Experience, Discovery, and Utility: Roger Bacon in the Age of Francis

This paper examines the importance of experiential knowledge in the work of thirteenth century natural philosopher, courtier, and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1292), who saw experience as central to understanding natural knowledge, and to converting that knowledge into useful tools and processes to improve human life and exert power. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how Bacon’s views on the necessity of experiential knowledge to confirm and discover the laws of nature dramatically shaped the contours of his reception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as early modern ideas about utility and experiment. Experiential knowledge is the common thread that runs through the many stories about Bacon that appeared in Latin and in English, on the stage and in historical annals in the early modern period. Whether a figure of sorcery or as a committed experimenter undone by the Church, legends and accounts of Bacon that appeared in the centuries after his death portray him as one interested in learning by doing, and in using natural knowledge in the service of political utility. Bacon’s treatises appeared in the libraries of men like John Dee and Francis Bacon, who found in Bacon’s work an interest in utility, discovery, and experiment that matched their own. Bacon’s interests in experience and experiment, in the service of utility and epistemic gain, are vital to understanding the intellectual transformation often called the Scientific Revolution and reveal important intellectual continuities between the medieval and the early modern periods.