Roger Bacon's Rainbow: Experiment, Fictionality, and Modernity in the Middle Ages

UW Medieval Studies program lecture by Bernardo S. Hinojosa, Room L150.

media release:

What was an “experiment” in the Middle Ages? The question itself ensures raised eyebrows and accusations of anachronism. After all, it is an accepted premise in the history of science that the emergence of the controlled experiment – in which, to cite Francis Bacon, nature is “forced from its own condition by art and human agency” – signals and produces an epistemic shift between medieval and modern ways of understanding the material world and its operations. In my talk, I trace the development of a precursor to the modern experiment, which scholastic philosophers, namely Robert Grosseteste (c.1168-1253) and Roger Bacon (c.1219-c.1292), called experimentum. By combining techniques from classical rhetoric and Aristotelian natural philosophy, this mental procedure replicates physical phenomena as imaginative rehearsals of causal sequences, thus rendering these phenomena available for perception and investigation. As a collaboration of literary and empiricist thinking, the scholastic experimentum brings into relief how the modern controlled experiment, like its medieval ancestor, is a kind of fiction: an artificial procedure that replicates the material world and its processes in a different context and at a different scale.

Bernardo S. Hinojosa is an assistant professor of English at St. Norbert College. Before joining St. Norbert, he received a PhD in English and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley. He is currently writing a book, Fictions of Experiment in Medieval England, on the development of experimentalist thinking and its relationship to literary mimesis in medieval natural philosophy and Middle English poetry, prose, and drama. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New Medieval Literatures and theJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, among other venues.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of English and History, the Holtz Center for Science and Technology, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.