page_title: Roger Bacon
section_title: Other works
hierarchical_section_title: Roger Bacon / Works / Other works
caption_attribution_description: English: The first page of the letter in secretary hand from Roger Bacon to Pope Clement IV introducing his Opus Tertium
context_page_description: Roger Bacon OFM, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different than those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.
  His linguistic work has been heralded for its early exposition of a universal grammar. However, more recent re-evaluations emphasise that Bacon was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books in the scholastic tradition. He was, however, partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional quadrivium.
context_section_description: Bacon states that his Lesser Work (Opus Minus) and Third Work (Opus Tertium) were originally intended as summaries of the Opus Majus in case it was lost in transit. Easton's review of the texts suggests that they became separate works over the course of the laborious process of creating a fair copy of the Opus Majus, whose half-million words were copied by hand and apparently greatly revised at least once.
  Other works by Bacon include his "Tract on the Multiplication of Species" (Tractatus de Multiplicatione Specierum), "On Burning Lenses" (De Speculis Comburentibus), the Communia Naturalium and Mathematica, the "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy" and "of Theology" (Compendium Studii Philosophiae and Theologiae), and his Computus. The "Compendium of the Study of Theology", presumably written in the last years of his life, was an anticlimax: adding nothing new, it is principally devoted to the concerns of the 1260s.
caption: The first page of the letter from Bacon to Clement IV introducing his Opus Tertium[87]
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