (6 vols, 174766), i, 34164. 90. Ibid., 347. 91. Ibid., 364.
674 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: Early nineteenth-century treatments of Bacon were variable. In 1820, Hegel dismissed Bacon in two sentences: Roger Bacon treated more especially of physics, but remained without inuence. He invented gunpowder, mirrors, telescopes, and died in 1294.92 On the other hand, Goethe wrote with warm admiration of Bacon in his 1810 Zur Farbenlehre and, in 1836, Alexander von Humboldt demonstrated that Bacons Opus maius was an important indirect source for Columbuss geographical notions.93 In 1814, the Anglo-Saxon enthusiast, Sharon Turner, placed Bacons thought in the context of the inux of Arabian science into England, a theme elaborated most notably by the Irish scholar and clergyman, Charles Forster, in 1829.94 Forster also indignantly revealed Francis Bacon to be little more than a successful plagiariser of Roger Bacons system of thought.95 In 1837, a leading gure in the British scientic community, William Whewell, gave a very brief, but deeply admiring account of Bacon in his History of the Inductive Sciences, noting that he was one on whom much stress has been laid; a man so far beyond his age that it is difcult to conceive how such a character could then exist.96 In the same year, Francis Palgrave, yet another member of the Royal Society, later to be the rst Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, published a curious book in which Roger Bacon and Marco Polo wandered together about England, observing and discoursing on the customs of their day, and in particular, serving to illustrate Palgraves convictions about the development of English law.97 Certainly, if there was a pause in the publication of Bacons work, there was no pause in discussion of him. He was increasingly sentimentalised: there is a great deal of highly regrettable Victorian poetry lamenting the cruelty of Bacons fate. A particularly gloomy example, entitled Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri Baconis, Anno Domini 1292 begins in the tenth year of his imprisonment: O day! if it be day, O Night! if night,/On my sepulchral lamp I waste my sight
92. This was in contrast to the next philosopher in the lecture, Ramon Lull, who received a two-page notice. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (3 vols, 18926), iii, 92. 93. J. W. von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (2 vols, Tbingen, 1810), ii, 14864; F. H. A. von Humboldt, Examen critique de lhistoire de la gographie du nouveau continent et des progrs de lastronomie nautique aux quinzime et seizime sicles (5 vols, Paris, 18369), i, 5878. 94. S. Turner, A History of England (3 vols, 181423), i, 485; C. Forster, Mahometanism Unveiled: An Inquiry, in which that arch-heresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to conrm the evidences, and the propagation, of the Christian Faith (2 vols, 1829), ii, 26870, 2745, 31219. Forster was the protg of John Jebb, Bishop of Limerick and relative of Samuel Jebb. It is said that this connection gave Forster particular access to the Opus maius. C. Bennett, Victorian Images of Islam (1992), 23. 95. The parallels with Francis Bacon had been drawn more gently by H. Hallam, View of the State of Europe in the Middle Ages (3 vols, 2nd edn, 1819), iii, 53940. 96. W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (3 vols, 1837), i, 341. 97. Francis Palgrave, Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar (1837); Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, xii (18623), xiiixx.
675 and continues for fty-nine verses in this vein, ending with Bacons solitary death.98 From March to June of 1848, Victor Cousin, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, and one of the most inuential men in the French academic world at that time, serialised a lengthy description of Bacons Opus tertium, which he had recently found. Unhappy with Jebbs edition of the Opus maius, Cousin wrote provocatively: Puisse cette entreprise, la fois utile et facile, sourire au patriotisme de quelque savant dOxford ou de Cambridge!99 It is interesting to see that he addressed an appeal for its publication however facetiously specically at the English universities, despite the fact that they were at that time hardly leading institutions in the study of either science or history. An irritable reviewer attributed their lack of immediate response to the intense preoccupation with religious matters in Oxford in the years around John Henry Newmans defection to the Catholic Church.100 The project was eventually undertaken for the editors of Rolls Series, possibly at the urging of Palgrave, by J. S. Brewer, at that time Professor of English at Kings College, London.101 The Opus tertium, Opus minus and Compendium philosophiae comprised the rst, and in the event, sole, volume of a projected Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, appearing in 1859. In 1861, Emile Charles, Professor of Logic in the Lyce de Bordeaux, published the rst modern, scholarly account of Bacons life and works, dryly noting that he had undertaken the work Cousin had requested from Oxbridge patriotism.102 This period marked the early stages of the removal of serious study of Bacon into the sphere of the universities. A number of biographies, studies and addresses appeared in the following decades in England, France and Germany. No further editions issued from any source, despite repeated complaints, until the end of the century. In the new century, nineteenth-century work on Bacon, along with so much else, was swiftly regarded as outdated. Yet the effects of nineteenthcentury perspectives on twentieth-century presentations of Bacon are at once so profound and so little recognised that it can be claimed with justice that Bacon scholarship still suffers from them. I have asserted in this article that representations of Bacon say at least as much about the age from which they come as they do about Bacon himself. The wider tensions, doubts and developments experienced by nineteenth-century intellectuals interacted with a partial knowledge of earlier presentations
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 98. R. H. Horne, Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri Baconis, Anno Domini 1292, Frasers Magazine, New Ser., xxvi (1882), 11319. 99. Journal des Savants (1848), 12938, 22236, 290307, 34054 at 354. 100. The Life and Writings of Roger Bacon, Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, New Ser. xxv (1864), 130 at 3. 101. DNB, q.v. John Sherren Brewer; D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises (1963), 103. 102. E. Charles, Roger Bacon: sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines (Paris, 1861), vii. It was his thesis for the degree of docteur s lettres. Dictionnaire de biographie franais, q.v. Emile Charles.
676 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: to produce a very strained and rather gigantesque image of Bacon. A strong and growing interest in science and its development in the West since ancient times hardened the direction that study of Bacon had taken in the seventeenth century. Under the inuence of such diverse thinkers as Auguste Comte, Victor Cousin and William Whewell, there was an increasing tendency to apply philosophical doctrines to intellectual history.103 This meant that Bacon was rarely considered either in isolation, or in a thirteenth-century milieu, but instead was presented not so much as a man, but as a stage in a long, triumphant history. There was a wide and intense preoccupation with religious matters in the universities and in society generally. The discoveries of Lyell, Darwin and others did not shatter religious belief; on the contrary, the ultimate ability of most religious groups to adjust old orthodoxies to accommodate new ndings enabled a general continuity of faith within the proud consciousness of living in an era of rationalism and scientic advance. Related in an odd way to these developments were others, such as the romanticising of the medieval period, the romanticising of progress and the heady combination of nationalism with the extreme admiration of the great men of the past.104 Bacon had long been admired, but the mood particular to the latter half of the nineteenth century brought admiration to fever-pitch. He was redrawn in the image of the ideal nineteenthcentury man of science, portrayed as a courageous individualist, an advocate of advanced scientic methods and a creative genius.105 And in those days when many were deeply conscious of the determined opposition of the Catholic Church to the growth of liberal thought, Bacons famed deance of Church and Pope for the cause of independent, scientic thought was central to the admiration he received.
