http:\/\/cofk.history.ox.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/stewart_edited.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\nProfessor Alan Stewart<\/strong> (Columbia University and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, QMUL) offers a fascinating case study. Taking as his starting point the anomaly that, despite his standing as a public intellectual, Bacon\u2019s extant letters (c.800) do not address scholarly themes and were not exchanged with continental luminaries (instead focusing on a \u2018worldly and slightly sordid narrative\u2019 of political affairs), Stewart argues that for an epistolary elaboration of Bacon\u2019s intellectual agenda we need to focus on the letters he crafted as a lawyer and junior parliamentarian on behalf of Robert Devereux (the 2nd Earl of Essex) during the 1590s. Within an environment of manuscript production in which letters were not a private \u2018conversation between two absent persons\u2019 (in the Erasmian formulation) but were instead drafted, disseminated, and consumed collaboratively, and a political one in which Essex relied on a large team of quasi-scholarly secretaries and advisers to generate key documentation, Bacon was able to use the letters to advance anonymously themes which prefigure his later The Advancement of Learning<\/em> (1605).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writing Francis Bacon\u2019s Letters 2010 Seminar Series \/ Thursday 6 May, 2010 Professor Alan Stewart (Columbia University and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, QMUL) offers a fascinating case study. Taking as his starting point the anomaly that, despite his standing as a public intellectual, Bacon\u2019s extant letters (c.800) do not address scholarly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":187,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-556","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11960,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/556\/revisions\/11960"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}