by James Blish
DOCTOR MIRABILIS
James Blish
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Epigraph
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
FOREWORD
FORTHE, PYLGRYME, FORTHE!
I. Folly Bridge:
of how the death came to visit Robert Grosseteste, and in what mind it found him: and of a letter from Ilchester to Roger Bacon, and in what mind it found him: and, how the Frideswyde Chest was opened
II. Northover:
of a meeting with a falconer of fells upon Salisbury Plain, and the deception practised upon the knights of Hubert de Burgh by Wulf the peasant: and what manner of treasure trove Roger Bacon found at Yeo Manse.
III. Beaumont:
of the fall of Hubert de Burgh and all his purposings at Henry the King’s hands, and how Adam Marsh discoursed with the Lady Eleanor: in which doth appear a clerk before these courtiers
IV. Westminster:
of a suasion from Paris addressed to no man that befell Roger Bacon, and in what manner Henry the King warred with Richard Marshall: also divers other matters presaging a departure
TO FERNE HALWES
V. Straw Street:
of a voyage of the Maudelayne, and how Roger Bacon became a yellowbeak: and how a cat played at dice: in which doth appear Albertus Magnus, who exhibiteth several quaestiones
VI. The Charnwood Hills:
of how Adam Marsh further contrived to rid him of his cross, and in what wise he fared: and how Simon de Montfort reaped the fruits of his high alliance: wherein is seen a prognostick in the Dragon’s tail
VII. The Camp of Pallas:
of how Roger Bacon entered into the college of Peter the Peregrine with an Arabic word, and there breathed sweet vitriol: in which also is disclosed the Secret of Secrets
VIII. Kirkby-Muxloe:
wherein Robert Grosseteste unwittingly doth bring the Inquisition into England: and Henry the King reviveth therewith an old quarrel: with table talk between Eleanor of Leicester and her confessor
OF HEM THAT YAF HYM WHERWITH TO SCOLEYE
IX. Villa Piccolomini:
wherein Roger Bacon is delivered of one of his illnesses: and readieth for all the world the ignis volans: with ensamples of fire of several other sorts
X. St. Edmund Hall:
of how the learned Richard of Cornwall was baited after the fashion of Paris: and how he failed at first to requite it: wherein also a saint dieth, and Gerard of San Borgo doth cast a long shadow
XI. St. Catherine’s Chapel:
of the manner in which Adam Marsh confronted his judgment: in which also is called a Mad Parliament at Oxford: and how Henry the King dashed a taper to the floor
XII. The Convent:
wherein is seen how Roger Bacon changed straw, and wrote a letter unto the Pope: and of the apprentice Joannes, and how he assisted at the Peregrine college: and how a barber read a conclave of blazons
XIII. The Bowl of Belisarius:
of how Roger Bacon became a mendicant, and from whom he begged: and of a plea which became an encyclopedia: and in which Joannes is sent forth to cross the Alps
XIV. The Ministry:
wherein Roger Bacon is exiled home, and undertaketh to pay a debt: and is sent to Paris once more: and in which Jerome of Ascoli exhibiteth certain quaestiones
HOW THAT WE BAREN US THAT ILKE NYGHT
XV. The March of Ancona:
of how Roger Bacon glossed the Consolations of Boethius: and gained and lost an apprentice: wherein intrudeth also one Raymond de Gaufredi, with a hammer
XVI: Folly Bridge
wherein Thomas Bungay doth read at a certain work, and forbeareth to weep: and heareth a cry in the street, and asketh help of it: and of how the page was turned by the Most High
NOTES
Website
Also by James Blish
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright
Truth is the daughter of time
ROGER BACON
And now through every window came a light into the chamber as of skies paling to the dawn. Yet not wholly so; for never yet came dawn at midnight, nor from all four quarters of the sky at once, nor with such swift strides of increasing light so ghastly … The King cried terribly, ‘The hour approacheth!’
E. R. EDDISON: The Worm Ouroboros
We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more and farther than they; yet not by virtue of the keenness of our eyesight, nor through the tallness of our stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft upon that giant mass.
BERNARD OF CHARTRES
There are no dead
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
in order of their appearance
ROGER. BACON of Ilchester, clerk.
ADAM MARSH (or, de Marisco) of Wearmouth, Franciscan, lecturer in theology at Oxford until 1250, confessor of Eleanor of Pembroke and later of her husband.
ROBERT GROSSETESTE, Bishop of Lincoln.
WILLIAM BUSSHE of Dorset, Merchant of the Staple.
WULF, a serf of the Bacon estate.
TIBB, a thief.
SIMON DE MONTFORT, Earl of Leicester.
ELEANR OF PEMBROKE, sister of the King, widow of the Earl of Pembroke, wife to Simon de Montfort.
HENRY III of WINCHESTER, King of England, son of King John.
PETER DES ROCHES, tutor to the King, Bishop of Winchester.