He was all that a man of science should be, and was therefore all that he should not be in the eyes of his order, and of the Levites of the ark of learning in his day he would accept no belief without examining it and putting it to the proof
103. See W. M. Simon, The Two Cultures in Nineteenth-Century France: Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxvi (1965), 4558; R. Yeo, Dening Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1993). 104. History, more than any other liberal arts study, permitted teachers and students to indulge in an antiquarian passion, a romantic yearning for a comprehensible, heroic and decisive past. At the same time they could admire and accept selected changes as improvements. Nostalgia was mitigated by some species of progressivist apologetics. Ambiguities, ironies, subtleties, losses and regrets were submerged in the larger meaning of history as national progress. R. Soffer, Nation, Duty, Character and Condence: History at Oxford, 18501914, Historical Journal, xxx (1987), 77104 at 80. See also E. Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000) and M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, 1981). 105. Adamson began his 1876 lecture on Bacon: At a time when such rapid advances are being made in all the Sciences, and when so much attention has been devoted to their general philosophy or methods, it does not seem to be out of place to ask you to consider for a short time the thoughts on these matters of a great but much neglected English thinker. R. Adamson, Roger Bacon: The Philosophy of Science in the Middle Ages: An Address (Manchester, 1876), 5.
677
of experience; and he vexed his contemporaries by his persistence in inquiring into the causes of natural phenomena instead of resting content, as others did, with the mystical explanations which were then universally accepted.106
There were some, especially early on, who made a partial resistance to this false picture. The Irish Positivist, J. K. Ingram, pointed out in 1858 that Jebbs failure to include the seventh part of the Opus maius in his edition did serious injustice to Bacon:
For the cardinal idea which presided over his whole construction is thus kept out of view, or at least obscured. This idea was, the supremacy of moral science over the rest of the intellectual system. The earlier and simpler sciences he regarded as deserving of study, chiey because they are the necessary preparation for Morals, the supreme and nal science.107
His important observation, itself couched in rather secular terms, was largely ignored. In a summary of the Opus maius, given two decades later, the philosopher Robert Adamson who wrote the DNB entry on Bacon made no mention of a seventh book, reporting that in Bacons scheme, all other sciences were ancillae to Experimental Science.108 Since the Christian faith which informed all of Bacons work was being edited out, it was possibly no coincidence that the only more or less complete edition of Bacons Opus maius published since that of Jebb was undertaken by the ardent Positivist, J. H. Bridges. Reviewers who might have noted this were distracted by an issue more important to them: Bridges was no medievalist. His edition was exceptionally full of palaeographical errors and he had neglected to consult important manuscripts. The Saturday Review for 18 September 1897 concluded:
It remains to be asked by what right Dr. Bridges has undertaken a work which could only be carried through by a scholar. We have long known and admired his Considerations on the Death-rate of Bradford; we have read with respectful sympathy his views on Home Rule; but which of these works was it that induced the Clarendon Press to foist him into a position which will make him the laughing-stock of European scholars?
The Athenum of 25 September 1897 described Bridges as a person unknown as a medieval scholar who had produced a lasting blot upon English scholarship. J. P. Gilson commented several months later: We can be sorry for Mr. Bridges, but we shall be sorrier for the interests of
106. G. C. Bourne, reporting on a lecture by Mr Falconer Madan on The Past History of Science in Oxford, Oxford Magazine, 29 Nov. 1893, 111. 107. J. K. Ingram, On the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon (Dublin, 1858), 6. 108. Adamson, Roger Bacon: The Philosophy of Science, 28. A recent description of the Opus maius also presents the section on experimental science as the conclusion of Bacons argument. D. C. Lindberg, Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition, Isis, lxxviii (1987), 51836 at 5334.
678 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: 109 scholarship. The depth of Bridges unhappiness with the reception of his labours was said to have led to the breakdown of his health; he immediately set about mollifying his critics by adding a third volume to his edition, which contained extra material and corrections.110 By the time that Robert Belle Burkes indifferent translation of Bridges edition appeared in 1928, some reviewers showed no particular awareness of the condemnation Bridges had received thirty years before.111 The Opus maius has never been re-edited, with the exception of parts ve (1996) and seven (1953), so that everything written about it in the last century has been based entirely or largely on Bridges edition or Burkes translation.112 Both the devastating reception of the work in 1897 and, perhaps more importantly from a historiographical point of view, the philosophical stance of its editor, appear to have been virtually forgotten.113 Bridges was a leading member of the Positivist Church of Humanity founded in London in the 1870s.114 He wrote to his wife that he wanted to undertake the edition because Bacon had an ideal of science coordinated for the highest purposes, an ideal which is akin to Comtes and therefore to mine.115 That he was not shy of formally connecting Bacons thought with Positivism is indicated both in his extensive and inuential introduction and his inclusion of an epigraph on the title page of the edition which had been taken from the writings of Comte.116 Although sympathetic to Christianity, he felt that it was a religion that had fallen short: it had not reached what Comte considered the positive
109. Reviews of Books, ante, xiii (1898), 1515 at 155. 110. He confessed in the Preface to the new volume: the work was undertaken with insufcient equipment of expert skill in deciphering manuscripts, Opus majus, III, v. His friends noted the dignity with which he attempted to remedy his error. S. Liveing, A Nineteenth-Century Teacher: John Henry Bridges (1926), 23741. 111. See for example L. Thorndikes reviews in Speculum, iii (1928), 6002 and A[merican] H[istorical] R[eview], xxxiv (1929), 31719. G. Sarton was more conscious of the problems of Bridges edition in his review in Isis, xi (1928), 13841. 112. D. C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1996); Rogeri Baconis, Moralis Philosophia, ed. E. Massa, Thesaurus mundi (Turin, 1953). 113. Lindberg, who noted both the reception and the philosophical stance, did not draw out the historiographical implications: ibid., cvcvi. Again, Sarton seems to have been the most conscious of the later reviewers but, himself an admirer of Comte, he came very close to endorsing Bridges association of Bacon and Comte: review in Isis, xi (1928), 13841, at 139. 114. He was perhaps the most philosophically minded and the best equipped of the English positivists and if he had not been obliged to devote his time and energy to his duties as medical inspector to the Local Government Board, the fortunes of English positivism might have been different. G. Sarton, Notice of Liveings A Nineteenth-Century Teacher, Isis, x (1928), 2089 at 209. 115. Letter quoted in Liveing, A Nineteenth-Century Teacher, 237. 116. He wrote in the Preface (III, v.): the Opus Majus, when published in its entirety, appeared to me to present to the world a scheme of culture contrasting strongly with any that was offered in Bacons time or in the centuries that followed. Combining the comparative study of language with a comprehensive grasp of physical science, conceiving these studies as progressive, and yet holding them subordinate to a supreme ethical purpose, it surpassed any that was put before the world till the publication of the philosophical and social works of Auguste Comte. Comte does not seem to have had much to say of Bacon, although he included him in his Calendar of Great Men: The New Calendar of Great Men: Biographies of the 558 worthies of all ages and nations in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte, ed. F. Harrison (1892), 4879.
