Francis Bacon, Essays (1625): An Annotated Edition

This edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays (1625) seeks to mark the text’s quatercentenary by offering readers a new view on that work as a whole and on each of its individual parts. It offers a thorough guide to one of the most widely read and taught texts in early modern British Literature—a text whose influence has been felt in Britain and across the Anglosphere. A substantial Introduction traces the unity within the diversity of Bacon’s Essays. This it does by focusing on three concepts in particular: self-knowledge (inviting us to reconsider and thence know ourselves anew); renovation (personal and thence social renewal); cultivation of the self (guidelines for achieving care and development of the self within the private and public spheres). Thereupon the text of 1625 is reproduced in a conservatively modernized form. At the end of each essay is a short commentary along with explanatory notes.