SOURCE: "Roger Bacon and the State of Science in the Thirteenth Century," in Studies in the History and Method of Science, Vol II, edited by Charles Singer, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1921, pp. 121-50.

Steele was one of the editors of the twelve-volume Opera Hactenus Inedita Fratris Rogeri Baconis (1905-40). In the following excerpt, he places Bacon within the context of his world and of his scholarly contemporaries, summarizing Bacon's contributions to knowledge in several fields of learning.

In estimating Bacon's position among the men of his own time it is important to remember, first of all, the complete originality of his scheme. His great work, unfinished though it most probably was, and almost beyond the powers of any one unaided scholar to complete, the Compendium Studii Philosophie or Theologie, as the case may be, was as distinct in kind as in form from the works of his...