679 stage. Positivists sought a kind of systematisation of the sciences, presupposing a unity in all knowledge, which could be achieved in an evolutionary stage beyond the religious stage. The problem with such ideologues admiring, even identifying with, Bacon, was that they edged towards the feeling that Bacon had risen above the superstitions of medieval religion, just as they were themselves casting off the shackles of Christian fundamentalist orthodoxy in the face of new scientic theories. Such a thought did not need to be expressed directly, but it was implicit. Perhaps precisely because it was not made plain, it has had an insidious inuence. The effects of it can be detected in presentations of Bacon right through the twentieth century, in which his Christian faith, or his sincerity as a member of a religious order, are called into question in a manner quite unjustied by anything he himself wrote.118 Without this strong tradition, who would think of asking such anachronistic questions about a thirteenth-century Franciscan? Whether it is intended or not, when Bacons mind is described as modern, there is an inevitable whiff of atheism in the air. Positivism, in its widest sense, had an enormous inuence on the emerging discipline of history. The religious stance of Comte and his followers was not particularly common in Britain, but there were other routes to misunderstanding Bacon. It is, for example, relevant to the evolution of the image of Bacon, especially in Britain, that Catholics had long been excluded from British universities and were slow to appear as professional medievalists writing in English.119 One of the most obvious results is the very late appearance of academic histories of the English Reformation which effectively challenged Protestant interpretations. This was so despite the determined and optimistic ethic among late nineteenthand early twentieth-century historians that the religious opinions of the individual must be kept apart from the history they wrote.120 Yet the mere suppression of prejudice is not enough; active sympathy and imagination
117
117. See T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1986), 8893, 11417. 118. Speculation about his motivations in entering the order has been highly secular and curiously cynical in quality: D. C. Lindberg (ed.), Roger Bacons Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition, with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus (Oxford, 1983), xx; idem, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva, xviii; E. R. Daniel, The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages (Kentucky, 1975), 5566; T. Crowley, Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in his Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain, 1950), 3442, 6771; C. Brub, De la philosophie sagesse chez Saint Bonaventure et Roger Bacon. Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina, XXVI (Rome, 1976), 60, 83, 856. 119. As late as 1938, the Catholic controversialist, Hilaire Belloc, could write bitterly of his Protestant opponent, G. G. Coulton, a Fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge: Also his task is the easier for his environment, since he works in a centre ofcial and therefore necessarily anti-Catholic and for an outside public of that same temper. H. Belloc, The Case of Dr Coulton (1938), 6. 120. O. Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975, 2000 edn), 193228. Wide reading in archives of letters of historians preserved from these decades reinforces the impression: with very few exceptions, they seemed to refer almost obsessively to this concern.
680 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: are required. Sympathy for Bacon was always of the wrong sort, focusing on the wrong issues. There was sympathy for Bacons suffering at the hands of Catholic authorities, but little for his devotion to the Catholic Church. The review of Brewers edition of Bacons works which appeared in the short-lived liberal Catholic periodical edited by Lord Acton, The Rambler, was effectively the only one to accept quite casually that Bacon could disagree (as did Lord Acton) with his confreres or his superiors without rejecting the Church or its teachings. Even so, the author, Richard Simpson, took the opportunity to attack the mood of Pius IXs ponticate: But among religious people, where the tendencies of the thirteenth century still linger, there may be sometimes found the very same spirit which Bacon denounces, jealous of any attempt to harmonise faith with the discoveries of science, and ready on the least provocation to put down inquiries which seem at the rst blush likely to shock the prejudices of those who believe.121 It occurred to almost no one, inside or outside the universities, to consider Bacon primarily as a Franciscan friar, or as an example of a Franciscan friar. When, in due course, histories of the religious orders began to be written, even Catholic authors accepted the general, exceedingly secular, verdict on Bacon.122 It is therefore highly ironic that when the majority of Bacons works nally came into print, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the most immediate practical cause was the nineteenth-century growth of a deeply romantic interest in medieval Italy and in St Francis. Catholics and non-Catholics alike were drawn to the ideal of this saint, and an immense amount of scholarly work was done.123 In 1892 A. G. Littles The Grey Friars in Oxford appeared, followed a year later by Paul Sabatiers Vie de Saint Franois dAssise. The impact of the latter, in particular, was enormous, although Sabatier was accused of portraying St Francis as a liberal Protestant of the nineteenth century and, despite the initial blessing of the Vie by Pope Leo XIII, it was put on the Index of Prohibited Books.124 In 1901, Sabatier founded a society of Franciscan studies and in 1902, Little founded a British branch, reconstituted in 1907 as a society for the publication of original studies and documents.125 Little was, and remains, a beloved gure.126 Writing of him after his death, Powicke described him as a man of wide human sympathies who possessed a skill for drawing people together. He seems to have
121. The Rambler, New Ser., ii (185960), 3936. See Simpson to Acton 15 Feb 1860, The Correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson, eds J. L. Altholz and D. McElrath (3 vols, Cambridge, 19715), ii, 44. 122. For example: D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (3 vols, Cambridge, 19509), i, 219. 123. Ibid., 11517. 124. A. G. Little, Paul Sabatier, Historian of St. Francis: A Lecture Delivered before the British Society of Franciscan Studies on 29th April, 1929 (Manchester, 1929), 67. 125. An Address presented to Andrew George Little with a Bibliography of his Writings (Oxford, 1938), 16. 126. I am grateful to Christopher Brooke for giving me a sense of Little and his circle.
