Abstract

The study of vegetables represents one of the main topics in Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum. Not only in quantitative terms, because plants occupy about a third of the entire book, but the centuries on plants are among the most structured, and this reveals Bacon’s particular interest for the topic. The key to understanding Bacon’s interest can be found in both his Sylva sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis, where Bacon explains how the results of studying certain processes in plants can be later transferred and applied to animals and humans. In the context of his discussion of nourishing foods and drinks, Bacon addresses the question of how nourishment gets assimilated in the body. One of the ways in which the...