A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon

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English Historical ReviewVol. CXXI No. 492 The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

EHR, cxxi. 492(June 2006)

doi:10.1093/ehr/cel102

A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation ofRoger Bacon*

InJune 1914, just before the grim shadow of war fell over the world, the700th anniversary of the birth of Roger Bacon was celebrated in Oxford.There was wide coverage of the occasion in British, American andEuropean newspapers and periodicals. Eminent people including aformer British prime minister and a future pope gathered from allover Europe to do homage to the memory of one of the greatest andmost misunderstood figures 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 recentlycome to the attention of scholars after centuries of obscurity. They knewthat he was now recognised as a precocious figure in the development ofmodern scientific method. They certainly all knew the pitiful story of thethirteenth-century Franciscan friar whose advanced, independent thinkinghad so aroused the wrath of the medieval Church that he had beenforbidden to work and imprisoned for more than a decade. They knewthat he had not been vindicated after his death, like so many other geniuses,but that instead he had become a byword for vainglorious meddling inmagic, alchemy, astrology and demonology. Turned by the Elizabethansinto a kind of benevolent Faustus, Friar Bacon had become a figure inEnglish folklore, while all the credit for recommending the experimentalmethod in science was given to his namesake, Francis Bacon.2They knewthat his great works had been neglected and left unpublished until theeighteenth century, and that it was not until the intellectual revolutions ofthe nineteenth century that he became for the first time an object of seriousadmiration and scholarly investigation. Beyond these details, theyrecognised that in his robust, independent, plain-spoken character, he wastypically English, and some went so far as to see in him some premonition

of Protestantism.3All this was exceedingly characteristic of what Butterfieldhas dubbed the Whig approach to history. Bacon was important becausehe was one of the great minds in English history, standing alone in advanceof his age; a man who would have contributed vastly to the scientific

* I am grateful to Anna Sapir Abulafia, Hugo Azrad and Grant Tapsell for commenting ondrafts 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 centenaryof the birth of Roger Bacon].2. L. Thorndike, Roger Bacon and Experimental Method in the Middle Ages, Philosophical

Review, xxiii (1914), 27198at 271.3. G. A. Tawney, The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Western Philosophical Association,

Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, xi (1914), 33752at 340.

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A MIRROR FOR EVERY AGE:658

progress of the human race if he had not been obstructed by the wrong-headedness of the Roman Catholic Church.

In its essentials, this was the view of the development of Baconsreputation that appeared in the volume of Commemorative Essayspublished later in 1914.4The most recent popular biography of Bacon

gives almost exactly the same account.5The picture has been universallyaccepted and reiterated even by the best Bacon scholars.6 It has beencrystallised, perhaps, by what came next. In the same year as thecommemoration, a reaction against the universal admiration began tobe articulated with increasing vigour. The preoccupation of Baconscholars became, and largely remains, the question of the extent ofBacons originality and historical importance. The result has been alaborious 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 find a balance between theextremes. Yet an examination of what was actually said of Bacon fromthe end of the thirteenth century onwards shows that the acceptedpicture of his reputation is not accurate. The study of Bacon has beenhindered to an unusual degree by being conducted outside theappropriate historical context. Even now, when his scientific andphilosophical work has been integrated into a wider picture of thirteenth-century science and philosophy, his objectives which were intimatelybound up with his religious faith and his dedication to the Franciscan

order have not been well understood. I believe that this otherwiseinexplicable difficulty is a direct consequence of a long historiographicaltradition which has hardened in a subtle fashion around particularerroneous expectations. I hope here to be able to put the tradition itselfinto context, and perhaps in consequence to liberate Bacon scholarshipfrom some of the unnecessary bonds of the past. My focus will privilegeBritish historiography, for this is at once where the worst faults had theirorigins and where the most passionate commitments were to be found.

The regard that the thirteenth century had for Bacon is largely a matterfor surmise, since little record of it exists beyond his own writings. Alsolacking is information on the circulation of his genuine works in his ownlifetime, although he was anxious about the honesty of his scribes,believing that anything he wrote would be rapidly copied and plagiarised.7Within a decade of Bacons death, copies were certainly being made ofvarious 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 theCommemoration 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), 494517at 500.


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THE REPUTATION OF ROGER BACON 659


Oxford in the fourteenth century and are known to have been in use.8Given the many traces of his influence, accessibility must be assumed. Hewas used as an authority whether acknowledged or not in mathematics,optics, astrology, astronomy, calendar reform and medicine.9To give afew prominent examples, the lawyer and pamphleteer, Pierre Dubois,

expressed admiration for his writings, citing him by name in severalworks, including the De Recuperatione Terrae Sanctae(c.1306), and usedarguments from Bacons Opus maius.10Substantial elements of the Opusmaius appear without acknowledgement in the work of the physicianArnold of Villanova (d. 1311).11Pierre dAilly (13511420), Chancellor ofthe University of Paris and later a cardinal, was greatly influenced byBacon, quoting his opinions without mentioning his name.12Meanwhile,a growing number of manuscripts by other authors were circulatingunder Bacons name. They were usually concerned with necromancy, the

occult, the practice of magic and similar topics. By the mid-sixteenthcentury, John Bale (14951563) was able to assemble a formidable anddamning list of such works.13Both the plagiarism and the use of Baconsname suggest that his work was admired where it was read and that hisname might be expected to impart gravitas to the most frivolous texts.

