Hordern House

BACON, Sir Francis, Viscount of St. Albans Histoire Naturelle... Paris, Antoine de Sommaville…, 1631

Octavo, woodcut device on title and woodcut initials throughout, with some contemporary ms. annotations; slight staining but a good copy in original vellum.

First French edition of Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum (first published in English in 1626), and thus of Bacon's enormously influential work New Atlantis. It introduced the imaginary voyage into utopia: 'we are told, as shall henceforth often be told in Pacific utopias, just how the author got there: he was on his way from Peru to China and Japan across the Southern Ocean' (Dunmore). The translation is by Pierre d'Amboise. The polymath Bacon (1561-1626) was for many years a highly favoured member of the Jacobean court, but he spent his last years in disgrace after being arraigned on charges of bribery. It was in this retirement that he wrote many of his greatest works, including this sweeping essay on natural history. It concludes with his utopian dream New Atlantis, a Christian utopia governed by the House of Salomon, a college dedicated to the idea that continuing research would lead to the conquest of nature, and thus to the veneration of God. Rees calls this the rather modern notion of the 'research institution as the power-house of an ideal society'.

Sylva Sylvarum was the last work written by Bacon before his death in 1626 (he died from bronchitis, the result of a chill caught while stuffing a chicken with snow to see whether it would delay putrefaction).
Gibson, 614.

$A4250

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