A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the Ars Memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge

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Notes

∗I am indebted to a number of colleagues for discussing versions of this paper with me. All have my gratitude, but – without implicating them in my argument – I must single out for particular thanks the contributions of Daniel Andersson, Pietro Corsi, Lorraine Daston, Mordechai Feingold, John Hunter, Brian Vickers and Sophie Weeks.

¹ The loci classici are F. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), and P. Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, translated by S. Clucas (London: Athlone, 2000). Some weightier recent publications include: La cultura della memoria, edited by L. Bolzoni and P. Corsi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Ars Memorativa: zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400–1700, edited by J. J. Berns and W. Neuber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); Seelenmaschinen: Gattungstraditionen, Funktionen und Leistungsgrenzen der Mnemotechniken vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Beginn der Moderne, edited by J. J. Berns and W. Neuber (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000); L. Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, translated by J. Parzen (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2001); B. Keller‐Dall’Asta, Heilsplan und Gedächtnis: zur Mnemologie des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001); C. R. Sherman et al., Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). When complete, Documenta Mnemonica, edited by J. J. Berns and W. Neuber 7 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998–) will be an invaluable scholarly resource. On my use of the locution ‘ars memoriae’, see below at fn. 23.

² H. Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1969); M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

³ The Oxford Francis Bacon, edited by G. Rees et al., 15 vols (Oxford, 1996–), vol. 4, 5; cited hereafter as OFB.

⁴ OFB, vol. 4, 119 (cf. 60, 111–12).

⁵ OFB, vol. 4, 119. Cf. Bacon’s ‘Letter and Discourse to Sir Henry Savill, Touching Helps, for the Intellectual Powers’ (c.1599/1600), in F. Bacon, Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into the Publick Light Severall Pieces […] Hitherto Sleeping, edited by W. Rawley (London, 1657), 225–31 (at 229). The principal studies of Bacon and the ars memoriae remain Yates, Art of Memory, 357–61; P. Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by S. Rabinovitch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 207–19; D. Newton‐De Molina, ‘A Critical Select History of the Classical Arts of Memory and their Interpretation, with Specific Reference to English Arts of Memory 1509–1620’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1971, 115–41; Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 102–11, 117–23.

⁶ OFB, vol. 4, 107.

⁷ Ibid., 62.

⁸ Ibid., 133.

⁹ Descriptio globi intellectualis, ch. 1, in OFB, vol. 6, 97–9. Cf. F. Bacon, De dignitate & avgmentis scientiarvm libros IX, edited by W. Rawley (London, 1623), 76–7 (II.1).

¹⁰ See L. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 90–1, 96–101; W. Schmidt‐Biggemann, Topica Universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), 219–25; G. T. Olivieri, ‘Galen and Francis Bacon: Faculties of the Soul and the Classification of Knowledge’, in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment edited by D. R. Kelley and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 61–81. On Bacon’s general assumptions about memory and the workings of the mind, see K. R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man the Faculties Of Man’s Soul: Understanding, Reason, Imagination, Memory, Will, and Appetite (Urbana and Chicago, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 55–69 and passim. On Galen, see fn. 11 below.

¹¹ See H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review, 28 (1935), 69–133; E. R. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975); Carruthers, Book of Memory, 56–76; R. Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, second edition (London: Duckworth, 2004), 1–2; D. Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation and Reception in Western Scholasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), ch. 3. On Galen, see further, R. E. Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine: an analysis of his doctrines (Basel: S. Karger, 1968), 116–20, 135–6.

¹² See T. Willis, Cerebri anatome (London, 1664), 123–6, 133–43; Thomas Willis’s Oxford Lectures, edited by K. Dewhurst (Oxford: Sandford Publication, 1980), 134–45. On the longevity of the Aristotelian‐Galenic model, see E. Clarke and K. Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1972), chs 3 and 4; K. Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by C. B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84 (at 465–73); C. Manegold, Wahrnehmung‐Bild‐Gedächtnis: Studien zur Rezeption der aristotelischen Gedächtnistheorie in der kunsttheoretischen Schriften des Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2004), 73–91.

¹³ J. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 32–9 (at 32). On Descartes, Hobbes and later seventeenth‐century theories of memory, see J. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 129–44.