In 1369, it was recorded in the Chronica XXIV generalium ordinisminorum that Bacon had been condemned and imprisoned by theFranciscans in 1277for some suspected novelties in his work. The minister-general of the order, Jerome dAscoli, had then applied to the pope,

Nicolas III, for endorsement of the condemnation.14

The passage givesno information about the popes response, but his involvement wasassumed by many later commentators. This account rapidly became acrucial element in the mythology surrounding the figure of Bacon, andwas accepted as fact until it was challenged in the early twentieth

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 Historyof 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 Devita 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 textespour 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 BritishAcademy, xiv (1928), 1.

12. L. Salembier, Le Cardinal Pierre dAilly: Chancelier de lUniversit de Paris, vque du Puy etde 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 ScotiaeSummarium(Gippeswici, 1548), fo. 114v115. Bales later and much longer list omitted some of themore scandalous titles. R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (eds), Index Britanniae Scriptorum: Quos exvariis bibliothecis non parvo labore collegit Joannes Baleus, cum aliis: John Bales Index of British andOther Writers(Oxford, 1902), 3928.

14. aliquas novitates suspectas: Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum, Analecta Franciscana,iii (Quaracchi, 1897), 360.


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century.15Alternative information about Bacons activities in the periodhas not come to light, so the story continues to hold a position ofconsiderable importance, if only by default. Recently, some historianshave begun to look in Bacons work for causes of such a condemnationwithout, however, providing fresh justification for taking the very late

testimony of the Chronicaseriously.16The general tendency of the authorof 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 becoloured by strange stories. In 1385, another Franciscan chronicler, Peterof Trau, wrote of him:

He was so complete a master of optics that from love of experiment he neglectedteaching 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 otheryou could see what people were doing in any part of the world. By experimentingwith the first, students spent more time in lighting candles than studyingbooks; and seeing, in the second, their relatives dying or ill or otherwise introuble, 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 belongto Bacon: in the same decade John Gower credited Robert Grossetestewith its construction.19

Many of the main themes in the history of Bacon are therefore visibleby the end of the fourteenth century: scholarly admiration for his work;desire to preserve his writings; extensive, unacknowledged borrowing ofthem; the confusing circulation of falsely ascribed texts; the account ofBacons condemnation by the Franciscan order; and picturesque storiesof his magical exploits. Too much emphasis has been laid on the lasttwo of these developments, and almost none on the others.20A survey of

15. L. Thorndike,A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuriesof Our Era(8vols, 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 ofParis (12661274), in J. Van Engen (ed.), Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the MedievalUniversity(Notre Dame, 2000), 69111.

17. Quotation from J. Moorman,A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year1517(Oxford, 1968), 396.

18. Peter of Trau, Zara, 1385, quoted from Little, Annual Lecture, 5. The source of thequotation is Bodl[eian Library, Oxford] msCanon. Misc. 525, fos 202v203v.

19. J. Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. R. Pauli (2vols, 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, hisreal work and merit. Not till the eighteenth century was it known, nor from the scanty referencesin the older authorities could it have been gathered, that Bacon was more than an ingeniousalchemist, a skilled mechanician, and perhaps a dabbler in the black arts.


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allusions to Bacon occurring in published material from the end of thefifteenth century onwards shows that he was much discussed in a varietyof contexts. References generally fall into two rough groups: thosecondemning or mocking Bacon for his dabbling in the arcane arts; andthose complaining that he was misunderstood and neglected. It seems

that far from being forgotten, every generation throughout this periodthought it necessary to have an impassioned argument about him.

Instances of the first kind of reference those accusing Bacon ofnefarious activities are by far the best known. The ambiguity of Baconsstatus had intensified by the middle of the sixteenth century, particularlyas a result of his treatment by Pico della Mirandola (14691533), one of theleading intellectuals in Renaissance Florence. Pico had used Baconpositively in his earlier works, but altered circumstances later in his life ledhim 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. Byway of contrast, the German scholar and writer on the occult, CorneliusAgrippa of Nettesheim (14861535), was censorious of Bacons writings forfalling short of what he desired in a treatment of magic.22Probably theearliest edition of the pseudo-Baconian De mirabili potestate artis et naturaewas published in 1542together with a summary of Nicolas Oresmes attackon astrology: an interesting pairing.23Classifying Bacon was not easy. Thetension is perhaps best illustrated by the volte-face of John Bale, who wrotein 1548that Bacon was an illusionist and magus necromancer, not by the

power of God, but by the operation of evil spirits.24

His objection toBacon seems to have arisen partly as a result of his impassioned anti-Catholicism.25 The second edition of the same work was published in15579, a period which for Bale encompassed the grave danger of asuccessful Marian restoration of Catholicism and the relief of Elizabethsascension. Bale entirely revised his estimate of Bacon, saying that he: hadincredible skill in mathematics and was without necromancy, although

21. magnus astrologiae patronus (64), veritatis patronus (532): G. Pico della Mirandola,Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, ed. E. Garin. Edizione nazionale dei classici delpensiero italiano, IIIII (2vols, 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 Religiousand 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 Picodella Mirandola e seguaci(Venice, 1995), 523.

22. C. G. Nauert, Jr,Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought. Illinois Studies in the SocialSciences, LV (Urbana, 1965), 2034.