681 worked tirelessly to impart a new freshness and breadth to the study of medieval history, although his own scholarly interests lay with the mendicant orders and their academic activities.127 He had a particular interest in Roger Bacon: he produced a number of papers on him; he edited and encouraged others to edit his writings; he corresponded with most leading Bacon scholars. Little was almost certainly the rst scholar to study Bacon as a result of an interest in the Friars Minor. He seems in his writing to have had a calm certainty in religious matters: although not a Catholic, he was untroubled by the mysterious parts of St Franciss experience, such as the stigmata, which others have sought to explain.128 Yet while he wrote of St Franciss vision for the order with admiration and true sympathy, his focus was upon the Franciscan order and the individual friars within the wider context of the medieval church and particularly the medieval universities. He was very much of the school maintaining that the Franciscan order moved away from the spirit of St Francis as it gained more and more converts among the learned. Little regarded this development as perfectly natural, and highly fruitful. Moreover, he believed that the spirit of St Francis could still be detected in the preference of these learned friars for immediate experience over logical reasoning and their keen sense of the close relations between the physical and the spiritual world.129 This view permitted Bacon to take a natural part in the Franciscan order as opposed to the historiography which claimed that his entry was little short of disastrous for his studies but in so doing, it left Bacon unguarded against the charges that would be made or implied again and again in the twentieth century: that Bacon was a leading representative of the kind of friar who betrayed the ideals of the order.130 In the early decades of the century, the association of Bacon scholars with scholars of St Francis was a protable one, with volumes three, four and fourteen of the twenty-two volumes produced by the British Society for Franciscan Studies devoted to editions of Bacons work. The relationship between the two subjects was so strong that the historian W. H. V. R[eade] remarked satirically: One hopes that it is not an article of faith with the Society of Franciscan Studies to accept all Roger Bacons statements.131 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, momentum had been gathering for a serious attempt to survey and to publish all of Bacons works. This was not unconnected with the approach of the 600th
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 127. F. M. Powicke, Modern Historians and the Study of History: Essays and Papers (1955), 8290; DNB, q.v. Andrew George Little. 128. See for example his treatment of the subject in The Seventh Centenary of St. Francis of Assisi (12261926), in F. Burkitt (ed.), Franciscan Essays ii. British Society for Franciscan Studies, Extra Ser., III (Manchester, 1932), 115, at 15. 129. Little, Franciscan Papers, 556. 130. For example, Daniel, Franciscan Concept of Mission, 5666. 131. Review of Sabatier et al., Franciscan Essays, ante, xxvii (1912), 810.
682 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: anniversary of his death. In 1893, during an afternoon darkened by unfavourable meteorological conditions, Falconer Madan, then Bodleys Librarian, gave a lecture on Bacon devoted to rehabilitating the shadowy gure of Roger Bacon and suggesting that the meeting of the British Association in Oxford in 1894 would be a tting occasion for printing in full, for the rst time, the last of his works, the Compendium Studii Theologiae.132 In the event, the meeting seems to have passed without reference to Bacon, although, rather topically, in his opening remarks, the Marquis of Salisbury, himself an amateur scientist, emphasised the recent nature of Oxfords present acknowledgement of the worth of the sciences.133 An edition of the Compendium was later undertaken by the historian of medieval universities, Hastings Rashdall, urged on by Little, although it did not appear until 1911.134 Rashdall himself affected not to hold a high opinion of its general worth and interest.135 In the meantime, other editions began to appear. In 1897, Cardinal Gasquet published a newly discovered fragment which supplied, among other things, additional details of Bacons suffering under the strictures of his superiors.136 In 1902, Edmond Nolan and Samuel Hirsh published Bacons Greek grammar and part of his Hebrew grammar and three years later, Robert Steele published, at his own expense, the rst fascicule of Opera hactenus inedita Roger Baconi: Bacons Metaphysica.137 In 1909 and 1912, respectively, Pierre Duhem and Little published additional portions of the Opus tertium.138 There was a sense of gathering momentum in the rst decade of the new century. Franois Picavet was able to boast that at the University of Paris he had no fewer than six students working on Roger Bacon.139 He had run a course on Bacons alchemical works surely an almost unique proceeding at the cole pratique des hautes tudes in 1893.140
132. Bourne, Oxford Magazine, 29 Nov. 1893, 111. 133. Address by the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., D.C.L., F.R.S., Chancellor of the University of Oxford, President, in Report of the Sixty-Fourth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Oxford in August 1894 (1894), 315, at 35; A. Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999), 11213, 5936. 134. Bodl ms Eng.lett.d.361, fo. 187, C. T. Tout to H. Rashdall, 29 Nov. 1909; Compendium studii theologiae, ed. H. Rashdall. British Society of Franciscan Studies, III (Aberdeen, 1911). 135. New College Archive, Oxford, PA/R2 Box 5, fo. 2, H. Rashdall to C. C. J. Webb, 5 Feb. 1912. 136. Gasquet, An Unpublished Fragment. 137. E. Nolan and S. A. Hirsch (eds), The Greek Grammar of Roger Bacon and a Fragment of his Hebrew Grammar (Cambridge, 1902). 138. P. Duhem, Un fragment indit de lOpus Tertium de Roger Bacon. Prcd dune tude sur ce fragment (Quaracchi, 1909); A. G. Little (ed.), Part of the Opus tertium of Roger Bacon: Including a Fragment now Printed for the First Time. British Society of Franciscan Studies, IV (Aberdeen, 1912). 139. BL Add. ms 47687, fo. 20, F. Picavet to J. P. Gilson, 8 May 1912. 140. The following year he ran one on the Opus maius and associated works. H. C. Longwell, review of Picavets Essais sur lhistoire gnrale et compare des thologies et des philosophies mdivales, Philosophical Review, xxiv (1915), 64657, at 653.
