Twentieth-century research on Roger Bacon requires some changes to the account above. It is clear that Richard Rufus, and not Bacon, was the first to lecture on the new Aristotle at Paris circa 1235. Bacon responded to the ideas of Rufus in his Parisian Quaestiones (c. 1240s). He returned to these topics in his last work Compendium of the Study of Theology (1292).

Sometime around 1247, Bacon departed from his teaching at the University of Paris. For the next twenty years he devoted his time to a study of the following works: Ibn al-Haytham Optics, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum on statecraft, the Centiloquium, the Commentary on the Centiloquium, and numerous works on astrology. Most important here was the work of Abu'mashar (Albumassar). The Communia mathematica, the Communia naturalium, and the Compendium studii philosophiae were most probably written in Paris.

Research on Bacon since the mid-twentieth century has...