THE MEDICINE OF THE MIND AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

A NEW WAY OF INTERPRETING FRANCIS BACON

A European Research Council Starting Grant under the European Community’s 7th Framework Programme has been awarded to Dr Guido Giglioni for a project on The Medicine of the Mind and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England: A New Way of Interpreting Francis Bacon. This five-year research project, which began in December 2009, is being carried out in conjunction with the New Europe College (Colegiul Noua Europă) in Bucharest.

The project focuses on an important, but as yet unexplored, intellectual context for Francis Bacon’s philosophy: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century projects for the ‘medicine of the mind’.

The phrase ‘medicine of the mind’ was used by a number of early modern philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians and physicians to refer to a set of practices for training and improving the powers of the mind. Those engaged in disciplines concerned with the medicine of the mind devised methods of training the soul and the body to work together towards the attainment of forms of practical wisdom. Within these disciplines, they provided regimens for living the good life, cures for the passions and methods of controlling one’s own thought, as can be seen in the writings of John Woolton (1535?-1594), John Abernethy (d. 1639), Thomas Rogers (c. 1553-1616), Thomas Wright (c. 1561-1623) and Robert Burton (1577-1640).

The aim of the project is to recover a corpus of knowledge which, precisely because it straddles a variety of different fields, seems not to have filled any specific institutional niche or disciplinary pigeonhole in the early modern system of knowledge and has therefore escaped the attention of scholars working on the history of natural philosophy in this period. The recovery of this background will make possible a new and fruitful reading of Bacon’s programme for the reformation of knowledge. The project will also explore the way in which, during the second half of the seventeenth century, the notion of medicina mentis, in its Baconian definition, became part of the language of experimental philosophy and of early modern science.

The research team at the Warburg Institute will consist of Guido Giglioni and James Austin Taylor Lancaster, PhD student, who will both concentrate on topics that, within the broader context of Bacon’s ‘medicining of the mind’, intersect with domains such as natural philosophy, medicine and practical divinity. Particular attention will be devoted to investigating possible influences coming from the Stoic tradition, especially in its late Renaissance incarnations, and closely related to this, to exploring the notion of ‘appetite’, in relation to the human body, the body of the universe and the body politic, as it appears in the writings of Bacon and his contemporaries.

Illustration from: F. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum ... London 1637