EDMUND RICH of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury (later canonized).
GUY DE FOULQUES, papal legate in England and Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina; from 1265, Pope Clement IV.
PETER DE RIVAULX (or, des Rievaux), nephew to Peter des Roches.
JOHANN BUDRYS of Livonia, clerk.
ALBERTUS called MAGNUS, Dominican, regent master at Paris, sometime Bishop of Ratisbon (later canonized).
RAIMUNDO DEL REY, clerk.
PIERRE DE MARICOURT (Petrus Peregrinus), a noble of Picardy.
JULIAN DE RANDA, clerk.
MATTHEW, PARIS, Benedictine, historian to Henry I
II.
LUCA DI COSMATI, artist.
LORENZA ARNOLPO PICCOLOMINMI, Marquis of Modena, and patron of Luca.
OLIVIA PICCOLOMINI, daughter to the Marquis of Modena.
THOMAS BUNGAY, provincial minister to the Franciscans in England 1271–75.
RICHARD RUFUS of Cornwall, regent master in theology at Paris and Oxford.
JOANNES, a clerk, apprenticed to Roger Bacon.
RAYMOND OF LAON, clerk to Guy de Foulques.
SIR WILLIAM BONECOR, emissary of the King to Clement IV.
JEROME DI ASCOLI, minister-general to the Franciscans 1274–89; thereafter Pope Nicholas IV.
OTTO, a gaoler.
ADRIAN, a voice.
RAYMOND DE GAUFREDI, minister-general to the Franciscans from 1289.
Time: 1231–94 A.D.
Place: England, France, Italy
FOREWORD
Though Roger Bacon is generally acknowledged to be one of the great figures in medieval history, and in particular, one of the forerunners of modern science, astonishingly few facts about his life are known. There is a sizable Bacon legend, but of this the historical Bacon was only temporary custodian: the famous story of the brass head, for instance, is an ancient Arabic legend, which first appeared in Europe in the tenth century as a tale about the mighty Gerbert (later Pope Sylvester II) from the potent hand of William of Malmesbury. In Roger Bacon’s own time, it was being told about Albertus Magnus. It became attached to Bacon only late in the sixteenth century, via a play called Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Shakespeare’s forgotten rival Robert Greene. (The play itself has been called an attempt to imitate Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but there seems to be good evidence that Greene’s work was first; in any event, it is still worth reading.) Since 1589, the brazen head has lived an underground life as the golem, Frankenstein’s monster, Karel Capek’s robots and their innumerable spawn, and today, perhaps, as Dr. Claude Shannon’s mechanical player (after Poe) of indifferent chess. Tomorrow, Dr. Norbert Weiner warns us, it may be outthinking us all – and Dr. Isaac Asimov thinks that will probably be a good thing.
The appearance of Roger Bacon as the hero of the Greene play, however, is no accident of legend. The historical Doctor Faustus – a dim figure indeed – became in the same way a vehicle for timeless preoccupations of the human mind, which tell us a great deal about ourselves but almost nothing about Faustus himself. The Bacon legend, which is not the subject of this novel, haunted Europe in the same way until the end of the seventeenth century.
What remains behind as reasonably certain knowledge about Roger Bacon’s life would hardly fill a small pamphlet; and the more intensively the man is pursued, the more what was once thought certain about him tends to melt into doubt. What little we know about him personally comes entirely from his own testimony, particularly in the Opus Tertium, the Compendium studii theologiae and an untitled work, evidently intended as a covering letter for the works for the Pope, which is usually called ‘the Gasquet fragment’. The Compendium, as my last chapter indicates, shows clear signs that his memory is failing; and as for the other two, they were intended to impress his patron and hence are not wholly reliable as autobiography, as well as being riddled with contradictions.
Except for an anonymous writer who saw Bacon at a gathering like the one described in Chapter VII, not a single soul in his own lifetime ever managed to mention him by name in a writing which has survived, not even people he obviously knew intimately; and we have the text of only one letter to him, that being the mandate of 1266 from Clement IV. A Roger Bacon does appear in one of the footnotes to Matthew Paris’ Chronica majora, but few modern scholars believe that this anecdote can refer to the Roger Bacon. (I disagree, as Chapter III shows, but there is simply no present way to settle this question except by intuition.)
An unknown amount of Bacon’s own work is missing, in addition to the fact that not all that is known has yet been published. He mentions two treatises, De generatione and De radii, which have not yet been found, and the many unpublished unattributed manuscripts of the period in European libraries may include many more. There are no Bacon incunabula; the Voynich manuscript, in which W. R. Newbold claimed to have found an elaborate cypher concealing a knowledge of human anatomy which would have been staggering even for Bacon, was once thought to be in his own hand, but modern scholarship has discredited hand and authorship alike (and cyphers, as we have learned painfully from Ignatius Donnelly and his followers, are not reliable clues to the authorship of anything). The only authenticated sample of Bacon’s handwriting is that of the corrections – not the text – of the piece of the Opus Majus in the Vatican Library.
