Francis Bacon

In his early thirties, some years before his works appeared in print, Francis Bacon (b. 1561–d. 1626) famously wrote that “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”—and the modern reader is still struck by the sheer range and ambition of his writings. In his busy public life, Bacon was lawyer, parliamentarian, adviser, courtier, bureaucrat, politician, and judge; his intellectual pursuits went well beyond even that scope to encompass natural philosophy in its broadest senses, theology, mythography, experimental science, historiography, and much more. Many scholars attempting to understand Bacon necessarily limit their inquiry to fit their own intellectual expertise and the silo of their academic discipline, and to good effect, but recently there has been a greater willingness to embrace interdisciplinary approaches, and to understand, for example, the relation between his scientific and legal thinking, or his political activities and his essay writing—although Bacon might well have been bemused by the still limited nature of these forays on his “province” of “all knowledge.” Bacon has been read and studied now for over four centuries, and while his writings have always remained in print, it is possible to track certain trends in the focus of Bacon studies. After a century when no major edition appeared, ambitious new editions of his works, in English, French, and Romanian, have been inaugurated since the 1990s. The same period has seen a resurgence of interest in his fable New Atlantis and, more recently, his natural history collection Sylva sylvarum; it is inevitable that the coming years—with the benefit of new scholarly editions—will pursue other directions. This bibliography was commissioned under the heading of “British and Irish Literature,” and it therefore perhaps leans towards the Bacon texts that have been deemed most worthy of study by literary scholars. But in truth there is very little Bacon scholarship that is purely literary: those scholars have found themselves in territory more familiar to philosophy, law, science, and politics. In an attempt to prevent the bibliography sprawling in every direction, it does not attempt to engage as fully with some of the more technical subjects that Bacon broaches (mathematics, medicine, mining, some experimental work, etc.) and the minutiae of his legal and parliamentary careers. It is be hoped, however, that there is still enough here to reflect Bacon’s intellectual “province.”