for the blessed Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first at Oxford, in my time, to lecture on the book of Elenchi [Sophistical Refutations] and I saw Master Hugo who at first read the book of Posterior Analytics, and I saw his opinion.  So there were few [books] which were considered worth [reading] in the aforesaid philosophy of Aristotle, considering the multitudes of Latins; nay, exceedingly few and almost none, up to this year of our Lord 1292.  So, too, the Ethics of Aristotle has been tardily tried and has lately been read by Masters, though only here and there.  And the entire remaining philosophy of Aristotle in a thousand volumes, in which he treated all the knowledges, has never yet been translated and made known to the Latins.[19]

The last sentence of the account displays an ignorance of the number of Aristotle’s extant writings which was doubtless shared by all of Bacon’s contemporaries.  Earlier writers, beginning with Andronicus of Rhodes (first century B.C.), had also placed the number at one thousand; Bacon probably copied the statement from one of these.

The attitude of ecclesiastical authorities toward the study of Aristotle at Paris is expressed in a series of regulations extending over nearly half a century (1210-1254).  They indicate at first a fear of certain of the newly translated books on account of their heretical views, as is stated by Roger Bacon (p. 44).  This suspicion gradually disappears; and by 1254 all the more important works of Aristotle are not only approved, but prescribed for study.

In 1210 a church council held at Paris sentenced certain heretics to be burned, condemned various theological writings, and added: 

Nor shall the books of Aristotle on Natural Philosophy, and the Commentaries [of Averrhoes on Aristotle] be read in Paris in public or in secret; and this we enjoin under pain of excommunication.[20]

In 1215 the statutes of the Papal Legate, Robert de Courcon, for the University, prescribe in detail what shall, and what shall not, be studied: 

The treatises of Aristotle on Logic, both the Old and the New, are to be read in the schools in the regular and not in the extraordinary courses.  On feast-days [holidays] nothing is to be read except ... the Ethics, if one so chooses, and the fourth book of the Topics.  The books of Aristotle on Metaphysics or Natural Philosophy, or the abridgments of these works, are not to be read.[21]

In other words, the Old and New Logic are prescribed studies; the Ethics, and Topics, Bk.  IV, are optional; the Metaphysics and the Natural Philosophy are forbidden.

Sixteen years later (1231) the Statutes of Pope Gregory IX for the University prohibit only the Natural Philosophy, and even these works only until they are “purged from error”: