Bacon’s Alphabet

• In Event: Negotiating Francis Bacon

Abstract

Bacon’s works are littered with letters. The manifest complexity of the sensible world is, he argues, composed of simple natures and motions – what he calls, in the title of a manuscript work, an Abecedarium naturae, an alphabet of nature. In Sylva Sylvarum, ‘Articulate Letters’ correspond to natural phenomena: ‘Trembling of Water hath Resemblance with the Letter L’, while the ‘Voice of Cats’ corresponds to ‘the Dypthong Eu’. Letters function not only as analogies for the composition of the world, but also as a metaphor for method, as in Bacon’s contested notion of ‘experientia literata’. Meanwhile, the biliteral cipher detailed in the De augmentis scientiarum suggests ways in which the material form of letters is itself significant. This paper brings together and contextualizes the diverse uses to which Bacon puts the alphabetical analogy, to argue that his natural philosophy is, literally, a literate experience.

Author

• Kathryn Murphy, Oriel College, University of Oxford