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Bacon (1214/1220–1292), Master of Arts, University of Paris,
later Franciscan Friar was one of the earliest witnesses to the
reception of Aristotle at Paris soon after the lifting of the
Condemnations of 1210, 1215, 1231. Trained in Logic and Natural
Philosophy at Oxford he was a contemporary of Albert the Great
and William of Auvergne at Paris in the 1240s. Sometime after
1247/8, he became an independent scholar with an interest in
languages and experimental-scientific concerns. Between 1247 and
1267, Bacon mastered most of the Greek and Islamic texts on
Optics. He had expected to get a teaching position on becoming a
Franciscan friar ca. 1257. He was to be disappointed. Because he
regarded the following ten years as an exile from teaching, he
sought the Patronage of Cardinal Guy le Gros de Foulque (Pope
Clement V, November 1265-1268). On the instruction of the Pope,
June 22, 1266, Bacon quickly wrote “an introductory work,” the
Opus maius and the