23. De his quae mundo mirabiliter eveniunt, ubi de sensuum erroribus et potentiis animae ac deinfluentiis caelorum, F. Claudii Caelestini opusculum. De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, ubi dephilosophorum 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, first performed in 1538, Bale had the character Hypocrisisplan to awaken some medieval masters, including Bacon, to advaunce the Popes decrees in orderto work against Christ and the Gospels. P. Happ (ed.), The Complete Plays of John Bale(2vols,Cambridge, 19856), ii, 109.


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many have defamed him with it. He took care to emphasise that Baconhad incurred the wrath of the pope.26In preparing the second edition, Balemade extensive use of the manuscript notes of the antiquary, John Leyland(1506?1552), who was an admirer of Bacon and who had apparentlysearched the libraries of Oxford colleges associated with Bacon.27

These ambivalences found their way into the popular consciousnessof the English in the course of the century.28Bales account of Baconwas an important source for Robert Greenes c.1592play Friar Baconand Friar Bungay. This play is usually treated by historians as if it werenot merely the best, but the sole, representation of perceptions of Baconin the period from his death until the nineteenth century.29The mainsource was the prose work entitled: The famous historie of Fryer BaconContaining the wonderfull things that he did in his life: also the manner ofhis death; with the lives and deaths of the two conjurers, Bungye and

Vandermast. Very pleasant and delightfull to be read. The earliest knownedition of this work was printed in 1627, but it is clear that there musthave been at least one earlier edition. It was printed again and again inthe next two centuries, often as part of collections including stories suchas those of Faustus and Robin Hood, and the lives of saints. There isdebate about whether the play was written before or after MarlowesDr Faustus, but they were certainly written within the same five years.30

The prose work purported to be a narrative of Bacons life, butalthough 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 Baconruns away to a Cloyster (later versions specify the order of Augustiniancanons) where, after further education, he becomes so famous that he issent to Oxford, and grows so excellent in the secrets of Art and Nature,that not England onely, but all Christendome admired him. The kinghears of him and wishes to see him, whereupon he is called to entertainthe royal court. He performs various tricks, each of which have a moral

26. Accessit ei in Mathesi peritia incredibilis, sed absque Necromantia: quamuis ea multisinfametur: 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, GerardLangbaine to Selden, 20Jan. 1653.

28. It is thought that the earliest reference to Bacon in English literature is Gavin Douglass1520 verse beginning: The Nigromansie thair saw I eik anone/Of Benytas, Bongo and FreirBacone . 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, hecame of age as a hero of legend in the sixteenth century: E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus(Cambridge, 1948; 1993edn), 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 ThematicAnalysis of Robert Greenes Play. Lund Studies in English, XLIV (Lund, 1972), 1115, 249, 1479.


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intent behind them. As well as magically humiliating his manservant forbreaking holy fast, he outwits the Devil, thereby saving the soul of ayoung man. Notable among these episodes was the famous story of theBrazen Head. Friar Bacon creates the Head in order to learn from it howto build a wall of brass around England for protection from invasion. It

was made very clear that his motivation was at once patriotic andvainglorious he wanted to use his art for the good of England, and sothat his name would never be forgotten. The later versions of the storyend with Bacons failure.31The earlier versions go on with more storiesof magical exploits, culminating in the deaths of two young men who killeach other after looking into the glass described by Peter of Trau, anevent which causes Bacon such acute repentance that the final chapterwas entitled: How Fryer Bacon burnt his Books of Magicke, and gavehimselfe 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 contraryto his Order, and soules health, admitting that Magicke made a Man aDevill. He has himself locked away in a cell, where he occupies himselfin digging his own grave with his fingernails: Thus was the Life andDeath of this famous Fryer, who lived most part of his life a Magician,and dyed a true penitent Sinner, and an Anchorite.32There is a certainirony in the fact that this late-sixteenth-century narrative alone broughtBacons views on learning into line with those of the Spiritual wing of

the Franciscans. Greenes use of his source is elegant, showing the processby which, like Faustus, Bacon becomes increasingly intoxicated by hisarts and powers, but unlike Faustus, is brought to repentance.33 Thestory was so widely known by 1604that a satire entitled A Piece of FriarBacons Brazen-heads Prophesie used the enigmatic words spoken bythe Brazen Head as the basis for the censure of society.34

This representation of Bacon must be understood, not as indicativeof serious views on Bacon at any time in history, but as the emergenceof Bacon as a comic-hero in English literature. He was rewritten as aquintessentially English character, losing all connection with crucialhistorical facts of his life: his intellectual milieu at the University of

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 andVandermast(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 hetravelled in the Air, saw all the World, and did what he listed; but I was as much troubled whenthe Devilcame to fetch him; and the Consideration of that horrible end did so much terrifie me,that I often dreamed of it. The next Book I met with was Fryar Bacon, whose pleasant Stories muchdelighted me.

34. W. Terilo, A Piece of Friar Bacons Brazen-heads Prophesie, in J. O. Halliwell (ed.), FriarBakons Prophesie: A Satire on the Degeneracy of the Times AD 1604(1844). Bacon is not mentionedin this poem, except in the title.