683 Sometime before June 1911, discussion began about how best to celebrate the seventh centenary of Bacons birth.141 A committee was formed, led by Little, J. P. Gilson, who was Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and others, who comprised the core of a Roger Bacon Society. There seems to have been wide canvassing for funds and members. The initial membership list was a roll-call of virtually every eminent historian in Europe who wrote on Bacon that quartercentury; chancellors of universities, presidents of the Royal Society, directors of museums, high-ranking members of the Church of England and the Franciscan Order, and others important in public life, notably the 19025 prime minister, Arthur Balfour. The aims of the Society were to hold a commemorative event, issue a commemorative volume of essays, and arrange for the proper editing and printing of Bacons works, together with the examination and photographing of manuscripts in various countries. It also recommended the publication of new critical editions of the works previously edited by Bridges and Brewer.142 When it was remarked in the Times Literary Supplement that, in the light of recent publications, there was a sufciency of material for Bacon to be judged, a member of the executive committee hastily wrote in a following issue that, on the contrary, it was hoped that some millionaire of the type of Mr Loeb would come forward, since a standard edition of Bacons works was much needed.143 On 10 June 1914, the anniversary of Roger Bacons birth was commemorated in Oxford. A statue was unveiled, a memorial tablet erected and distinguished men made speeches lauding Bacons life and achievements. Accounts of Bacons career and of the ceremony itself appeared in the main daily and weekly newspapers in Britain, academic journals and the leading European newspapers.144 Independently of the Oxford ceremony, a tablet to Bacon was erected in the birthplace traditionally assigned to him: the Somerset town of Ilchester.145 A small collection of commemorative essays was edited by Agostino Gemelli of the University of Turin.146 A congratulatory telegram arrived from Princeton, and the Public Orator of the University of Cambridge composed a Latin address to the University of Oxford.147 The playwright, John Erskine, wrote a pageant for performance at Columbia University and preparations
THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 141. The earliest letter that I have seen refers to a committee that had evidently been in existence for some time. Ibid., fo. 4, H. W. L. Hine to J. P. Gilson, 8 June 1911. 142. A pamphlet advertising the society, entitled: Roger Bacon Commemoration, June 10, 1914. Cambridge University Library Pam. 4.91.456. 143. G. Smith, Roger Bacon, the Admirable Doctor , T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement], 647 (11 June 1914), 2778 at 278; C. Brereton, Roger Bacon, TLS (25 June 1914), 309. 144. See Misc Papers. 145. Ibid., 131, fo. 114 H. W. L. Hine to F. Madan 9 Feb. 1917. Nothing seems to be known of this tablet in Ilchester today. 146. A. Gemelli (ed.), Scritti Vari pubblicati in occasione del VII Centenario della nascita di Ruggero Bacone. Rivista di Filosoa Neoscolastica, VI (Florence, 1914). 147. Misc Papers, 131, fo. 47; 131, fo. 11.
684 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: were underway there for an October commemoration at which there would be a number of addresses which will be published in a volume illustrative of the scientic attainments and outlook of the thirteenth century.148 The most remarkable aspect of the whole affair is the astonishing agreement on all fronts, scholarly and popular, national and international, that Roger Bacon was worth commemorating: from the man who wrote to Gilson Roger Bacon does not mean much to me but he ought to have a statue at Oxford so I will send a guinea; to the illustrious men who came from all over Europe to take part in the ceremonies.149 There was nothing of the kind in 1894 or in 1992, although a volume of commemorative essays appeared in 1997.150 The rst decades of the twentieth century may be notable for the sheer number of commemorative events for great Englishmen, but few of these can have drawn quite such a distinguished crowd.151 There was a particular conuence in 1914 of concepts of history, of nationhood and above all, of Roger Bacon himself. The TLS reported:
Roger, indeed, is of the line of those Englishmen who are especially national and characteristic; the line represented by Ben Jonson, Dryden, Landor. These men are robust, self-opinionated, stout lovers of their friends, haters of all shams, enthusiastic, ery, impatient of contradiction, rebels who would dominate for the best of motives.152
Steele spoke in the cooler terms of the cautious scholar that he was, but did not differ in essence:
We in England have a special interest in this work [the publication of Bacons writings]. Roger Bacon was our rst great English philosopher; he was typically English in his independent attitude and practical turn of mind; he inuenced the teaching of Oxford, and, through Oxford and Scot and Ockham, the later philosophy and politics of medieval Europe; he established
148. J. Erskine, A Pageant of the Thirteenth Century, for the Seven Hundredth Anniversary of Roger Bacon, given by Columbia University (New York, 1914); Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientic Methods, xi (1914), 112. 149. BL Add. ms 47687, fo. 42, C. Hughes to J. P. Gilson, 8 July 1913. 150. Several people noted the passing of the anniversary: S. J. Williams, Roger Bacon and his Edition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, Speculum, lxix (1994), 5773 at 73; Clegg, First Scientist, 1. The commemorative essays are: J. Hackett (ed.), Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays (Leiden, 1997). 151. F. C. Kenyon, The British Academy: The First Fifty Years (1952), 201. Arthur Balfour had unveiled a statue of Francis Bacon a mere two years earlier. See the pamphlet entitled: Greys Inn: The unveiling of the statue of Francis Bacon by The Rt. Hon. Arthur Balfour, M.P., Thursday, 27th June 1912. The reputation of Francis Bacon suffered a mild eclipse in the days of Roger Bacons eminence, although the reasons for this are probably unrelated. P. Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. S. Rabinovitch (1968), xiv. There were also long-standing and recurring accusations that Franciss work derived heavily from Rogers. For example: H. Hochberg, The Empirical Philosophy of Roger and Francis Bacon, Philosophy of Science, xx (1953), 31326. 152. Smith, Roger Bacon, the Admirable Doctor , 278.
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the tradition of free enquiry which has made English workers open out so many new paths in the world of thought and science.153
Such presentations were not contested by the visitors from the Continent. In his address at the commemoration, Fr. David Fleming, representing the Friars Minor said: I have gladly come all the way from Rome to take my humble share in this celebration in honour of a great Franciscan, a great scientist, philosopher and Theologian, a great Oxonian and a great Englishman.154 His phrasing deliberately emphasised the Englishness of Bacon. Curiously, Picavet had written to Gilson as if the English had the prerogative in the matter of commemorating Bacon: Si vous invitiez lUniversit de Paris lrection du monument, jaccepterais bien volontiers de la reprsenter si jtais bien portant.155 The delegate from the Acadmie franaise raised the question of how much Bacon had learned from his time at the University of Paris, but this was in the context of Anglo-French intellectual and economic entente cordiale. He even expressed the hope that in time the English might be reconciled to the notion of a tunnel beneath the Channel.156 One of the organisers, John Sandys, quoted Robert Greene:
England and Europe shall admire thy fame, And Oxford shall in characters of brass And statues, such as were built up in Rome, Eternize Friar Bacon for his art.
