Francis Bacon and Jacobean legitimation

Abstract

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) maintained a lifelong interest in the institutional implementation of experimental science. What changed over the years were the rhetorical strategies employed to give this project legitimacy. I systematize those changes by dividing Bacon's works into three groups according to three criteria: what rite of officialization is enacted in each text (e.g., conversion, fatherly generation, royal delegation); who the inscribed addressee is (e.g., an imagined audience of sympathetic disciples, the monarch, posterity); and what the status is of the invoked philosophical, religious, and political authorities. In this manner, I isolate three distinct versions of Bacon's rhetoric of legitimation.