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The second group of references to Bacon those praising Bacon andlamenting that he had been neglected and misunderstood arose partlyin response to these vulgar presentations of Bacon although the earliestwere written against the story recorded by Peter of Trau, rather than Thefamous historie.41The wonder might perhaps be that scholars bothered

to contest hotly what was being said frivolously of Bacon in pamphletsand the playhouses. In fact, defences of Bacon were related to one of theburning preoccupations of the day, usually occurring where an authorwas trying to show that science was not magic, or that learning was notungodly.42The tradition was self-referential, with each author quotingprevious defences of Bacon. All stressed that Bacon had been falselyassociated with magic by people too ignorant to distinguish betweenmarvels accomplished through science and those accomplished throughblack 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 learninghad always been hindered by this kind of slander. The best example isperhaps the 1625work of the French scholar-librarian Gabriel Naud:Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont est faussement soupconnde magie, a critical and contextual analysis of allegations of magic.43

A related genre was Protestant anti-papal polemic, in which Baconsimprisonment was presented as yet another instance of the infamoustyranny of popes. One such was the Disputationum theologicarum &

scholasticarum de Antichristo & eius Ecclesia of the polemicist, GabrielPowell (15761611). Here Bacon was said to have aroused the popeswrath by his sharp criticism of contemporary society, the errors of whichhe attributed to the presence of Antichrist.44 In the early days of theReformation, mathematics and other sciences had been seen as eitherpopish, diabolical or both, and books on these subjects had been burnedin great numbers.45The association between Catholicism and suspectsciences probably underlay the popular mythology of Bacon, even ifBacon was presented as a virtuous friar. It is clear that the emphasis in manyseventeenth-century English accounts of Bacons life was laid where itwould best suit the climate of virulent anti-Catholicism.46It 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), 130at 25. Naud was highly influential in the transmission ofItalian learning to France. See P. O. Kristeller, Between the Italian Renaissance and the FrenchEnlightenment: 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 Anti-

Catholicism, Past and Present, li (1971), 2762.


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many respects, as Geneva points out, there has been a failure to integratethis new perspective into discussions of mentality, except in aperipheral manner.55 This is certainly true in Bacons case. Even asuperficial examination of what Renaissance intellectuals read and wroteleaves no doubt that he was admired in many circles precisely for his

writings on magic and natural science. The work most frequently printedunder Bacons name throughout the seventeenth century was The cure ofold age and the preservation of youth, closely followed by The Letter ofRoger Bacon concerning the marvellous power of art and of nature andconcerning the nullity of magic. In these, as well as in Bacons unquestionablyauthentic works, the discussion was not merely about the subjectsthemselves, but also addressed concerns about the likelihood of these artsbeing exploited by unscrupulous practitioners and about the risks ofusing 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, andeditions of the prose and drama versions of his life, at least one, andsometimes as many as four books bearing Bacons name were printed inevery decade from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Bacon hadbecome a compelling figure, reflecting from several different angles thepride, the achievements, the curiosity, the ambivalence and the uneaseof an age in which concepts of the powers and limitations of humanitywere at war.

In the seventeenth century, the preoccupation with whether Baconwas a magician began to yield to a more familiar preoccupation: theoriginality of his thought. The shift could perhaps be illustrated withLockes flippancy: There are millions of truths that a man is notconcerned to know; as, whether Roger Bacon was a mathematician, ora magician.56To demonstrate the process, it is necessary to abandonprinted sources which were largely carrying on the old debate andconsider other evidence. Only a narrow selection of Bacons works was inprint, but the bulk of the material known to us today was in circulationin manuscript form. John Bale gave a list of eighty-one separate works inthe 1557 edition of his opus on British writers. The catalogues of thegreat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century libraries record similar numbersof titles, and the owners such as Robert Cotton and Kenelm Digby were generous about letting people use their collections. Most of thosewho wrote about Bacon owned or had access to manuscripts.

Perhaps most prominent among them was the eminent lawyer JohnSelden, 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 theStars(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(2vols,1755), no page nos.


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reading in these collections.57 Despite the vigour of his challengingapproach to history, his early defences of Bacon were not remarkable.58In De Dis Syris Syntagmata, written by 1605, published in 1617, hecastigated the vulgusof England, and everyone who denounced Baconas a magician, pouring particular scorn on the legend of the Brazen

Head. He pointed out that no historian had mentioned any of Baconsmagical acts: they merely existed in the popular imagination.59He wasnot the first to defend Bacon from the legends that had grown up abouthis name, but he may have been the first to make this observation,believing as he did in both the use, and the critical interrogation ofprimary sources.60In his 1618Historie of Tithes, he attributed Baconssuffering under the suspicion of the Church to his most noble Studiesbeing out of the rode of the lazie Clergie of his time.61His remarks, inthe 1631Titles of Honour, are more interesting. He made one of the very

few pre-modern references to Bacons moral philosophy. He had readall six books of the moralis philosophia (the 18971900edition of theOpus maius contained only the first four) and used some of Baconsopinions briefly in the argument of his Preface.62

By 1637, he and Digby were engaged in the project of publishingBacons works, together with an account of Bacon written by Selden.63It is not clear what kind of account it was, but it may have been theLife mentioned by Seldens collaborator, Gerald Langbaine, Provostof Queens College, Oxford.64The project does not seem to have come

to anything at that time, but was revived again early in 1653, whenSelden asked Langbaine to look for Bacon manuscripts in the librariesof Oxford colleges associated with Bacon. Langbaine found nothingand wondered if the manuscripts had been destroyed during the purgesof libraries under Henry VIII, although he thought that probably theyhad not been there even before.65 However, the following week, hereported to Selden that he had shown some judicious friends passagesfrom his ep[is]t[l]e to pope Clem[en]t (w[hi]ch I perceive is the samewith that you call De utilitate Scientiar[um]). This was, of course, theOpus maius. The friends were much taken with them & suitor to mefor a publication. Langbaine had some reservations about Bacons

57. D. S. Berkowitz, John Seldens Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century England(Washington DC, 1988), 257; Bodl msBallard 11, fo. 22, Langbaine to Digby, 26Aug. 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 msSelden supra108, fo. 78, Digby to Selden, 11Feb. 1637.64. Bodl msBodl.1022, fo. 7v.65. Bodl msSelden supra109, fo. 434, Langbaine to Selden, 20Jan. 1653.