and remarked, accurately enough, This prophecy is now in course of fullment.157 The enormous and international public attention drawn to Roger Bacon in June 1914 seemed to promise great things for the future of Bacon scholarship. Yet before the pageant could be performed; before the commemorative essays could receive their due in reviews; before the enthusiasm could be capitalised upon to set up funds for the support of Bacon scholars, war broke out. Columbia issued a statement that: So many members of the university felt unable, on account of the war
153. R. Steele, Roger Bacon, Quarterly Review, ccxxi (1914), 25074 at 274. 154. Misc Papers, 131, fos 324, Address by David Fleming O.F.M., Delegate of the Order of Friars Minor. 155. BL Add. ms 47687, fo. 20, F. Picavet to J. P. Gilson, 8 May 1912. 156. Misc Papers, 131, fos 3641, Address by Le Comte dHaussonville de lAcadmie franaise, fos 378. The French had not always regarded the matter with such complaisance. In 1848, Cousin, echoed more vigorously in 1862 by his protg Saisset, had expressed his conviction that: si par sa naissance Roger Bacon appartient lAngleterre, cest en France et Paris quil acheva ses tudes, Journal des Savants, 129; E. Saisset, Prcurseurs et disciples de Descartes (Paris, 1862), 7. 157. Homiletic Review, lxvii (1914), 4338 at 438.
686 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: in Europe, to enter into the performance whole-heartedly The committee in charge hope to give the performance in the spring, or as soon as the European situation is on the way towards certain improvement.158 Poignantly, the last lines of the pageant had a rapt Bacon uttering prophecies at the moment of his death, of which one alone remained unfullled in 1914:
Harmless at last, the sword, Mans sternest ignorance, is laid away.159
In a sober, wartime sequel to the erection of the statue, a memorial tablet was placed on the city wall of Oxford in 1917; an event attended by non-combatants and Boy Scouts.160 At the time, it was proposed that the Franciscan community in Oxford would visit this tablet annually on 11 June, an activity which if continued, has become markedly less picturesque since the city wall has been demolished to make way for a shopping centre.161 Immediately after the commemoration, there was a sense abroad that all the publicity had led to great changes in the perception of Bacon: The interesting ceremony at Oxford was not so much a commemoration or a resuscitation as a revelation. Friar Bacon, for seven centuries a legendary character, has now at last taken his place in the history of science.162 It was the day when men of learning found it in their hearts to do homage for the rst time to Roger Bacon.163 In fact, the 1914 celebrations marked the end, not the beginning of an era, for in that year, a seminal article was published by a young American professor, Lynn Thorndike, which put Bacon rmly back into the intellectual milieu of the thirteenth century and stripped away the misconceptions about his genius and his traditional status among the greatest thinkers of the West.164 Thorndike developed the argument over the next decade, concluding:
Roger Bacon has hitherto been studied too much in isolation. He has been regarded as an exceptional individual; his environment has been estimated at
158. News and Notes, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientic Methods, xi (1914), 588. 159. Erskine, A Pageant, 75. 160. Oxford Journal Illustrated, 10 Oct. 1917: cutting in Misc Papers, 130, fo. d. 161. F. M., Roger Bacon, in Oxford Magazine, 9 Nov. 1917: cutting in Misc Papers, 130, fo. 61. 162. Roger Bacon, British Medical Journal (20 June 1914), 1365. 163. H. S. Redgrove, Roger Bacon: The Father of Experimental Science and Mediaeval Occultism (London, 1920), 7. 164. Thorndike, Roger Bacon and Experimental Method. This was not the rst time that such views had been expressed. Adamson had warned in 1885: Bacons works possess much historical value, for his vigorous thinking and pronounced scientic inclinations are not to be regarded as abnormal and isolated phenomena. He represents one current of thought and work in the middle ages which must have run strongly though obscurely, and without a thorough comprehension of his position our conceptions of an important century are incomplete and erroneous. DNB, q.v. Roger Bacon.
687
his own valuation of it or according to some preconceived idea of his age; and his writings have not been studied in relation to those of his predecessors and contemporaries. Thought of as a precursor of modern science, he has been read to nd germs of modern ideas rather than scrutinized with a view to discovering his sources.
And:
one is impelled to the conclusion that Bacons writings, instead of being unpalatable to, neglected by, and far in advance of, his times, give a most valuable picture of medieval thought, summarizing, it is true, its most advanced stages, but also including much that is most characteristic, and even revealing some of its back currents.165
Thorndikes voice was swiftly joined by others, and his judgement absorbed.166 Reades assessment of Bacon in The Cambridge Medieval History was on the whole damning and even contemptuous, and would have been even more dismissive had there not been editorial intervention. When he submitted his chapter in June 1923, it was sent back with suggestions for additions, particularly the request for more on positive side of Bacon.167 Thorndike, however, applauded his strictures upon the reputation of Roger Bacon.168 There was some mild resistance among historians. George Sarton, the founder of the academic discipline of the history of science at Harvard University, felt that Bacon was essentially an encyclopaedist, although a true harbinger of modern civilisation.169 Despite his cautious views on Bacons genius, his opinion was: Thorndike is the leader of the anti-Baconian reaction, but I believe he has gone too far.170 Most signicantly for future historiography, many accounts of Bacon made a clumsy compromise between old and new versions of Bacon. In 1920, J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, wrote:
although Roger Bacon was inspired by these enlightened ideas, although he cast off many of the prejudices of his time and boldly revolted against the tyranny of the prevailing scholastic philosophy, he was nevertheless in other
165. Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, II, 618, 619. Other key articles are L. Thorndike, The True Roger Bacon, I, AHR, xxi (1916), 23757; The True Roger Bacon, II, ibid., 46880. 166. E. W. Dows 1915 paper noted, the limitations to that accomplishment which various students have lately pointed out, although it went on to praise Bacon. The Meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, AHR, xx (1915), 50327 at 5078. 167. Philosophy in the Middle Ages, in J. R. Tanner et al. (eds), The Cambridge Medieval History V Contest of Empire and Papacy (8 vols, Cambridge, 192636, repr. 1968), 780829, at 8246; St Johns College Archive, Cambridge, Cambridge Medieval History, box 4, notebook 3. 168. L. Thorndike, Review of The Cambridge Medieval History, Speculum, ii (1927), 8690 at 88. 169. G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II, From Rabbi ben Ezra to Roger Bacon (Baltimore, 1931), 953; American National Biography, q.v. George Sarton. 170. Review of the Opus maius, trans. R. B. Burke, Isis, xi (1928), 13841, at 141.
