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Francis Bacon produced his final draft of the New Atlantis around the years 1624-1625. Standing at the threshold of early modern thought, Bacon's text operates at the interstices of its contemporary culture and does indeed signal a desire to 'illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge'. This book presents a collection of essays that show how the New Atlantis negotiates a variety of contexts, namely literary, philosophical, political, religious and social, in order to achieve this. The narrative begins with a standard literary device. When Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, he clearly had More's Utopia in mind as a model. For all his strictures on the use of language for rhetorical effect, Francis Bacon was thoroughly grounded in the Renaissance art of rhetoric. He consciously drew on his rhetorical skill in his writings, adapting his style as occasion demanded. The New Atlantis is a text about natural philosophy which seems to offer connections at almost every point with moral and political philosophy. The book discusses two forms of natural knowledge that Bacon takes up and develops in the New Atlantis: natural magic, and medicine. The modern project is crucially dependent on two fundamental miracles: the miracle of creation and the miracle of divine revelation. The book also analyses Bacon's representations of colonialism and Jewishness in the New Atlantis has revealed. The New Atlantis raises questions concerning the relationship between censorship and knowledge.
This article discusses how we might formulate an account of William Blake’s avant-garde reception. Having dealt with Peter Bürger’s theorisation of the notion of ‘avant-garde’, it concentrates on a series of portraits, made from Blake’s life mask, by Francis Bacon in 1955. This ‘high art’ response to the Romantic poet is then contrasted with a series of ‘subcultural’ responses made from within the British counterculture of the 1960s. Case studies are presented from the alternative magazine production of the period (notably an illustration from Oz magazine in which Blake’s imagery is conflated with that of Max Ernst). An article by David Widgery in Oz on Adrian Mitchell’s play Tyger (1971) is also discussed to show how the scholarly literature on Blake of the period (mainly David Erdman) was called on by the counterculture to comment on political issues (e.g. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech). The final section of the article shows how the ‘avant-gardism’ of Oz’s utilisation of Blake might be counterposed to the more activist left-wing approach to the poet in small magazines such as King Mob with their links to French situationism. In terms of the classic avant-garde call for a reintegration of art and life-praxis, such gestures testify to a moment in the 1960s when Blake may be considered fully ‘avant-garde’.
48 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 3 Persuasions to science: Baconian rhetoric and the New Atlantis SARAH HUTTON For all his strictures on the use of language for rhetorical effect, it is now well established that Francis Bacon was thoroughly grounded in the Renaissance art of rhetoric and that he consciously drew on his rhetorical skill in his writings, adapting his style as occasion demanded. The nature and extent of Bacon’s use of rhetoric has been extensively, though not exhaustively, explored.1 Gone are the days when Bacon was regarded as a dysfunctional
60 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 4 Ethics and politics in the New Atlantis DAVID COLCLOUGH God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world; rather may he graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on his creatures.1 I The New Atlantis is a text about natural philosophy which seems to offer connections at almost every point with moral and political philosophy. The celebrated description of Salomon’s House raises the question of the place of the scientist in
82 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 5 Natural knowledge in the New Atlantis RICHARD SERJEANTSON The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible. And amongst them we have a water which we call Water of Paradise, being, by that we do to it, made very sovereign for health, and prolongation of life.1 Francis Bacon and early modern ‘science’ At the heart of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis there is an institution for the systematic pursuit of
Introduction 1 1 Introduction BRONWEN PRICE if a man could succeed … in kindling a light in nature – a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the borderregions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is hidden and secret in the world, – that man should be the benefactor indeed of the human race, – the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities.1 Francis Bacon
Chapter 7 . ‘His Lordships First, and Last, chapleine’: William Rawley and Francis Bacon Angus Vine A t the west end of the nave of All Saints’, Landbeach, lies a black marble tomb slab, commemorating one of that church’s better-known seventeenth-century incumbents: Dr William Rawley, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and chaplain in turn to Sir Francis Bacon, Charles I and Charles II. The tombstone was originally located in the chancel, where Rawley was buried in accordance with his last will and testament, but it was moved in the late nineteenth
156 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 8 ‘Strange things so probably told’: gender, sexual difference and knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis KATE AUGHTERSON I Let us establish a chaste and lawful marriage between mind and nature, with the divine mercy as bridewoman.1 I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave … so may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds.2 The human mind in studying
28 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 2 Narrative contexts for Bacon’s New Atlantis PAUL SALZMAN When Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, he clearly had More’s Utopia in mind as a model, offering a small homage to it in a comment made by the ‘good Jew’: ‘I have read in a book of one of your men, of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked’.1 With great acuity, Susan Bruce has pointed out the significance of the family, and of desire, as a link between the two utopias.2 Bruce argues that in Bacon
180 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 9 Censorship and the institution of knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis SIMON WORTHAM I Critical readers of Bacon’s New Atlantis have often drawn attention to the complex relationship between, on the one hand, the production and dissemination of enlightened scientific knowledge in Bensalem – and, indeed, the forms of social community for which it implicitly provides a model – and, on the other, the secret or concealed conditions of this very same process of production. For example, Robert K. Faulkner in Francis Bacon and the