The context and development of Roger Bacon’s Scientia Experimentalis from 1263–1274

Part one will introduce Roger Bacon and will examine aspects of Bacon’s scientia experimentalis: Bacon’s remarks in Opus maius, Part six, Opus tertium (eds Brewer, Egel), the Duhem fragment of the Opus tertium and the Tractatus brevis, which is Bacon’s introduction to his edition of the Secretum secretorum. This presentation will be prefaced by Bacon’s remarks in the Opus minus on his own sense of his scholarly limitations in respect of the study of the rainbow. Part two is an introductory examination of Bacon’s scientia experimentalis in relation to the De metheora of Albertus Magnus. The focus is on the status of color in the rainbow. Part three will review the recent scholarship on Bacon’s harsh criticism of William of Moerbeke as a translator of Aristotle’s scientific works.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the importance of Aristotle’s Meteorologies in conjunction with Ptolemy’s Almagest, Quadripartitum and Pseudo-Ptolemaic Centiloquium and De dispositione spherae as sources for Bacon’s scientia experimentalis. The discussion of the reality of color in the rainbow in the De metheora of Albertus Magnus will provide a position that is directly contrary to Bacon’s advocacy of color in the rainbow as a mere appearance. Thus, it is most likely that Bacon is not only responding, as is commonly claimed, to the account of the rainbow in Robert Grosseteste’s De iride. It is most probable that Bacon is also responding to Albertus’s appropriation of Grosseteste’s teaching from De iride in Tractatus four of his De metheora.