The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones.

  • John Henry Bridges
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    31/180 (page 29)
    The messenger whom he selected to convey his manuscripts to Pope Clement was a poor lad [John] whom he had been training in this way for five or six years. On the whole it seems probable that the restrictions placed on his liberty at this period of his life were not of extreme severity. Of the reception given to Bacon’s manuscripts in Rome we know absolutely nothing.^ A few months after their arrival Clement IV died ; and the papal see remained vacant for three years. The Pope elected in 1271 (Gregory X) was a Franciscan. Owing his elevation to St Bona- ventura, he was not likely to show favour to a suspected member of his Order. Yet it was in this year or shortly afterwards that Bacon wrote the work known as Compendium Studii Philosophiae^ an introductory discourse, perhaps, for the encyclo- paedic Scriptum Principale^ at the completion of 1 [‘ On the whole, it will be hard to find in the history of literature a work the authenticity of which rests on a sounder foundation. These, and other questions of a more doubtful kind, would be at once disposed of, could the original MS. sent in 1267 to Rome be discovered. But of this there is little hope. We have no knowledge that the work ever reached Pope Clement. In whichever of the many stages between Paris and Rome it may have been detained, it probably did not survive the con- demnation which, as we now know from an Assisi document, was passed on Bacon and his works ten years afterwards.’— Op. Maj.y vol. iii, pp. xiv-xv.] 2 Contained in Brewer’s work, pp. 393-519.