688
A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE:
respects a child of his age and could not disencumber himself of a current medieval conception of the universe.171
The early attempts at objectivity and contextualisation suffered from the usual difculty in forgetting Bacons posthumous reputation and examining his work on its merits alone. Despite this, exaggerated admiration of Bacon was still nding an outlet. In 1921, the strange affair of the Voynich cipher manuscript rst broke upon the academic world. The manuscript had been acquired in 1586 by the Hapsburg Emperor, Rudolph II, who believed that Roger Bacon had written it, and that it contained a formula for the elixir of life.172 Unfortunately, it proved impossible to decipher, although various scholars made the attempt. It was purchased in 1912 by the rare book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, who was so eager for a solution that he distributed free photostats to experts who might be able to read it. Among those who expressed interest were Little and Gasquet. No progress was made until, in 1919, the respected Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, William Romaine Newbold, began to work on it. Two years later he claimed, in a series of public lectures, that he had been able to read it. His discoveries created a sensation among historians and scientists. He asserted that Bacon had possessed both a telescope and a microscope with which he had seen the spiral nebula and the spermatozoa and cells depicted in the drawings accompanying the manuscript.173 Experts in America and Europe were, if not entirely convinced, strongly persuaded by various details of the discoveries. Even John M. Manley, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, who later demonstrated the fallibility of Newbolds method, was receptive although his experience in decoding ciphers made him wary of Newbolds results.174 The academic world was well aware that if Newbolds discoveries could be established beyond doubt, they would have an immense effect on the history of science. And some people were already regarding the discoveries as established beyond doubt.175 Newbold continued his investigations until his sudden death in 1926. An obituary notice in the Philosophical Review condently noted: After
171. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (1920), 26. For subsequent examples: W. Dampier, A History of Science and Its Relations with Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge, 1940), 100; M. Frankowska, Scientia: W Uj eciu Rogera Bacona (Warsaw, 1969), 148. 172. R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History 15761612 (2nd edn, 1997), 2389. 173. R. S. Brumbaugh (ed.), The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1978), ixxi; W. R. Newbold, The Cipher of Roger Bacon, ed. R. G. Kent (Philadelphia and London, 1928), xi, 223. 174. J. M. Manley, The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World: Did Roger Bacon Write It and Has the Key Been Found?, Harpers Monthly Magazine, cxliii (1921), 18697. 175. For example, H. B. Alexander in a review in the Journal of Philosophy, xix (1922), 1379.
689 the failure of many other experts, Professor Newbold succeeded in deciphering the Voynich manuscripts of Roger Bacon and discovered that he possessed a microscopic lens and mirror.176 An intimate friend of Newbolds, Roland Grubb Kent, published Newbolds work in 1928. It met with scathing and anxious reviews from Sarton and Thorndike. Sarton wrote that he: had hoped that this idiotic thing might be averted, but now that it has been published in book form a new stream of evil has been started which will work mischief for ages to come.177 Despite such strong public rejection, Newbolds theories were given some credence by the eminent medievalist Etienne Gilson and the prolic Bacon scholar, Raoul Carton.178 The uneasy state among scholars in 1929 was reected by Littles opinion that one of the reasons why a new biography of Bacon ought not to be undertaken at that time was that: it is necessary to settle denitely whether the Voynich Cipher Manuscript has anything to do with Roger Bacon. He added in brackets: which remains doubtful.179 Concerned because Newbolds decipherments threaten[ed] to falsify, to no unimportant degree, the history of human thought, Manley again entered the debate, publishing an article thoroughly rejecting both the decipherment and the attribution to Bacon.180 It largely closed the matter for serious historians and scientists. As this detour indicates, scholarly consensus on Bacon was in disarray. Despite the post-war mood of vigorous scepticism towards a nineteenthcentury hero, leading historians were prepared to countenance the most extreme claims for the greatness and precocity of Bacons scientic discoveries.181 It will be noted that in this discussion there has been little discrimination between the opinions of specialists and those of amateurs, for in this period, the two groups were grappling with similar issues and discussing them in a wide public arena. Behind the scenes, however, the publication of Bacons work continued, largely in the form of the multi-fascicule Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi edited by Steele, Delorme and others. It was Steeles project and largely his initiative. He was a self-trained palaeographer, initially regarded with slight coolness by the inner circles of British Bacon scholars. The project was taken up by the Clarendon Press, with the slender nancial support of various institutions and public subscription, and the enthusiastic
176. Notes, Philosophical Review, xxxvi (1927), 959 at 96. 177. G. Sarton, The Cipher of Roger Bacon, Isis, xi (1928), 1415 at 144; L. Thorndike, review in AHR, xxxiv (1929), 31719; R. Steele, Science in Medieval Cipher, Nature, cxxii (1928), 5636. 178. E. Gilson, review in Revue critique dhistoire et de littrature, 95 (1928), 37883; R. Carton, review in Revue dhistoire de la philosophie, 3 (1929), 3166, 16379. 179. A. G. Little, A Life of Roger Bacon, letter in TLS (3 Jan. 1929), 12. 180. J. M. Manley, Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS, Speculum, vi (1931), 34591 at 347. 181. It was, for example, natural that Bacon should be among the six Oxford scientists carved by the sculptor Eric Gill on a set of doors in the 19334 extension of the Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford.
690 A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE: encouragement of many Bacon scholars.182 The fascicules in this longrunning series appeared at intervals until 1940, by which time the dedicated Steele was eighty-one. Each was swiftly followed by a ruthlessly negative review by A. E. Taylor: I do not know whether many persons besides myself have had occasion to read the whole twelve Fasciculi of the opera inedita so far published; those who have done so, I suspect, must, like myself, have found their estimate of the Doctor Mirabilis steadily growing lower and lower.183 Despite the churlishness of the reviews, Taylor did in fact capture a certain mood produced by the publication of the Opera hactenus inedita. It was recognised that a different, more realistic version of Bacon was emerging.184 This suited a more sober age, in which great value was being placed on meticulous scholarship of a high standard and the study of medieval history was being undertaken by highly trained specialists.185 On this increasingly solid basis, and under the inuence of scholars such as Little, David Knowles and Beryl Smalley, more subtle historical understanding was brought to bear on the medieval mind, particularly its belief systems.186 The mid-twentiethcentury biographies of Bacon written by Stewart Easton and Theodore Crowley were greatly superior to all previous attempts at reconstructing Bacons life and thought within their historical context.187 Unfortunately, particularly in the case of Eastons biography, the demands of producing so long a work from so little material caused too great a reliance on supposition, with elements of Freudian analysis which had the effect of simplifying motivation and weakening the overall credibility of the portrait. Crowleys biography avoided the worst pitfalls of this sort of writing, but was inclined to attribute feelings to Bacon for which there is no evidence. Both manifested to some extent a desire to cut Bacon down to size.
