Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning

chapter 12 Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning

Richard Serjeantson

Anthony Grafton’s contributions to our knowledge and understanding of the long European Renaissance are numerous and varied. But one that is espe- cially significant is his demonstration of the role played by humanistic learning in the transformation of natural knowledge across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No longer do we see this period as witnessing the sepa- ration of two increasingly opposed cultures of scholarship and of science. On the contrary: the history and philology of the Renaissance had far-reaching consequences for the natural sciences.1 Indeed, some of the most cherished aspects of this era’s revolution in the sciences can now be seen to have had their origins in humanistic scholarly practices. We now know, for instance, that Francis Bacon’s epochal insistence that research into nature should be the work of collaborative research groups, rather than the preserve of solitary savants, had its roots in the collaborative labors of the team of Protestant ecclesiastical historians led at Magdeburg by Matthias Flacius Illyricus.2 Francis Bacon is also the subject of this contribution. One of the great modern questions in the interpretation of his life and writings has concerned the relationship between his politics and his science. According to one perspective, Bacon was a proponent of a “politics of science,” in which natural philosophy would support a powerful and well-governed British state.3 An opposite

1 Anthony Grafton, “Humanism, Magic and Science,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay (London: Longman, 1990), 99–117; Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 178–203; Grafton, “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203–23. 2 Anthony Grafton, “Where Was Salomon’s House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 21–38; repr. in Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98–113. 3 Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 141–75; developed by Stephen Gaukroger, Francis

196 Serjeantson perspective, however, sees Bacon’s humanist Machiavellianism as quite dis- tinct from his ambition to transform human understanding of the natural world: they were simply “two different projects.”4 But what if the question itself is badly posed? Though Bacon wrote about the improvement of knowledge (de augmentis scientiarum), he was not a sci- entist. For him, the worlds of natural knowledge and of moral and political philosophy were comprehended under a single rubric, of “learning.” What do we find, then, if we ask not about Bacon’s politics of “science,” but about his politics of learning? i A Conquest of the Works of Nature

The politics of learning was a theme that Bacon first essayed, speculatively, in the “Orations” that he wrote for performance at Gray’s Inn in the New Year of 1595. As part of these saturnalian revels the Inn gave itself a monarch—the “Prince of Purpoole.” Bacon’s contribution appoints counselors to this prince, each of whom delivers a speech on the best means by which their sovereign may obtain honor and happiness for his state. These Gray’s Inn orations thus offer a remarkably unconstrained insight into ways in which monarchical politics could be approached when the writer was not actually having to address a real monarch.5 In opposition to the “force” advocated by the first counselor, the second counselor’s speech proposes that his monarch cultivate instead the faculty of reason. It is in “the exercise of the best and purest parte of [his] mynde” that the prince will find his glory, and the conquest that the second counselor proposes is not military empire, but the “conquest” of the “works of nature.” The oration then goes on to present a concrete vision of what it is that sovereignty can do for learning. The prince is enjoined to undertake four philosophical projects in par- ticular. The first is to found a “most perfect and generall library”—as the emperor

Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–10; and Sarah Irving, “‘In a Pure Soil’: Colonial Anxieties in the Work of Francis Bacon,” History of European Ideas 32 (2006): 249–62, esp. 250–51. See also John E. Leary, Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), esp. 257–58. 4 Markku Peltonen, “Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 279–305; see also Peltonen, “Bacon’s Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 283–310. 5 Francis Bacon, “Orations at Graies Inne Revells,” in Early Writings, 1584–1596, ed. Alan Stewart, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 583–606. Portpool was the manor on which Gray’s Inn was built.