This essay attempts to provide a specific cultural context for Francis Bacon’s project of natural philosophical reform. Documenting Bacon’s earliest understanding of the link between the nature and uses of natural philosophy and what he would call the “care of the commonwealth,” it moves from a consideration of Bacon’s vision of the promise and procedure of reform to his critique of what he saw as its primary obstacle. It concludes with an examination of the sociopolitical circumstances conditioning reform, with special attention to how the rhetoric of political reform becomes the same rhetoric he subsequently employs to champion the new epistemological imperatives.

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Original publication: Barnaby, Andrew. "“Things Themselves”: Francis Bacon’s Epistemological Reform and the Maintenance of the State." Renaissance and Reformation 33 (4): 2010. 57-80. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v33i4.11375. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.