182. BL Add. ms 47687, fo. 22, A. G. Little to J. P. Gilson, 8 June 1912; D. W. Singer, Obituary Notice: Robert Steele (18601944), Isis, xxxviii (1947), 107; Powicke, Modern Historians, 86. See also Reading U[niversity] L[ibrary Archive] Acc. 977 (Robert Steele Papers) for letters of commendation written to Steele by many leading Bacon scholars. 183. A. E. Taylor, Review of Fasc. XII in Mind, New Ser., xliv (1935), 3879 at 389. Little wrote comically to Steele after years of this: I return Taylors review and your notes. I think he is improving. In several cases he seems to be right. When I last examined his list of emendations (some years ago) I think he was right only in one case & wrong in all the others, Reading UL, Acc. 977, A. G. Little to R. Steele, 3 Nov. 1937. 184. R. R. H. review, Hermathena, lxi (1933), 2712; Reviews of Summa gramatica: TLS (13 June 1940), The Guardian (14 June 1940), cuttings in Reading UL, Acc. 977. 185. For general trends see: Powicke, Modern Historians. 186. Cowling writes: Knowles made it his aim to treat mediaeval thought and religion as normal, natural manifestations of a Christian consciousness which had not yet been hampered, or inhibited, by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (3 vols, Cambridge, 19802001), i, 130, 1545. 187. Crowley, Roger Bacon; S. C. Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science: A Reconsideration of the Life and Work of Roger Bacon in the Light of His Own Stated Purposes (Oxford, 1952).
691 Since then, Bacon has been studied chiey by historians of science and to a lesser extent, historians of philosophy. In recent decades the period known as the scientic revolution has been subjected to intense scrutiny and the most important thinkers have been exhaustively reexamined and contextualised. In particular, their commitment both to religion and to branches of study not regarded today as scientic has been widely recognised.188 Treatment of the preceding period has been quite different. The primary concern has been, and largely remains, to demonstrate the existence and importance of medieval science and its role in subsequent developments. The result has been, among other things, some failure to undertake the kind of contextualising work which has come to characterise study of later periods. As recently as 1995, Lindberg issued a plea for a historiography of medieval science which would acknowledge the inuence of religion and religious institutions, emphasising that otherwise the best that can be hoped for is a partial and distorted picture of the medieval scientic enterprise.189 Even this programme appears problematic. Considering that virtually every great medieval scientist was a committed member of a religious order who undertook his study in order to understand better the workings of a cosmos created by the Christian God, the process by which historians might distil science from the rest of his thought is fraught with danger. If taken too literally, it precludes any possibility of understanding the wider mental world and purposes of medieval scholars. It does not seem excessive to suggest that a picture of the medieval scientic enterprise is itself essentially a partial and distorted picture of medieval thought. In the case of Bacon, very little has been done to correct the impact of these wider deciencies. Bacon scholarship remains in the mode that it entered in the course of the seventeenth century: it is preoccupied with the question of Bacons originality. Thorndike precipitated a shift from complacency to heated debate and, while the debate may have cooled over the decades, it has overshadowed nearly everything written about him since. It seems now to be conventional, even necessary, for a historian to make some form of apologia for the exaggerations of their predecessors before reassessing Bacon. This method of approaching Bacon endeavours to be critical in the face of a very considerable accretion of material. In most cases, the reassessment ends with further acclamation emerging at length from a sea of criticism and faint
188. See particularly: M. J. Osler (ed), Rethinking the Scientic Revolution (Cambridge, 2000); D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientic Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); F. J. and S. P. Ragep (eds), Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of two conferences on Pre-modern Science held at the University of Oklahoma (Leiden, 1996). 189. D. C. Lindberg, Medieval Science and its Religious Context, 2nd Ser., x, Osiris (1995), 6079, at 70.
692 praise. The 1997 Commemorative Essays edited by Jeremiah Hackett demonstrates this mixture of caution and approbation.190 It is not misplaced, but it imposes limitations. Too much of the discussion is undertaken with the express purpose of producing value judgements about Bacon and his work. It seems that most historians have followed at least one of the two unsatisfactory routes that can be taken after the importance of an individual in history has been exploded, and yet the dust of that particular explosion is still hanging in the air. One can either take care to deate the object of ones study; or one can resign any claims to consider the individual at all, and focus on the minutiae of their work and its place in human development. It is generally, and rightly, considered that these reductive processes represent an advance in historical method and a corresponding improvement in our understanding of the past. Nevertheless, I think we ought to ask how far we do, in fact, now understand Bacon better, and how far he is providing yet another mirror for another age. A clearer perception of the origins and the longevity of recurring themes and preconceptions may serve to reduce their inuence. In particular, it should facilitate the full recognition of one of the most important and neglected aspects of Bacons life and thought: his commitment to the Franciscan order. His Opus maius was a plea for reform addressed to the supreme spiritual head of the Christian faith, written against a background of apocalyptic expectation and informed by the driving concerns of the friars. It was designed to improve training for missionaries and to provide new skills to be employed in the defence of the Christian world against the enmity of non-Christians and of the Antichrist. It cannot usefully be read solely in the context of the history of science and philosophy. Away from such preoccupations, broad and fascinating vistas open up in every direction. Bacons bold and explanatory writing reveals the mind of a thirteenth-century Franciscan who was highly responsive to the burning issues of the day. The accidents of history have caused him to be seen in many ways other than this most obvious of ways: it is time for the balance to be redressed. University of Shefeld
AMANDA POWER
190. J. Hackett (ed.), Roger Bacon and the Sciences: see particularly J. Hackett, Roger Bacon on the Classication of the Sciences, 4965, at 53; I. Rosier-Catach, Roger Bacon and Grammar, 67102, at 102; A. de Libera, Roger Bacon et la logique, 10332, at 132; A. G. Molland, Roger Bacons Knowledge of Mathematics, 15174, at 151, 170; D. C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal Emanation of Force, 24375, at 243, 2723.

A Mirror For Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon

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English Historical Review Vol. CXXI No. 492 The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press.

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A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon*

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From the more sophisticated pen of Byron came this stanza:

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THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON

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