During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an intellectual reawakening swept Western Europe as scholars rediscovered the work of such ancient philosophers as Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Plato (c. 429–347 BC). Many of the world’s most famous universities were founded during this period, including Cambridge (1209) and the Sorbonne (1257).
Few scholars played as large a role in the revival of learning in Europe as Roger Bacon (c. 1214–c. 1292), an English monk who helped breathe life into the intellectual world of the Middle Ages. Bacon was both a philosopher and a spirited advocate of Muslim thinkers, especially Arabic-speaking writers such as Ibn Sina (c. 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198).
Bacon was born sometime between 1214 and 1220 in Ilchester, England. He is believed to have come from a well-off family, although details of his early life are nonexistent. He was educated at Oxford and Paris and inducted into the Franciscan order in 1256 or 1257 in Paris.
Although a devoted Franciscan, Bacon would clash with the order over religious questions for the rest of his life. The Franciscans forbade monks from publishing without specific permission, a ban that Bacon flouted several times. In 1266, he complained that his first decade as a monk had been a virtual imprisonment.
In his writing, Bacon offered several challenges to his colleagues. He argued that scholars relied too heavily on conventional wisdom and ancient sources of authority, without testing their scientific and philosophical beliefs. Bacon, in contrast, was an early advocate of experimental science and pushed his contemporaries to read unconventional sources like the Arabic writers, who were largely responsible for reintroducing the ancient Greeks to Europeans. (Indeed, most of the texts circulating at European universities were translated from Arabic versions, rather than from the original Greek.)
In 1272, Bacon published Compendium Studii Philosophiae, which attacked members of the priesthood for what Bacon viewed as their ignorance of philosophical matters. The book was condemned, and Bacon may have been imprisoned in retaliation. He returned to England around 1280, where he died.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Influenced by Arabic writers, Bacon was a believer in astrology—a position that was condemned by the church in 1277, leading to Bacon’s arrest.
- Although he does not appear in the book, Bacon is a key figure in the best-selling novel The Name of the Rose (1980), by the Italian author Umberto Eco (1932–).
- One persistent fable about Bacon was that he invented gunpowder. The story is not true; however, Bacon was one of the first Europeans to describe the explosive, which had been invented by Chinese scientists centuries earlier.
