For over four centuries, Francis Bacon’s Essayes has remained the English philosopher’s most widely-read text: an instant success when first published in 1597, the Essayes went through multiple editions in English, were translated into French and Italian during Bacon’s lifetime, and posthumously appeared in Latin. But while most readers are familiar with the fifty-eight essays published in the 1625 edition, the first printed iteration of the Essayes was very different. In 1597, Bacon included only ten short and highly aphoristic essays, but insisted on publishing them alongside two other, longer writings: his Meditationes sacrae, a set of meditations on scriptural verses, written in Latin; and the Colours of good and euill, his attempt to develop ideas contained in book 1, chapters 6 and 7 of Aristotle’s Rhetorica.
In this paper, Prof. Stewart asks what it means to consider the Essayes in the context of its first print appearance, drawing on research undertaken for his forthcoming edition of the 1597 volume for the Oxford Francis Bacon’s volume II, Late Elizabethan Writings, 1596-1602.
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