¹⁴ Aristotle, De memoria et reminiscentia, 451a18–453a25. See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 35–46; Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection, 58–78. Cf. Plato, Meno, 80d–86c and Phaedo, 72e–77b, and see further J. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5–34.

¹⁵ Aristotle, De memoria et reminiscentia, 453a9–10.

¹⁶ Ibid., 451a21–31.

¹⁷ See, for example, C. B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); C. B. Schmitt, ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, in Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 792–804; M. Feingold, ‘Aristotle and the English Universities in the Seventeenth Century’, in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, edited by H. Robinson‐Hammerstein (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 149–68.

¹⁸ See J. L. Vives, De anima et vita, II.2, in Joannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini opera omnia, edited by G. Mayáns, 8 vols (Valencia, 1782–90), vol. 3, 345–52. See D. C. Andersson, ‘Juan Luis Vives: a Pious Eclectic’, Philosophers of the Renaissance, edited by P. R. Blum (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming).

¹⁹ J. C. Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum liber quintus decimus, de subtilitate, ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Paris, 1557), 414 verso–416 recto (307.28); J. Magirus, Physiologiae peripateticae, libri sex (Cambridge, 1642), 351–2, 360 (VI.12); this edition also appends Magirus’s mnemotechnic treatise De memoria artificiosa (1595), first published under the pseudonym of Johannes Austriacus.

²⁰ E. Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (London, 1640), 13. By 1658, Reynolds’s work had been published in four further editions.

²¹ Aristotle, Topica, 163a28–30; De memoria et reminiscentia, 451b16–452a23, De insomniis, 458b20–22. Further, Diogenes Laertius (Lives, V.26) relates that Aristotle compiled a treatise on mnemotechnique, to which Aristotle might have referred on a number of occasions (e.g. De anima, 427b).

²² Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection, 74.

²³ Yates, Art of Memory, 18–19. See further, J. P. Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997), 81–2.

²⁴ See Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16–24; Cicero, De oratore, 2.350–360; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11.2. In De inventione, 2.53, Cicero also makes memory one of the three parts of prudentia, something that would prove to be particularly influential within the medieval rhetorical tradition. For general accounts, see Yates, Art of Memory, chs 1 and 2; Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik; H. Caplan, Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Mediaeval Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 196–246; Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind, 81–116; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 76–98; Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 22–34. See also L. Bolzoni, ‘The Play of Images. The Art of Memory from its Origins to the Seventeenth Century’, in The Enchanted Loom: Chapters in the History of Neuroscience, edited by P. Corsi (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16–65.

²⁵ Yates, Art of Memory, 18.

²⁶ See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, II.4.27–30, XI.2.46–47.

²⁷ Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.28–9.

²⁸ See the translations in The Medieval Craft of Memory: an Anthology of Texts and Pictures, edited by M. Carruthers and J. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 138 (Albert), 179 (Thomas). This is perhaps the place to note that my exclusion of Augustine from this essay is deliberate. The famous account of his memory in Confessions, X.8–27 was central to the emergence of memory as a habitus of monastic piety. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that he characterized the memory in terms of palaces, storehouses and cloisters (in so doing showing himself to have been cognisant with the idea of recollection), he neither mentioned nor so much as alluded to mnemotechnique. In its turn, this is perhaps symptomatic of the dismissive view of mnemotechnique adopted within the Platonic philosophy, largely on the grounds that mnemotechnique is not concerned with the recollection of eternal verities; see, for example, Greater Hippias, 286a.

²⁹ J. Publicius, Artis oratoriae epitomata (Venice, 1485), sig. g4r–v (translated by Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, 233). Publicius’s work was popular and influential. It is discussed in Yates, Art of Memory, 117–18; Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 27; Bolzoni, Gallery of Memory, 136–7; Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, 226–31. As late as the 1660s, it was being mined by those with an interest in mnemotechnique: see R. Lewis, ‘The “Best Mnemonicall Expedient”: John Beale’s Art of Memory and its Uses’, The Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 113–44 (at 124).

³⁰ On synecdoche, see D. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum (1512), I.23, in Collected Works of Erasmus, edited by C. R. Thompson et al., 86 vols (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974–), vol. 24, 341.

³¹ Vives, De anima et vita, II.2, in Vives, Opera omnia, vol. 3, 349.

³² Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, 454–5.

