DANA JALOBEANU
Abstract
Francis Bacon founded his grand-scale project of a Great Instauration on what he has claimed to be a new and reformed natural history. This claim has been often taken for granted by Baconian scholars. This paper investigates some possible roots of Baconian natural history and discusses a number of features common to Bacon’s conception of natural history and to other natural historical writings belonging to the same cultural context: the Neo-Stoic and Protestant revival of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England. My investigation focuses on one of the characteristic features Baconian natural history shares with other natural historical writings belonging to this cultural milieu, namely the claim that an empirical study of nature has moral and therapeutic benefits for the human mind.
AnnalsUnibuc-2012-61-01Jalobeanu