SOURCE: "Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition," in Isis, Vol. 78, No. 294, December, 1987, pp. 518-36.

Lindberg has written extensively on Bacon's accomplishment and is the editor of Roger Bacon's Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes of "De multiplicatione specierum" and "De speculis comburentibus" (1983). In the following excerpt, he seeks to demonstrate that "Bacon was not a modern, out of step with his age, or a harbinger of things to come, but a brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric schoolman of the thirteenth century, endeavoring to take advantage of the new learning just then becoming available while remaining true to traditional notions, patristic in origin, of the importance to be attached to philosophical knowledge. "

In the middle of the thirteenth century Roger Bacon found himself in a situation roughly analogous to that of Hugh of St. Victor in the first half of...