³³ See Ars reminiscendi (1602), ch. 1–3, in G. B. della Porta, Ars reminiscendi, aggiunta L’arte del ricordare, edited by R. Sirri (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996), 7–12. The earlier vernacular edition of della Porta’s work is even more explicit, discussing natural and artificial forms of ‘reminiscenza’, where the Latin edition makes do with ‘memoria’. See della Porta, L’arte del ricordare (1566), ch. 2, in ibid., 59–60.

³⁴ J. Willis, Mnemonica; Or, The Art of Memory, Drained out of the Pure Fountains of Art & Nature, translated by L. Sowersby (London, 1661), sigs A5 verso–A6 recto. Willis’s original treatise was Mnemonica, sive reminiscendi ars (London, 1618), the third section of which was translated by Willis himself as The Art of Memory (London, 1621).

³⁵ For more detailed accounts of this history, see – in addition to the works cited in fn. 1 and fn. 29 above – Newton‐De Molina, ‘Critical Select History’; H. F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 201–50.

³⁶ See J. L. Vives, De causis corruptarum artium (1531), IV.2 in Vives, Opera omnia, vol. 6, 159–63. On the original integration of memoria into the parts of rhetoric, see G. A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, second edition (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 98–9.

³⁷ T. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), fols 111 verso–118 verso; B. Keckermann, Systema rhetoricae (Hanau, 1608), 467–504 (III.1). See further, J. S. Freedman, ‘Cicero in Sixteenth‐ and Early Seventeenth‐Century Rhetoric Instruction’, Rhetorica, 4 (1986), 227–54 (at 234–8).

³⁸ See, for example, T. Farnaby, Index rhetoricus (London, 1625); W. Pemble, Enchiridion oratorium (Oxford, 1633), sig. A3 verso. For Vossius’s dismissal of memoria as an illegitimate part of rhetoric, see G. J. Vossius, Oratoriarum institutionum libri sex (Leiden, 1606), 5. Cf. the expanded third edition of the work, Commentarius rhetoricum, sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex, 2 vols (Leiden, 1630), vol. 1, 6 (I.1.3), and see discussion in P. Laurens, ‘Entre la poursuite du débat sur le style et le couronnement de la théorie de l‘actio: Vossius et le réaménagement de l’édifice rhétorique (1600–1625)’, in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne 1450–1950, edited by M. Fumaroli (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999), 499–516.

³⁹ P. Ramus, Institutionum dialectiarum (Paris, 1543), fols 54–8; P. Ramus, Brutinae quaestiones (Paris, 1549), 17, 41. See Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 97–101; W. J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, third edition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), 194–5, 275–6; W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 148.

⁴⁰ See M. Feingold, ‘English Ramism: A Reinterpretation’, in The Influence of Petrus Ramus, edited by M. Feingold, J. S. Freedman and W. Rother (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 127–76. Feingold notes that ‘“Rámus” is still a Czech locution for “noise”’ (ibid., 148). On the impact of Ramism in general, see further, Schmidt‐Biggemann, Topica Universalis, 31–66; H. Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630, Oxford‐Warburg Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁴¹ R. Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, 1570), p. 8 verso. On the role of orderly memorization in the humanist schoolroom, see A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth‐ and Sixteenth‐Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 9–18.

⁴² T. Nashe, The Vnfortvnate Traveller (1593), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, edited by R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford, 1966), vol. 2, 299.

⁴³ J. L. Vives, De anima et vita, II.2, in Vives, Opera omnia, vol. 3, 349 (cf. De tradendis disciplinis (1531), III.3, in ibid., vol. 6, 310–12). Mnemonic poetry had long been used to teach syllogistic in the form of the famous ‘Barbara Celerant’ verses (See W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962), 232–4). See further, J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), 87–91, and fn. 74 below.

⁴⁴ Erasmus, De ratione studii (1511) in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, 671 (cf. Ars notoria (1529), in ibid., vol. 40, 931–7).

⁴⁵ P. Melanchthon, Rhetorices elementa (1534) in P. Melanchthon, Opera quae supersunt omnia, edited by C. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil, 28 vols (Halle and Braunschweig, 1834–60), vol. 13, col. 419 (cf. Erotemata dialectices (1555), in ibid., vol. 13, col. 573); Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, translated by J. Sandford (London, 1569), 24–5.

