Francis Bacon and scientific poetry (review)

Reviews 159 of Baudelo as the most likely author of Van den Vos Reynarde. He likewise favours assertions that it was written in the second half of the thirteenth century, as recent syntactic and prosodic investigations of Middle Dutch would indicate. Rudolf Schutzeichel ('Althochdeutsche Studien: Artikelgestaltung') provides a progress report of the work undertaken by the Munster branch of the Old High German dictionary research project of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in GOttingen and provides some examples of particular points of difficulty, such as ascertaining the meaning of individual words where, although their meaning within a particular idiomatic context is apparent the literal meaning is difficult to determine where there are only a limited number of attestations to draw upon. Rolf Bergmann (l Zur phonologischen Gestalt althochdeutscher Grundmorpheme '), writing on his work in compiling a morphological dictionary of Old High German, draws extensively on the work of Schutzeichel. His aim here is to provide a clear view of the etymological and phonological relationships operating in base morphemes. Readers who find that their main interests in Germanic Studies have not been mentioned here are encouraged to consider this work independently, as the broad range of dedications to Huisman guarantees that many Germanists will find choice items of interest to themselves within the volume. Altogether, this Festschrift provides a well-rounded survey of current research in early Germanic Studies. Fredericka van der Lubbe Department of Germanic Studies University of Sydney Schuler, Robert M., Francis Bacon and scientific poetry (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 82, Part 2), Philadelphia, The American Philosophical Society, 1992; paper; pp. v, 65; R.R.P. US$12.50. Professor Schuler's brief monograph is mainly concerned with Bacon's views on, and uses of, scientific poems from the Greco-Roman past It examines that topic helpfully and unpretentiously and, in doing so, sheds new light on several aspects of Bacon's thought Its starting point is 'the "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (Republic 607b)—ancient already to Plato and still with us . . . ' , in which 'a major, recurring conflict has been that between the didactic and the mimetic' (p. 1). Constructing a history of that quarrel in relation to the scientific poem, Schuler*s book proceeds to identify Bacon as an inheritor of the quarrel's unresolved problems who, in trying to come to terms with them, worked creatively and interestingly within their limits. Schuler's introductory chapter moves quickly from Plato's challenging 'the traditional association between poetry and knowledge' to Aristotle's attempts in 160 Reviews his Poetics to redefine it (pp. 1-3). Those attempts resulted in obfuscation rather than in clarification and left in particular, the status of the scientific poem far from clear. Aristotle seems to have been unable to decide in the Poetics whether Empedocles* scientific verse qualified as poetry or as philosophy. O n the one hand, Empedocles expressed his teachings figuratively and metrically. O n the other, he did offer teachings in his verse and not primarily a mimesis of human behaviour. The first chapter then proceeds to study Italian humanists' efforts to deal with Aristotle's legacy of confusion about the status of the scientific poem, and also the efforts of English humanists, especially Sidney. It subsequently observes that although Bacon was not 'primarily a literary theorist', he was 'significantly partial' to aspects of presocratic scientific thought and therefore valued 'the chief Greek and Latin scientific poems of antiquity' (p. 9). In conclusion it suggests that examination of Bacon's ambivalent attitude to those poems, for he iterates Aristotle's uncertainty about the scientific poem, reveals 'an unresolved tension' in his thought 'between science and poetry, reason and the imagination' (p. 10). The second chapter acts upon that suggestion by considering Bacon's attempts to keep reason from contamination by the imagination and to keep natural philosophy from any association with poetry: to establish a pyramidal model of knowledge with reason, in effect, at the apex and imagination, likewise, at the base. It focuses shrewdly on Bacon's apparently evading direct discussion of the scientific poem as such lest poetry be conceded a point of contact with natural philosophy. It also focuses astutely on Bacon's uneasy...