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writings on grammar, but felt they were counterbalanced by other partswhich were so considerable as the com[m]on interest of papists &others will hardly permitt them to publish it. He also noted that manytitles attributed to Bacon by his biographers were falsely ascribed.66Seldens reply encouraged Langbaine to resume those thoughts (w[hi]ch

I had lyd aside) of publishing that piece of Roger Bacon.67The nextweek found Langbaine unwell, and in receipt of two Books of fryerBacon from Selden which did more chere and revive me than eitherthe doctors, or Bacons own cordial pro retardanda Senectute. Hesought Seldens permission to have one of these books transcribed forpublication, for I judge it well deserves to be more publique.68Thisseems to be the last mention of the project in the extant letters betweenthe two men, and Selden died the following year. Selden housed anumber of Bacon manuscripts with Langbaine, who may have retained

them.69

In 1656, he wrote to Digby saying that he was still eager topublish a good part of Bacons works. He had transcribed the Opusmaiusfrom Cottons copy (owned before him by Dee), and as much aswas left of the Compendium studii theologiae. He had sent someone towork on the Dublin manuscript of the Opus maius. Finally, he hopedthat Digby might be able to provide additional works for publication.70Yet, as in 1637, nothing seemed to come of the project, possibly becauseLangbaine 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 portraitshe advised the Lord Chancellor to add to his collection of paintings inClarendon House.71Evelyn gave no justification for his selections, buthe must have seen the portrait of Roger Bacon that hung in the collectionof portraits at Knole in Kent, the home of the Sackville family. A seriesof about forty paintings had been commissioned in the late sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries, mostly of Protestant notables, but withsome Catholic martyrs such as Thomas More and John Fisher amongthem. Those of Bacon and Wycliffe stand out, since they are the onlytwo in this sequence who lived much before the sixteenth century.72

66. Ibid., fo. 444, Langbaine to Selden, 30Jan. 1653.67. Ibid., fo. 376, Langbaine to Selden, 9Feb. 1653.68. Ibid., fo. 380, Langbaine to Selden, 20Feb. 1653.69. Bodl msSelden supra111, fo. 108(list of John Seldens Books and mss, c.1654).70. Bodl msBallard 11, fo. 22, Langbaine to Digby, 26Aug. 1656.71. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. A. Dobson (3vols, 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. Atpresent the Bacon portrait is no. 38in the Brown Gallery at Knole. See R. Sackville-West, Knole,Kent, National Trust (1998), 16.


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Tourists interested in Bacon could look around his study at Oxford, ina tower over the gateway of Folly Bridge. Pepys visited it in 1668and theantiquarian, Anthony Wood, described it, although he admitted thatthe 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 hadobserved that Bacon had known how to make gunpowder. It wasdesired by that Society, that as many books, as could be procured ofthe said ROGER BACON should be perused; and it was wished, thatthey were all collected and printed, as being supposed to contain verymany curious and useful things.74The matter was discussed with greatenthusiasm during the weekly meetings through March and April of1679. 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 incollecting and publishing Bacons works seemed to be to establish thatBacon had conceived of various inventions long before others hadknown of them.75They hoped that his writings might prove an honourto the English nation; especially as he appeared to be the first, who hadbegun experimental philosophy.76 Unfortunately, the well-knowndifficulty of compiling a complete list of Bacons works seems to havecaused the project to founder, and the excitable members of the Societywere rapidly diverted into other lines of research.77 The subject of

Bacons precocity was not forgotten entirely. In July 1682the minutesnoted with some satisfaction after a reading of Thomas DiggesStratioticos that: it seemed evident, that Roger Bacon was the firstinventor of telescopes, and Leonard Digges the next reviver of them,both Englishmen.78 The nationalistic preoccupation was to becomecentral to English interest in Bacon.

The connection between these two attempts to arrange Baconsworks for publication was not entirely tenuous. Digby and Langbaine

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 AnthonyWood (3 vols, Oxford, 188999), i, 425. Pencil sketches of the study and the bridge beneathit appear in B[ritish] L[ibrary, London] Add. ms36374, fos 51, 52. The second of these is datedto 1701.

74. T. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for improving of Natural Knowledge, fromits first rise in which the most considerable of those Papers communicated to the Society, which havehitherto not been published, are inserted in their proper order, as a supplement to the PhilosophicalTransactions(4vols, 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 theSociety in those days is described in L. Mulligan and G. Mulligan, Reconstructing RestorationScience: Styles of Leadership and Social Composition of the Early Royal Society, Social Studies ofScience, xi (1981), 32764at 3445.

78. Birch, History of the Royal Society, iv, 1567.


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as eminent a scholar as Thorndike perpetuated the common belief thatuntil Jebbs edition, Bacon was unappreciated and unknown.87Theseerrors have persisted, emphasising the lack of value placed on earlierinterests and achievements.