⁴⁶ R. Sanderson, Logicae artis compendivm (Oxford, 1615), sigs Y3 verso–Y4 recto (‘Appendix posterior’, 102–3).

⁴⁷ See Erasmus, De duplici et copia verborum, II.11, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, 635–48 (cf. De ratione studii in ibid., vol. 24, 672–3). For useful ways into the literature on this topic, see P. Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: the Seventeenth‐Century Commonplace Book’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, edited by W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 131–47; A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); E. Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Library, 2001).

⁴⁸ Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory, 5–6; G. J. Vossius, De arte grammatica libri septem (Amsterdam, 1635), 29 (1.7). Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 275a–b.

⁴⁹ For all the copiousness of their documentation, Richard Yeo’s recent studies do not grasp this point: see R. Yeo, ‘Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth‐century England’, History of Science, 45 (2007), 1–46; ‘Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke and Vannevar Bush on External Memory’, Science in Context, 20 (2007), 21–47 (at 35); ‘Notebooks as Memory Aids: Principles and Practice in Seventeenth‐century England’, Memory Studies, 1 (2008), 115–136 (at 121–2).

⁵⁰ See A. Blair, ‘Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy’, in Books and the Sciences in History, edited by M. Frasca‐Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169–89; the articles by Ann Blair, Richard Yeo and Brian Oglivie in Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003). On Harrison, see N. Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”: An Episode in the History of the Organisation of Knowledge’, The Seventeenth Century, 19 (2004), 196–232.

⁵¹ C. Butler, Oratoriae libri duo (Oxford, 1629), sigs P2 verso–Q3 recto (II.5), at sig. P4 verso. See L. S. Hultzén, ‘Charles Butler on Memory’, Speech Monographs, 6 (1939), 44–65.

⁵² See M.‐A. Muret, M. Antonii Mureti variarum lectionum in libri VIII (Venice, 1559), fols 23 recto – 24 verso (3.1); J. J. Scaliger, Scaligerana, Thuana, Perroniana, Pithoeana, et Colomesiana. Ou remarques historiques, critiques, moràles, & litteraires de Jos. Scaliger … [etc.], edited by P. des Maizeaux, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1740), vol. 2, 450–51 (s.v. ‘mémoire’).

⁵³ C. Timpler, Rhetoricae systema methodicum (Hanau, 1613), 469–70 (III.14.5). See J. F. Freedman, European Academic Philosophy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: the Life, Significance, and Philosophy of Clemens Timpler (1563/4–1624), 2 vols (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1988), vol. 1, 307–25.

⁵⁴ For a convenient handlist of these treatises, see Newton‐De Molina, ‘Critical Select History’, 161–9 and Yates, Art of Memory, 114–34.

⁵⁵ On Watson, see Binns, Intellectual Culture, 205–7.

⁵⁶ Yates, Art of Memory, 133.

⁵⁷ For more on Bruno, see L. Spruit, Il problema della conoscenza in Giordano Bruno (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1988), 40–54; S. Clucas, ‘Giordano Bruno’s De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione: Art, Magic and Mnemotechnics’, Physis, 38 (2001), 75–98. For Camillo, see L. Bolzoni, Il teatro della memoria: studi su Giulio Camillo con un’appendice di testi (Padua: Liviana Scolastica, 1984).

⁵⁸ See Yates, Art of Memory, 260–78; S. Clucas, ‘In campo fantastico: Alexander Dicson, Walter Warner and Brunian Mnemonics’, in Giordano Bruno 1583–1585: The English Experience, edited by M. Ciliberto and N. Mann (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1997), 37–59. On Dicsone, see further, P. Beal, ‘Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that “False Knave” Alexander Dicsone’, in Manuscripts and their makers in the English Renaissance. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, Volume 11, edited by P. Beal and G. Ioppolo (London: British Library, 2002), 1–51.

⁵⁹ H. Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London, 1594), 81–5. On Plat, see A. Mukherjee, ‘Dearth science, 1580–1608: The Writings of Hugh Platt’, The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar, Occasional Paper No. 35 (Durham: Thomas Harriot Seminar, 2007); D. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 211–41.

⁶⁰ Plat, Jewell House, 84.

⁶¹ Yates, Art of Memory, 277.

