«Exploded» Knowledge? The Legend of Roger Bacon's Brazen Head and Its Circulation in Romantic-period Culture

The corpus of legends that in early-modern England developed around the figure of the medieval philosopher Roger Bacon circulated widely in the early nineteenth century, as testified by their reprints in a number of chapbooks and by multiple references in the works of Southey, Byron, Godwin, and Mary Shelley. This essay focuses on the most famous of these legends – Bacon’s creation of a Brazen Head gifted with oracular powers – and maps its occurrences within Romantic-period culture, relating it to the eighteenth-century craze for automata and to the lingering lure of magical-alchemical modes of enquiry that accompanied the development of new scientific paradigms. The textual history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein shows that references to the figure of Roger Bacon were removed from the first draft, while the concern with magical lore resurfaced in the novel’s adaptation for the stage and in Shelley’s later short story The Mortal Immortal, both featuring elements of the Brazen Head tale. Combined with the critical revival of the legend in the last work published by William Godwin, Lives of the Necromancers, Mary Shelley’s oblique references to Roger Bacon raise the issue of the intersections between popular culture and the public discourse on science that was being shaped in the Romantic period.