It is assumed that there was at this point an inexplicable lull in interest

in Bacon until nineteenth-century scholars resurrected him fromcenturies of obscurity and regarded him with profound admiration.88This characterisation is inaccurate in both directions. Profoundadmiration had been manifested in earlier centuries, and it was notlacking in the eighteenth century. As a direct result of Jebbs publication,one of the most comprehensive and detailed articles ever written onRoger Bacon appeared in the Biographia Britannica a mere fourteenyears later.89The 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 lengthysummary of the Opus maiusand shorter descriptions of the contents ofother 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 regardedtoday as problematic were identified and treated in substantial discursivenotes filled with citations of previous writers. The author believedhimself the heir of a long tradition of the deepest regard for Bacon,concluding:

Thus it appears that the reputation of this extraordinary person, has notrisen from any superstitious regard to antiquity, or the prejudices of a fewgreat men in his favour, but is truly founded on merit, and has been cherishedand maintained, from a principle of justice, by the ablest men, and the mostcompetent judges in all ages, and of all countries, from the times nearest hisown, down to those in which we live.

He was particularly conscious that Bacons merit duly weighed, togetherwith the glory which results to this nation from having produced, andthat too in one of the darkest and most unlettered ages, the brightestand most universal genius, that perhaps the world ever saw made thestudy worth undertaking.91 Here we seem to have the Victorianstereotype aloft, a century early, and with a far better appreciation ofprevious traditions perhaps the last accurate understanding of thelongevity 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), 25462at 257.89. Biographia Britannica or the Lives of the Most eminent Persons who have flourished in Great

Britain and Ireland, from the earliest Ages down to the present Times(6vols, 174766), i, 34164.90. Ibid., 347.91. Ibid., 364.


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Early nineteenth-century treatments of Bacon were variable. In 1820,Hegel dismissed Bacon in two sentences: Roger Bacon treated moreespecially of physics, but remained without influence. He inventedgunpowder, mirrors, telescopes, and died in 1294.92On the other hand,Goethe wrote with warm admiration of Bacon in his 1810 Zur

Farbenlehreand, in 1836, Alexander von Humboldt demonstrated thatBacons Opus maiuswas an important indirect source for Columbussgeographical notions.93 In 1814, the Anglo-Saxon enthusiast, SharonTurner, placed Bacons thought in the context of the influx of Arabianscience into England, a theme elaborated most notably by the Irishscholar and clergyman, Charles Forster, in 1829.94 Forster also in-dignantly revealed Francis Bacon to be little more than a successfulplagiariser of Roger Bacons system of thought.95 In 1837, a leadingfigure in the British scientific community, William Whewell, gave a

very brief, but deeply admiring account of Bacon in his History of theInductive Sciences, noting that he was one on whom much stress hasbeen laid; a man so far beyond his age that it is difficult to conceivehow such a character could then exist.96 In the same year, FrancisPalgrave, yet another member of the Royal Society, later to be the firstDeputy Keeper of the Public Records, published a curious book inwhich 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 ofBacons work, there was no pause in discussion of him. He wasincreasingly sentimentalised: there is a great deal of highly regrettableVictorian poetry lamenting the cruelty of Bacons fate. A particularlygloomy example, entitled Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri Baconis, AnnoDomini 1292begins in the tenth year of his imprisonment: O day! ifit 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 atwo-page notice. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane andF. H. Simson (3vols, 18926), iii, 92.

93. J. W. von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (2 vols, Tbingen, 1810), ii, 14864; F. H. A. vonHumboldt, Examen critique de lhistoire de la gographie du nouveau continent et des progrs delastronomie nautique aux quinzime et seizime sicles(5vols, Paris, 18369), i, 5878.

94. S. Turner,A History of England(3vols, 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 confirm the evidences, and the propagation, of the Christian Faith(2vols, 1829), ii, 26870,2745, 31219. Forster was the protg of John Jebb, Bishop of Limerick and relative of SamuelJebb. 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 theState of Europe in the Middle Ages(3vols, 2nd edn, 1819), iii, 53940.

96. W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences(3vols, 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.


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and continues for fifty-nine verses in this vein, ending with Baconssolitary death.98

From March to June of 1848, Victor Cousin, Professor of Philosophyat the Sorbonne, and one of the most influential men in the Frenchacademic world at that time, serialised a lengthy description of Bacons

Opus tertium, which he had recently found. Unhappy with Jebbsedition of the Opus maius, Cousin wrote provocatively: Puisse cetteentreprise, la fois utile et facile, sourire au patriotisme de quelquesavant dOxford ou de Cambridge!99 It is interesting to see that headdressed an appeal for its publication however facetiously specificallyat the English universities, despite the fact that they were at that timehardly leading institutions in the study of either science or history. Anirritable reviewer attributed their lack of immediate response to theintense 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 Professorof English at Kings College, London.101The Opus tertium, Opus minusand Compendium philosophiae comprised the first, and in the event,sole, volume of a projected Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quaedam hactenusinedita, appearing in 1859. In 1861, Emile Charles, Professor of Logic inthe Lyce de Bordeaux, published the first modern , scholarly accountof Bacons life and works, dryly noting that he had undertaken the work

Cousin had requested from Oxbridge patriotism.102

This period markedthe early stages of the removal of serious study of Bacon into the sphereof the universities. A number of biographies, studies and addressesappeared 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 somuch else, was swiftly regarded as outdated. Yet the effects of nineteenth-century perspectives on twentieth-century presentations of Bacon are atonce so profound and so little recognised that it can be claimed withjustice that Bacon scholarship still suffers from them. I have asserted inthis article that representations of Bacon say at least as much about theage from which they come as they do about Bacon himself. The widertensions, doubts and developments experienced by nineteenth-centuryintellectuals interacted with a partial knowledge of earlier presentations

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, 34054at 354.100. The Life and Writings of Roger Bacon, Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, New

Ser. xxv (1864), 130at 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.


