Roger Bacon wrote the Opus Majus because a pope asked for something he did not have. In 1266 Pope Clement IV wrote to the friar requesting a copy of his “writings and remedies for current conditions”. Bacon had nothing to send, so he spent the next year writing it.
What he produced was meant as a preamble to a larger masterwork on the state of knowledge. The preamble is the book now known as the Opus Majus.
Why Bacon had nothing to send
Bacon studied at Oxford from around 1233 and then moved to the University of Paris. About ten years later he joined the Franciscans, an order then only recently founded.
Around 1256 he ended up on the losing side of a bitter doctrinal dispute inside the order. His punishment was a decade shut away in a Paris convent, doing menial work.
The way out came from an old admirer. Guy Le Gros de Foulques, a lawyer who had praised Bacon, unexpectedly became Pope Clement IV.
What the book covers
The range is wide. The Guardian’s reviewer listed astronomy, zoology, medicine and perspective. BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time adds mathematics, optics, religion and moral philosophy, and notes the pope’s commission.
Bacon took much of his method from Peter of Maricourt, whom he met in Paris. Peter, he wrote, studied even the spells of witches and the tricks of conjurors, so that nothing worth knowing escaped him.
Was it the start of science?
The author Brian Clegg called Bacon the “first scientist” in his 2003 biography. He pointed to the Opus Majus’s faith in mathematics and its insistence on experiment.
Benjamin Woolley, reviewing the book for the Guardian, disagreed. He argued that Bacon’s theory of how the world worked stayed medieval, rooted in Greek and Arab natural philosophy. One passage warns that many have died from failing to guard against moonlight.
Bacon still earned the name Doctor Mirabilis, the wonderful doctor. Legends gathered round him after his death, including one in which he built a brass head that could speak.
