965J J Bacon, Francis 1561-1626

Resuscitatio, or, bringing into publick light several pieces of the works, civil, historical, philosophical, & theological, hitherto sleeping, of the right honourable Francis Bacon, baron of Verulam, viscount Saint Alban. According to the best corrected copies. Together, with his Lordships life. The second edition, some-what enlarged. By William Ravvley, Doctor in Divinity, his Lordships first, and last, chaplein. And now his Majesties chaplein, in ordinary.

London : printed by S. Griffin, for William Lee, and are to be sold at his shop in Fleetstreet, at the signe of the Turks Head, neer the Mitre tavern, 1661.    $1,900

Folio 29 x19.cm. Signatures:π2,a2, (b)(c)4,π2B-Z4 Aa-Nn4, Oo1, Oo-Rr4,Ss5, Aaa-Qqq4. Second edition, a re-issue of the 1657 edition with the Addition of the Civil Characters of Julius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar and A Collection of Apothegmes. 

This Edition as the 1657 edition contains “Speeches in Parliament, Star-Chamber, Kings Bench, Chancery, and other-where,” has separate dated title page inserted before quire B.  “Certain treatises vvritten, or referring, to Queen Elizabeths times:“, “Severall discourses written, in the dayes of King James,” and “A collection of apothegmes new and old.” each have separate dated title page on leaves O3r, 2C2r, ²2O4r, respectively. 

“Several letters, written by this honourable author,” has separate title page, with imprint “printed by F.L. for William Lee, … 1657”; pagination begins with quire 3A. 

“Other letters, by the same honourable authour,” and “A confession of the faith:” each have separate titlepage, with imprint “printed by F.L. for William Lee, … 1657” on leaves 3L4r and 3P4r, respectively.  With final advertisement leaf.

 A very clean copy bound in full appropriate paneled calf. 

At the hinge between the late Tudor and early Stuart worlds, Francis Bacon stands as both participant in, and diagnostician of, a profound reordering of knowledge. His project—articulated most famously in the Instauratio Magna—sought to move learning away from inherited authorities and toward a disciplined engagement with experience, experiment, and the accumulation of particulars. Yet Bacon’s intellectual life was never confined to natural philosophy alone. His legal arguments, parliamentary speeches, historical reflections, and theological meditations all belong to the same effort: to understand how knowledge operates within power, governance, and belief. In this sense, the Resuscitatio, assembled by his chaplain William Rawley, is not merely a posthumous miscellany, but a deliberate act of recovery—bringing into view the full breadth of Bacon’s engagement with the mechanisms of state and the structures of thought at a moment when England itself was negotiating the uncertain inheritance of the sixteenth century.

Issued in the decades following Bacon’s death, and here in its expanded 1661 form, the Resuscitatio reflects the early Restoration desire to stabilize intellectual and political memory after the upheavals of civil war and regicide. The inclusion of speeches, state papers, and the sharply observed “Civil Characters” situates Bacon within a continuum stretching from Elizabethan counsel to Stuart crisis, while the apothegms and letters reveal the texture of his method at its most compressed—observation distilled into usable form. Unlike the more programmatic philosophical works, this collection shows Bacon in practice: testing judgment against circumstance, and applying a new empirical sensibility to the problems of history, rhetoric, and governance. As such, the volume occupies a distinctive place within Bacon’s opera: it is both retrospective and instrumental, preserving the fragments of a life that helped to mark the transition from Renaissance humanism to the emerging intellectual disciplines of the seventeenth century.

Gibson, R.W. Francis Bacon#227 Gibson, R.W. Francis Bacon,; 227; Wing B320;ESTC No. R12265

https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R12265

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