Disentangling Roger Bacon’s Criticism of Medieval Translations

In his Compendium studii philosophiae, Roger Bacon declares that ‘were I to have power over the books of Aristotle I would have them all burned because it is nothing but a waste of time to study them, a cause of error, and a multiplication of error beyond what can be accounted for.’ Bacon’s pyromaniac attitude to Aristotle is not due to his dislike of the acclaimed Philosopher, but rather to the Latin rendering of his works. Bacon points out that ‘since the labors of Aristotle are the foundations of all of science, no one can estimate how great the damage is to Latins because of the bad translations philosophers have received.’ Apparently, nothing can be better than something, if the latter is a source of error and discord. Expanding on the same line of reasoning, Bacon observes that it would be better to do as Robert Grosseteste did (pace sua), when he ‘entirely disregarded the books of Aristotle and their methods’ – at least according to Bacon. One might wonder, what was so bad about the Latin translations of Aristotle to motivate such harsh criticism by Bacon? In the following pages, I want to discuss Roger Bacon’s critique of the Latin translators and present a different interpretation of Bacon’s stance. This topic has been studied by Gabriel Théry and Richard Lemay. In their discussion of Bacon’s position, however, both scholars appear to have been quite unable to distinguish theory from rhetoric, purpose from persuasiveness, and the historical actor from the historical witness. As a consequence, the biases they see and blame in Bacon’s criticism of the translators are mirrored by their own criticism of Bacon’s words.