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of experience; and he vexed his contemporaries by his persistence in inquiringinto 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 1858that Jebbs failure to include the seventh part of the Opus maiusin hisedition did serious injustice to Bacon:

For the cardinal idea which presided over his whole construction is thus keptout of view, or at least obscured. This idea was, the supremacy of moralscience over the rest of the intellectual system. The earlier and simplersciences he regarded as deserving of study, chiefly because they are thenecessary preparation for Morals, the supreme and final science.107

His important observation, itself couched in rather secular terms, waslargely ignored. In a summary of the Opus maius, given two decadeslater, the philosopher Robert Adamson who wrote the DNBentry onBacon made no mention of a seventh book, reporting that in Baconsscheme, all other sciences were ancillaeto Experimental Science.108

Since the Christian faith which informed all of Bacons work wasbeing edited out, it was possibly no coincidence that the only more orless complete edition of Bacons Opus maius published since that ofJebb was undertaken by the ardent Positivist, J. H. Bridges. Reviewerswho might have noted this were distracted by an issue more importantto them: Bridges was no medievalist. His edition was exceptionally fullof palaeographical errors and he had neglected to consult importantmanuscripts. The Saturday Reviewfor 18September 1897concluded:

It remains to be asked by what right Dr. Bridges has undertaken a workwhich could only be carried through by a scholar. We have long known andadmired 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 positionwhich will make him the laughing-stock of European scholars?

The Athenum of 25 September 1897 described Bridges as a personunknown as a medieval scholar who had produced a lasting blot uponEnglish scholarship. J. P. Gilson commented several months later: Wecan 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 ofScience in Oxford, Oxford Magazine, 29Nov. 1893, 111.

107. J. K. Ingram, On the Opus Majusof Roger Bacon(Dublin, 1858), 6.108. Adamson, Roger Bacon: The Philosophy of Science, 28. A recent description of the Opus maiusalso

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), 51836at 5334.


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scholarship.109The depth of Bridges unhappiness with the reception ofhis labours was said to have led to the breakdown of his health; heimmediately set about mollifying his critics by adding a third volume tohis edition, which contained extra material and corrections.110By thetime that Robert Belle Burkes indifferent translation of Bridges edition

appeared in 1928, some reviewers showed no particular awareness of thecondemnation Bridges had received thirty years before.111The Opus maiushas never been re-edited, with the exception of parts five (1996) and seven(1953), so that everything written about it in the last century has beenbased entirely or largely on Bridges edition or Burkes translation.112Both the devastating reception of the work in 1897and, perhaps moreimportantly from a historiographical point of view, the philosophicalstance 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 wantedto undertake the edition because Bacon had an ideal of science co-ordinated for the highest purposes, an ideal which is akin to Comtesand therefore to mine.115That he was not shy of formally connectingBacons thought with Positivism is indicated both in his extensive andinfluential introduction and his inclusion of an epigraph on the titlepage of the edition which had been taken from the writings of Comte.116Although sympathetic to Christianity, he felt that it was a religion thathad fallen short: it had not reached what Comte considered the positive

109. Reviews of Books, ante, xiii (1898), 1515at 155.110. He confessed in the Preface to the new volume: the work was undertaken with insufficient

equipment of expert skill in deciphering manuscripts, Opus majus, III, v. His friends noted thedignity 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 ofBridges 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 thehistoriographical implications: ibid., cvcvi. Again, Sarton seems to have been the most consciousof the later reviewers but, himself an admirer of Comte, he came very close to endorsing Bridgesassociation 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 Englishpositivists and if he had not been obliged to devote his time and energy to his duties as medicalinspector to the Local Government Board, the fortunes of English positivism might have beendifferent. G. Sarton, Notice of LiveingsA Nineteenth-Century Teacher, Isis, x (1928), 2089at 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 inBacons time or in the centuries that followed. Combining the comparative study of language witha comprehensive grasp of physical science, conceiving these studies as progressive, and yet holdingthem subordinate to a supreme ethical purpose, it surpassed any that was put before the world tillthe publication of the philosophical and social works of Auguste Comte. Comte does not seem tohave had much to say of Bacon, although he included him in his Calendar of Great Men: The NewCalendar of Great Men: Biographies of the558 worthies of all ages and nations in the Positivist Calendarof Auguste Comte, ed. F. Harrison (1892), 4879.


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stage.117 Positivists sought a kind of systematisation of the sciences,presupposing a unity in all knowledge, which could be achieved in anevolutionary stage beyondthe religious stage. The problem with suchideologues admiring, even identifying with, Bacon, was that they edgedtowards the feeling that Bacon had risen above the superstitions of

medieval religion, just as they were themselves casting off the shacklesof Christian fundamentalist orthodoxy in the face of new scientifictheories. Such a thought did not need to be expressed directly, but itwas implicit. Perhaps precisely because it was not made plain, it has hadan insidious influence. The effects of it can be detected in presentationsof Bacon right through the twentieth century, in which his Christianfaith, or his sincerity as a member of a religious order, are called intoquestion in a manner quite unjustified by anything he himself wrote.118Without this strong tradition, who would think of asking such

anachronistic questions about a thirteenth-century Franciscan? Whetherit is intended or not, when Bacons mind is described as modern, thereis an inevitable whiff of atheism in the air.

