Message #108165

[Bianca]

He continued, "I omit how Egypt, India, and Ethiopia teemed with many philosophers, geometrists, and astrologers; how many well-known mathematicians were in Chaldea before Greece had any literature. I come back to our times in which, after a long eclipse of letters throughout almost the entire world, suddenly such a wealth of knowledge shone forth, such fertility of talents existed, as no age ever excelled."42 Bodin shared with Bacon and Ramus a cyclical vision of the history of knowledge; but he and Bacon did not map transmissions as Ramus did. [End Page 103]

Bodin dotted his text with "small memorials," and made no great plea for a history of the sciences. But other artes historicae did contain systematic proposals for, and examples of, the sort of history Bacon desired. As Donald R. Kelley has shown, the innovative fifth chapter of Christophe Milieu's 1551 De scribenda universitatis rerum historia outlined a historia litteraria, which began with a discussion of the Pillars of Seth and charted the position of learning in societies from the Pillars to Milieu's present.43 Equally detailed was Reinier Reineck's 1583 Methodus Legendi Cognoscendique Historiam, in which a section on the historia scholarum described the Pillars as a schoolboys' primer from the time of Enoch to the Flood.44 Reineck also admiringly described both Vergil's work and Caspar Peucer's 1572 De Divinatione as exemplary instances of this kind of history.45 Bacon's plea for a history of science was only a later example of late sixteenth-century proposals for a genre that some felt already existed. The self-proclaimed novelty of his proposal was either ill-informed or disingenuous.