Extracts from a paper laboratory: the nature of Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum

Abstract

ABSTRACTFrancis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum (1626/7) has puzzled scholars since the seventeenth century. Published in the year of Bacon’s death by his erstwhile chaplain, William Rawley, it looks very different from the natural histories that Bacon published in his lifetime. Above all, its 1000 so-called “experiments,” incongruously grouped into 10 “centuries,” lack coherence. This article argues that Sylva was in fact never intended for publication and that Rawley’s prefaced claims to authenticity and authority are insincere. There are several arguments to back up this new interpretation: the book’s late registration, several months after Bacon’s death; the tone and contents of its preface; its disorderliness; the un-Baconian use of the term “experiment”; and finally the book’s very title. The second part of this article traces the fate of Bacon’s papers after his death and offers an analysis of a French variant of Sylva, which was published in 1631. Taken together, the available evidence suggests that Sylva, far from being the result of a book project, represents Bacon’s manuscript collection of observations, experiments, and theories. Rather than being a mere commonplace book, however, it served him as a “paper laboratory” in which he prepared his actual natural histories by re-elaborating and connecting the collected experiments, recipes and observations. Viewed in this light, Sylva offers an important insight into Bacon’s working methodology and incidentally also solves most of the puzzles that have hitherto surrounded this idiosyncratic natural history.