Positivism, in its widest sense, had an enormous influence on theemerging discipline of history. The religious stance of Comte and hisfollowers was not particularly common in Britain, but there were otherroutes to misunderstanding Bacon. It is, for example, relevant to theevolution of the image of Bacon, especially in Britain, that Catholics hadlong been excluded from British universities and were slow to appear as

professional medievalists writing in English.119

One of the most obviousresults is the very late appearance of academic histories of the EnglishReformation which effectively challenged Protestant interpretations. Thiswas so despite the determined and optimistic ethic among late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historians that the religious opinions of theindividual must be kept apart from the history they wrote.120Yet the meresuppression of prejudice is not enough; active sympathy and imagination

117. See T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on VictorianBritain(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 CriticalEdition, with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of De multiplicatione specierum andDespeculis comburentibus (Oxford, 1983), xx; idem, Roger Bacon and the Origins ofPerspectiva, 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 hisProtestant opponent, G. G. Coulton, a Fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge: Also his task is theeasier for his environment, since he works in a centre official and therefore necessarily anti-Catholicand 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, 2000edn), 193228. Wide reading in archives of letters of historians preservedfrom these decades reinforces the impression: with very few exceptions, they seemed to refer almostobsessively to this concern.


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are required. Sympathy for Bacon was always of the wrong sort, focusingon the wrong issues. There was sympathy for Bacons suffering at thehands of Catholic authorities, but little for his devotion to the CatholicChurch. The review of Brewers edition of Bacons works which appearedin the short-lived liberal Catholic periodical edited by Lord Acton, The

Rambler, was effectively the only one to accept quite casually thatBacon could disagree (as did Lord Acton) with his confreres or hissuperiors without rejecting the Church or its teachings. Even so, theauthor, Richard Simpson, took the opportunity to attack the mood ofPius IXs pontificate: But among religious people, where the tendenciesof the thirteenth century still linger, there may be sometimes found thevery same spirit which Bacon denounces, jealous of any attempt toharmonise faith with the discoveries of science, and ready on the leastprovocation to put down inquiries which seem at the first blush likely to

shock the prejudices of those who believe.121

It occurred to almost noone, inside or outside the universities, to consider Bacon primarily as aFranciscan friar, or as an example of a Franciscan friar. When, in duecourse, histories of the religious orders began to be written, even Catholicauthors accepted the general, exceedingly secular, verdict on Bacon.122

It is therefore highly ironic that when the majority of Bacons worksfinally came into print, in the early decades of the twentieth century,the most immediate practical cause was the nineteenth-century growthof 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.123In 1892A. G.Littles The Grey Friars in Oxfordappeared, followed a year later by PaulSabatiers Vie de Saint Franois dAssise. The impact of the latter, inparticular, was enormous, although Sabatier was accused of portrayingSt Francis as a liberal Protestant of the nineteenth century and, despitethe initial blessing of the Vieby Pope Leo XIII, it was put on the Index ofProhibited Books.124 In 1901, Sabatier founded a society of Franciscanstudies and in 1902, Little founded a British branch, reconstituted in 1907as a society for the publication of original studies and documents.125

Little was, and remains, a beloved figure.126Writing of him after hisdeath, Powicke described him as a man of wide human sympathieswho 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, TheCorrespondence 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(3vols, 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 on29th 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.


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worked tirelessly to impart a new freshness and breadth to the study ofmedieval history, although his own scholarly interests lay with themendicant orders and their academic activities.127He had a particularinterest in Roger Bacon: he produced a number of papers on him; heedited and encouraged others to edit his writings; he corresponded with

most leading Bacon scholars. Little was almost certainly the first scholarto study Bacon as a result of an interest in the Friars Minor. He seemsin his writing to have had a calm certainty in religious matters: althoughnot a Catholic, he was untroubled by the mysterious parts of St Francissexperience, such as the stigmata, which others have sought to explain.128Yet while he wrote of St Franciss vision for the order with admirationand true sympathy, his focus was upon the Franciscan order and theindividual friars within the wider context of the medieval church andparticularly the medieval universities. He was very much of the school

maintaining that the Franciscan order moved away from the spirit ofSt 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 detectedin the preference of these learned friars for immediate experience over logical reasoning and their keen sense of the close relationsbetween the physical and the spiritual world .129This view permittedBacon to take a natural part in the Franciscan order as opposed to thehistoriography which claimed that his entry was little short of disastrous

for his studies but in so doing, it left Bacon unguarded against thecharges that would be made or implied again and again in the twentiethcentury: that Bacon was a leading representative of the kind of friarwho betrayed the ideals of the order.130

In the early decades of the century, the association of Bacon scholarswith scholars of St Francis was a profitable one, with volumes three,four and fourteen of the twenty-two volumes produced by the BritishSociety for Franciscan Studies devoted to editions of Bacons work. Therelationship between the two subjects was so strong that the historianW. H. V. R[eade] remarked satirically: One hopes that it is not anarticle of faith with the Society of Franciscan Studies to accept all RogerBacons statements.131

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, momentum had beengathering for a serious attempt to survey and to publish all of Baconsworks. This was not unconnected with the approach of the 600th

127. F. M. Powicke,Modern Historians and the Study of History: Essays and Papers(1955), 8290;DNB, q.v. Andrew

A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon

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