⁶² See M. Feingold, ‘Giordano Bruno in England, Revisited’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 329–46. On the diffusion of Bruno’s ideas more broadly, see S. Ricci, La fortuna del pensiero di Giordano Bruno, 1600–1750 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1990); Dicsone is discussed at 19–27.

⁶³ See A. E. Vine, ‘Francis Bacon’s Composition Books’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 13 (2008), forthcoming.

⁶⁴ On Bacon’s complex arrangement of notebooks, see ‘Comentarius Solutus siue Pandecta, siue Ancilla Memoriae’, British Library Add. MS 27278, fols 10 verso–14 recto (printed in The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by J. Spedding, 7 vols (London, 1861–1874), vol. 4, 39–95 (at 59–62); cited hereafter as LL). The ‘Comentarius Solutus’ was itself a notebook in which Bacon inventoried most aspects of his life, including his collection of notebooks: as he described it, ‘This booke receyveth all remembrances touching my private of w^t nature soever’ (BL, Add. MS 27278, fol. 12 verso; LL, vol. 4, 61).

⁶⁵ The ‘Promus’ is now in the British Library, Harley MS 7017, fols 83 recto–129 verso (excerpts are printed in The Works of Francis Bacon, edited by J. Spedding et al., 7 vols (London, 1859–64), vol. 7, 187–211; cited hereafter as SEH).

⁶⁶ In the absence of the relevant volume of the OFB, I quote from F. Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning … IX Bookes, translated by G. Watts (Oxford, 1640), 254 (V.5). Cf. the related passage in the original Advancement (OFB, vol. 4, 118). In emphasizing the utility of writing in remembering things, Bacon echoed texts such as Willis, Mnemonica, 1 (and passim). On the role of commonplacing within Baconian natural philosophy, see A. Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 541–51; Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, 268–72; Yeo, ‘Between Memory and Paperbooks’.

⁶⁸ Bacon, Advancement, 253 (V.5).

⁶⁷ For the ‘Advice’ (1596) to the Earl of Rutland, see LL, vol. 2, 20; for the ‘Advice’ (c.1599) to Fulke Greville, see LL, vol. 2, 23–6. On the occasionally vexed question of the authorship of these texts, see B. Vickers, ‘The Authenticity of Bacon’s Earliest Writings’, Studies in Philology, 94 (1997), 248–96 (esp. 271–7). In his ‘Comentarius Solutus’, Bacon proposed rearranging his notebooks to make them ‘fewer and lesse curious and more sorted to use than to Art’ (British Library Add. MS 27278, fol. 13 verso; LL, vol. 4, 62).

⁶⁹ Ibid., 254–55. A little earlier in the De augmentis, Bacon approvingly quoted Seneca (Epistle 45, ‘On Sophistical Argumentation’) on ‘the feats of Iuglers which though we know not how they are done; yet we know well it is not as it seemes to be’ (ibid., 247 (V.4)). On Bacon and ‘illusion’, see S. Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 78–9.

⁷⁰ See J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down […] Between the Years 1669 & 1696, edited by A. Clark, 2 vols (Oxford, 1898), vol. 1, 82. Yates, Art of Memory, 357 makes much of this.

⁷² Novum organum, II.26, in OFB, vol. 11, 285–7.

⁷¹ Bacon, Advancement, 255–6.

⁷³ OFB, vol. 11, 287.

⁷⁴ Cf. Vives, De anima et vita, II.2 in Vives, Opera omnia, vol. 3, 349–50. P. Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London, 1595), sig. G3 recto‐verso; S. Daniel, A Panegyricke Congratulatorie […] With a Defence of Ryme, second edition (London, 1603), sig. F2 verso. On Vives and mnemonic verse, see fn. 43 above.

⁷⁵ OFB, vol. 11, 287. Cf. a similar point about the value of striking images in F. Bacon, Sylua Syluarum: or a Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries, edited by W. Rawley (London, 1627), 256 (no. 956).

⁷⁶ See Bacon, Advancement, 219–20 (V.1) and fn. 7–10 above.

⁷⁷ See, for example, F. Bacon, De sapientia veterum (London, 1609), 87–9 (fable 25, ‘Atalanta’); Bacon, Descriptio globi intellectualis, ch. 2, in OFB, vol. 6, 101–5; Bacon, Advancement, 79–84 (II.2). See further, S. Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon and the Art–Nature Distinction’, Ambix, 54 (2007), 117–45.

