What were the epistemic configurations of experience in the medieval sciences of soul and body? Simple sense perception, inspectio, anathomia, iudicatio by common sense, pre-universal experientia, and expertise all occupied distinctive, yet decidedly standardized spaces in the cognitive realm of the sapiens. For Peter of Spain (ca. 1215-1277), the science of animal souls and bodies required sense perception and judgment in acquiring knowledge, particularly of its most specific species. For Albert the Great (1200-1280), simple sense perceptions had the epistemic power to verify or falsify theoretical facts in the sciences of soul and body, but they first had to pass the common-sense judgment of the expert. All this shows that scientific experiences were principally shared by the sapientes; they were, so to speak, universal and individual at once. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on these pragmatics of experience, both by exposing the mental realm as the integral backbone to the practices, standards, and conceptualizations of experience, and by illustrating how the ideals of this realm became embodied in the practices of the medieval life sciences developed by historical actors such as Peter of Spain and Albert the Great.

This paper will examine sixteenth-century physicians’ attempts to portray contrived tests of poison antidotes as a learned endeavor. Poison trials had long been used by charlatans and other empirics, who hawked their nostrums in marketplace shows that involved self-poisoning and poisoning animals. From the 1520s, however, some physicians began to test antidotes using poison on condemned criminals – first at the papal court in Rome and then at other European courts. Their newfound interest in poison trials invited comparison with empirical practitioners’ marketplace shows. Physicians thus came up with deliberate narrative strategies to differentiate their trials from empirical practitioners’ “misguided” tests. One strategy involved explicit contrast between physicians’ tests and the fraudulent shows put on by “itinerant country swindlers,” in the words of German physician Eurichus Cordus (1540). More subtly, physicians penned detailed accounts of poison trials that included careful markers of their learning, such as references to the hours of the clock, pulse checks, and allusions to learned medical theory. They described these trials using scholarly terms designating experience, such as historia, observatio, or experimentum. Some of these accounts were recorded privately; others circulated at courts; and still others were shared publicly, such as Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s detailed account of a poison trial in his popular commentary on Dioscorides. The similarity between these documents, however, suggests a conscious narrative of a “right” way to conduct contrived medical trials with poison.

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.