The Advancement of Learning

'The product of thorough, painstaking, and judicious scholarship... should serve to strengthen the vitality and visibility of the Bacon project, and fulfil the aim of all sound critical editions: to ensure that the work will not need to be redone for a very long time.' -Notes and Queries'A thoroughly impressive job... Kiernan begins his introduction with a fluent and efficient analytic summary of the contents of Bacon's book... assured and authoritative bibliographical section... This commentary, like the introduction, is underpinned by wide-ranging and sure-footed scholarship.' -Notes and Queries'Many of Kiernan's notes become mini-essays in themselves, striking exactly the right balance between textual, semantic, and cultural elucidation, as well as providing summary guides to current Bacon research... This new edition of The Advancement of Learning is indeed more correct, more faithful, more profitable, and more diligent than any of its predecessors, and it is most warmly welcome.' -Review of English Studies'Kiernan is especially good in tracking classical and contemporary allusions; in situating Bacon on the social and political map of his day; and in discussing Bacon's understanding of humanism, rhetoric, dialectic, and moral philosophy.' -Sixteenth Century Journal, XXXII/2An authoritative critical edition, based on fresh collation of the seventeenth century texts and documented in an extensive textual apparatus, of Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) The Advancement of Learning, the principal philosophical work in English announcing his comprehensive programme to restore and advance learning.