⁷⁸ Bacon, Advancement, 109 (II.13); for the Latin, see Bacon, De augmentis, 119–20. Cf. other versions of the fable in Bacon, De sapientia veterum, 23–4; F. Bacon, Opera moralia et civilia, edited by W. Rawley (London, 1638), 287. See discussion in Wallace, Bacon on the Nature of Man, 29–30.

⁷⁹ A. Doni, De natura hominis (1581), II.21, in L. De Franco, L’eretico Agostino Doni: medico e filosofo cosentino del ‘500. In appendice: A. Donii – De natura hominis – con traduzione a fronte (Cosenza: Pellegrini, 1973), 402–05. See SEH, vol. 1, 528. On Doni and his work, see A. Rotondò, Studi di storia ereticale del cinquecento, 2 vols (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2008), vol. 2, 635–99 (esp. 648–89). This passage also has much in common with Vives, De anima et vita 1.12, in Opera omnia, vol. 3, 332, and J. Huarte, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of Mens Wits, translated by C. Camili and R. C[arew] (London, 1594), 52–5. See also Wallace, Bacon on the Nature of Man, 68; Olivieri, ‘Galen and Francis Bacon’, 69.

⁸⁰ For the Advancement, see OFB, vol. 4, 93. On Bacon’s complex relationship with Telesian philosophy, the best overview is Graham Rees’s introduction to OFB, vol. 6, xxxvi–lxix. See also V. Giachetti Assenza, ‘Bernardino Telesio: il migliore dei moderni. I riferimenti a Telesio negli scritti di Francesco Bacone’, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 35 (1980), 41–79.

⁸¹ See Bacon’s summary of his views (with reference to both Telesio and Doni) in Bacon, Advancement, 206–09 (IV.3). For further discussion, see Wallace, Bacon on the Nature of Man, 23–39; D.P. Walker, ‘Francis Bacon and Spiritus’, in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, edited by A. G. Debus, 2 vols (New York: Science History Publications and Watson Academic Publications, 1972), vol. 2, 120–31; G. Rees, ‘Francis Bacon on Spiritus Vitalis’, in Spiritus: IV^o colloquio internazionale del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, edited by M. Fattori and M. Bianchi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984), 265–81.

⁸² See, for example, OFB, vol. 6, xxxvi–xxxvii.

⁸⁴ Bacon, Advancement, 226 (V.2); for the earlier reference to it, see ibid., 168 (III.5). Cf. Novum organum, I.82 and I.98–103, in OFB, vol. 11, 128–30, 154–61.

⁸³ OFB, vol. 4, 111. See also Cogitata et visa (c.1607/8), in F. Bacon, Scripta in natvrali et vniversali philosophia, edited by I. Gruter (Amsterdam, 1653), 56–7; Redargutio philosophiarum (ca. 1608), British Library, Harley MS 6855, fol. 13 verso (SEH, vol. 3, 573). See discussion in Jardine, Francis Bacon, 143–9; L. Jardine, ‘Experientia literata or Novum organum? The Dilemma of Bacon’s Scientific Method’, in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, edited by W. A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 47–68; S. Weeks, ‘The Role of Mechanics in Bacon’s Great Instauration’, in Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries, edited by C. Zittel et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 133–95 (at 162–73).

⁸⁵ See, for example, C. Gesner, Historiae animalium lib. I. De quadrupedibus animalium (Zürich, 1551), 184–6, 250–5; E. Topsell, The Historie of the Foure‐Footed Beasts (London, 1607), 151. In Bacon’s fable of Pan, we are informed that invention comes ‘only from Pan, that is, from sagacious experience [Experientiâ sagaci], and the universal knowledge of worldly things [& rerum Mundi notitiâ universali]’ (Bacon, De sapientia veterum, 26 (fable 6); cf. Advancement, 118 (II.13)). For discussion of early modern natural philosophy as a form of hunting, see W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 8. See further, K. J. Höltgen, ‘Clever Dogs and Nimble Spaniels: on the Iconography of Logic, Invention, and Imagination’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 24 (1998), 1–36.

⁸⁶ See C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin–English Dictionary (Oxford, 1879), s.vv. ‘sagacitas’, ‘sagax’, ‘sapientia’, ‘sapio’.

