The literary and rhetorical background of Francis Bacon as an English man of letters

Abstract

The aim of this study has been to consider Bacon's works against a background of reading:- Bacon's own reading, classical and Renaissance, compared with the reading of his contemporaries and certain larger European influences (e.g. the Renaissance attitude to History) in order of his time, and to consider his European outlook as an Englishman of culture. Contrasting subjects to define the Scope of work:- The ideas of Death and Life, illustrating the inter-relation of philosophical attitudes to death and scientific research into life, forming an ideally Renaissance background for the "Historia Vitae et Mortis". 2. The Idea of History: Sources in classical historians; Renaissance theory and practice; the idea of statesmanship; the need for an English History. Bacon's History. 3. The Topical Literature of the Period as in the Sphere of Navigation; the revival of the Atlantis myth, and the effect on Bacon's reading, illustrations, and the "New Atlantis". 4. Rhetoric. The art of exposition in the period, its sources in antiquity, its light on Bacon's use of examples and his method of writing. A rhetorical setting for the "Essays" and the "De Sapientia Veterum." 5. The Baconian Method of work, as a method of his time,involving a discussion of his attitude to the material he collected in reading and experience. 6. The Baconian view (compared with classical and contemporary precept) of Poetics, poetry and the poets, of the sensual arts (painting, music, masques).Conclusions drawn from these studies are:- 1. That Rhetoric illuminates and explains the works and dicta of Bacon. 2 That he was a man of his time, but with an ability to review and reorganize received material with an original consistency of aim. 3. That he was a specialist in the theory of specialisation, and therefore the logical and rhetorical elements are more securely efficient in him than his attempted applications of specialised knowledge.