Finally, just the published body of Bacon’s work is so vast – some twenty-two thick volumes, plus smaller pieces – that no one has ever attempted a definitive Collected Works, and the existing partial collections, those of Steele and Brewer, are arranged in no rational order. Furthermore, for the reader who would rather not cope with medieval Latin, only the Opus Majus and a few much smaller works have ever been translated, and the translations are long out of print. It is easier to deal with a mountebank like Giambattista della Porta, whose Natural Magick can be bought today in a facsimile of the handsome 1658 English printing, boxed; but a universal genius is born mutinous and disorderly, and remains so seven hundred years later.
This is a wholly inviting situation for a novelist, providing only that he has the brass head to believe that he can turn a universal genius into a believable character; but he must not pretend that the book he writes from it is a fictionalized biography. Under the circumstances it would be impossible to write any such work about Roger Bacon. What follows is a fiction. It is as true to Bacon’s age as I have been able to make it; there is, at least, no shortage of data about the thirteenth century – the problem is to mine it selectively. Roger Bacon himself, however, is unrecoverable by scholarship alone. The rest is – or should be – a vision.
A word about language:
The reader may wonder why I have resorted here and there to direct quotations in Latin, especially since the characters are speaking Latin a large part of the time and I have been content to give what they say in English. The reason is that these exceptions, these ideas and opinions written down seven centuries ago, might otherwise have been suspected of being a twentieth-century author’s interpolations. There is always an English paraphrase close by; but the direct quotations are intended to demonstrate that I have not modernized my central figure, and did not need to do so.
I must, however, admit to one modernization, this being the translation from De multiplication specierum in Chapter XII. Here it seemed to me that the Aristotelian terminology Bacon uses would be worse than impenetrable to most modern readers. Hence I have followed Sarton and others in converting what Bacon calls ‘the multiplication of species’ (which today suggests that he must have been talking about biology) into ‘the propagation of action’, which shows that his subject is physics. Several other Aristotelian terms, such as ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ have suffered a similar conversion at my hands.
As for the English, I have followed two rules. (1) Where the characters are speaking Middle English, I have used a synthetic speech which roughly preserves Middle English syntax, one of its several glories, but makes little attempt to follow its metrics or its vocabulary (and certainly not its spelling, which was catch-as-catch-can). (2) Where they are speaking French or Latin, which is most of the time, I have used modern English, except to indicate whether the familiar or the polite form of ‘you’ is being employed, a distinction which should cause no one any trouble.
I am greatly indebted to W. O. Hassall of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for help in locating pertinent manuscripts; to L. Sprague de Camp, whose vast knowledge of the history of technology I mined mercilessly; to Ann Corlett, Algis Budrys, L. D. Cole, Virginia Kidd, Willy Ley and Henry E. Sostman for invaluable criticism and suggestions; and to Kenneth S. White for pushing me into the project in the first place.
>
JAMES BLISH
Arrowhead,
Milford, Pennsylvania
Implicit prima pars:
FORTHE, PYLGRYME, FORTHE!
I: FOLLY BRIDGE
It was called the fever, or the plague, or the blue-lips, or the cough, but most often simply the death. It had come north across Folly Bridge into Oxford with the first snow, and at first had shown a godly grim decorum, spreading mainly inside the enclave of the Jewerye, so that the mayor and the burgesses of Oxford decided that there was nothing to fear from it.
The astrologers agreed. There was every heavenly sign that the city would be at peace throughout the whole of A.D. 1231. Certainly there would not be another pestilence; and certainly not in October, when Jupiter, Venus and the moon would be in trine before All Hallows’ Eve.
Besides, the Jews had excellent physicians, even one or two from Bologna. There was nothing to fear.
Now It is too late to be afraid, Roger thought. The words came to him not as his own thought, however, but like an aphorism which he had only remembered; it was the way he had learned to distinguish the prompting of his self from the general tumult of notions which stormed tormentingly out of his soul the instant he started awake. He stood motionless in the pitch-black, freezing stone corridor, hands folded tensely into each other under the coarse hempen robe he had thrown over his clothing when Adam Marsh had brought the word and called him out, listening; but the self had nothing further to say.
It had said all that was needful. It was too late to fear the death now. Neither the Bolognese Jews nor anyone else had been able to prevent the death. If it was not yet a plague, it had not much further to spread to become one. Half the burgesses were stricken of it already, and the school was dissolved into a shivering huddle of coughing shadows. No classes had met for over a week; no convocations had been called since the death had taken the prior of Carfax; the halls were silent; the students huddled on their pallets, too sick to care for themselves, or providentially too well to risk breathing the prevalent miasma outside the dormitories. Here, at the Franciscan school, the gloom was absolute, for the death was visiting the lector.