SYLVA SYLVARVM: OR A Naturall Historie.

The first page of William Rawley's dedication to Charles I.

Description:

Sylva Sylvarum was the final work of Francis Bacon, the lawyer, statesman, literary man, and natural philosopher who immersed himself in scientific studies at the end of his life. The book was prepared posthumously by Bacon’s chaplain, William Rawley, a circumstance which obscures issues of authorial intention. Rawley contributed a dedication to Charles I and a prefatory address to the reader, where he anticipates the accusation that the work is an "Indigested Heap of Particulars,” but defends it as the form Bacon intended. Because Rawley was also Bacon’s contemporary biographer, his account is the primary substantiation for his own claims that Bacon authorised publication and Rawley’s posthumous editorship, throwing researchers back on the text itself.  It seems likely that Rawley took a larger editorial role than he admits, including the decision to include The New Atlantis, Bacon’s unfinished work of fantasy fiction, in the same volume with Sylva Sylvarum

Context:

Despite the many accomplishments of his long public career, Bacon fell out of political favour in the final years of his life and died in debt. Working from a suggestion by Pierre Amboise, the editor of the 1631 French Histoire Naturelle, a number of historians have argued that Rawley opportunistically took the dead author’s papers, perhaps in lieu of a promised bequest that Bacon’s estate was unable to pay.[1] Robert Leslie Ellis, who annotated Sylva in the Standard Edition of Bacon’s works (1859-64), noted that, in addition to recording his own observations, many of Bacon’s entries in the book are lifted from ancient sources (Aristotle, pseudo-Aristotle and Pliny) and contemporary works (Scaliger, Ficino, Telesio, Galileo, della Porta, Sandys and Cardano); this feature raises the possibility that Sylva Sylvarum (a title which means “Collection of Collections”) is a quarry or commonplace book that Bacon did not intend to publish.[2] However, it seems much more reasonable to believe that Rawley published a draft as a final copy rather than that he “grabbed a part of his lordship’s working notes [. . .] and peddled the whole thing as a work that Bacon had been in the process of publishing when he had unfortunately passed away.”[3] The suspicion about Rawley’s role is understandable and the structural features of Bacon’s work do indeed suggest incompleteness. However, there is no reason to assume that Bacon did not intend to publish Sylva Sylvarum if he had lived to finish it.

Conclusions:

The work creates an impression of incompleteness. Because Sylva Sylvarum lacks an introductory or explanatory address from Bacon to contextualise its material, its text seems startlingly abrupt. The opening lines instruct us to

‘Digg a Pitt vpon the Sea shore, somewhat aboue the High-water Marke, and sincke it as deepe as the Low-Water marke; And as the Tide commeth in, it will fill with Water, Fresh and Potable’ (page 1, sig. A4r).

Without any preface or preamble, Bacon uses very simple language to enjoin the reader to pursue a series of experiments that demonstrate scientific principles. The language is direct, concrete, declarative, and present, as though the gaze between reader and writer is so insistent that all peripheral vision has been lost. There is no sense of context or tradition, and little sense of the work’s purpose without explanatory clarifications from the author. Bacon’s canon is full of fragments and his style consistently eschewed commentary, but introductory matter to position or explain the experiments listed seems to be lacking. It would seem as though Bacon had finished the main text of his work, but had not yet completed the framing matter.

The numerical specificity of Sylva and its structure suggest conscious shaping for publication. The paratextual elements of the book clearly indicate that it is designed to enable reader use and reference: a tabular border around the text block provides marginal summaries and paragraph numbering, in addition to headers and pagination; the table that follows the main text lists the experiments using this numbering system to facilitate navigation and reference. Moreover, the work is a collection of one thousand experiments and theories on a wide variety of physical phenomena, which are numbered and presented in “centuries” (i.e. groups of one hundred). We are meant to understand that the work is complete because of the rounded number rather than due to any sense of closure. Colclough argues that this inconclusiveness is a generic feature of “centuriate organization,” typical of miscellaneous works in the period, which indicated editorial control through large groupings but admitted a lack of internal coherence.[1]  Indeed, the Latin title, which translates literally to “wood of the forest,” is a direct reference to generic conventions in medieval and Renaissance encyclopedic works, which were organised as miscellaneous collections. In works of this type, one is apt to overlook the structure of the whole, to lose sight of the sylvarum for the sake of the sylva, as it were. The archaic formal features of the Sylva Sylvarum may mislead us into thinking it is a less finished work than it actually is.

Another intriguing structural puzzle about this volume is its inclusion of Bacon’s unfinished work of fantasy fiction The New Atlantis, not mentioned on either engraved or printed title page. The relationship between this utopian narrative and the “ten centuries” of scientific experiments with which it was published is unexplained. Possibly, their co-publication is an accident of timing: perhaps Rawley decided to publish them together because The New Atlantis was unfinished and too brief to publish on its own. On the other hand, The New Atlantis may be meant to illustrate the principles of the Sylva Sylvarum in some way. Certainly, both works share a concern with the organisation of knowledge, the communication of discoveries, and the contribution that an understanding of physical phenomena can make to improve human life, but one could say this about virtually any of Bacon’s works. On the whole, the co-publication of the two widely varying books within the same volume is inconsistent with Bacon’s body of work and probably another intervention by his opportunistic amanuensis.