⁸⁷ Novum organum, I.100–1, in OFB, vol. 11, 158–9. See related discussion in ibid., lxxii–lxxvii.

⁸⁸ Novum organum, II.10, in ibid., 214–15.

⁸⁹ ‘Ministratio ad Memoriam hoc officium praestat, ut ex turba rerum particularium, & Naturalis Historiae generalis acervo, particularis Historia excerpatur, atque disponatur eo ordine, ut judicium in eam agere, & opus suum exercere possit’ (Partis instaurationis secundae delineatio et argumentis, in Bacon, Scripta, 305).

⁹⁰ For a clear exposition of the model, see, for example, Sanderson, Logicae artis compendivm, 3 (I.1), and L. Spruit, Species Intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1994), vol. 1, 22–65 and passim. For Bacon’s attitude to ‘judgment’, see the Advancement in OFB, vol. 4, 114–15; and, in general, see G. Nuchelmans, Late Scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition (Amsterdam: North‐Holland, 1980), esp. 50–2, 103–13.

⁹¹ Rossi, Francis Bacon, 212.

⁹² Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 122–3.

⁹³ In passing, we might echo Weeks in observing that: (a) despite the claims of Jardine (‘Experientia Literata or Novum Organum?’, 60–1), experientia literata does not have a conflicting role within Bacon’s philosophical programme; (b) William Eamon fundamentally misrepresents experientia literata in describing it as an ‘inductive methodology’ (Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 285–91). See Weeks, ‘Role of Mechanics’, 165–7.

⁹⁴ On Alsted, mnemotechnique and encyclopaedism, see Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 130–44; H. Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 56–9, 82–90.

⁹⁶ OFB, vol. 4, 118.

⁹⁵ See Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, ch. 7. For an examination of Rossi’s claims, see R. Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 128–33.

⁹⁷ Bacon, Advancement, 259 (VI.1). See Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, 10–20.

⁹⁸ Bacon, De augmentis, 271–3.

⁹⁹ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XI.2.29–31; cf. Rhetorica ad Herennium, III.20.33, where notae are considered as a class of mnemotechnic image. The definitive early modern text on ancient shorthand (specifically, the notae Tironianae) is Janus Gruter’s frequently reprinted Notae Romanorum veterum, in Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani, edited by J. Gruter, J. J. Scaliger and M. Welser, 2 vols ([Heidelberg], 1602–03), vol. 2, appendix. For a modern account, see H. Boge, Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironische Noten (Berlin and New York: G. Olms, 1973), 47–72. See further, Yates, Art of Memory, 40–1, 55–7; P. Mitzschke, ‘Quintilian und die Kurzschrift’, Archiv für Stenographie, 57 (1906), 305–11 and 337–41.

¹⁰⁰ J. Willis, The Art of Stenographie (London, 1602), sigs A3 recto (‘Proem’), C8 recto‐D1 verso (I.16).

¹⁰¹ Cf. Bacon’s list of potential mnemotechnic images in Novum organum, II.26, which included ‘animals, herbs, and words, letters, characters, historical personages, and so on too’ (OFB, vol. 11, 287).

¹⁰² Publicius, Oratoriae artis epitomata, sigs h3 verso–h7 verso; G. B. della Porta, De fvrtivis literarvm notis (Naples, 1563 [sc. London, 1591]), 89–92 (cf. Ars reminiscendi, esp. 46–50 (ch. 21)). See discussion in Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, 14; L. Volkmann, ‘Ars memorativa’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, Neue Folge Band, 3 (1929), 111–203 (at 145–77); C. Balavoine, ‘Hiéroglyphes de la mémoire: émergence et métamorphose d’une écriture hiéroglyphique dans les arts de mémoire du XVI^e et du XVII^e siècle’, XVII^e siècle, 40 (1988), 51–68.

¹⁰³ On Bacon and the traditional cognitive–psychological model, see Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, 10–14.

¹⁰⁴ See Lewis, ‘John Beale’s Art of Memory’; R. Lewis, ‘Hooke’s Two Buckets: Memory, Mnemotechnique and Knowledge in the Early Royal Society,’ in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, edited by D. Beecher and G. Williams (Toronto: Centre for Reformation & Renaissance Studies, 2009), 339–63.

¹⁰⁵ See, for example, Novum organum, II.20, in OFB, vol. 11, 260–1.