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Angus Vine (University of Stirling)[télécharger la proposition]In 1622 Sir Francis Bacon brought out his first dedicated collection of natural history, the Historia naturalis et experimentalis ad condendam philosophiam, one of four works that he published in that most fruitful of years. Issued by John Haviland, the London printer who would collaborate on a number of Bacon’s works over the course of that decade, the work was intended as a first step towards Part III of Bacon’s great meta-project for the reform of learning, the Instauratio magna. That third part was to consist of ‘Phænomena Universi’, that is to say, of collections of natural-historical data, which would provide the basis for the rebuilding of the sciences. The Historia Naturalis explains this in its extensive preliminaries, which set out the aim and scope of the Great Instauration, and then illustrates what those collections might resemble in two exemplary histories that follow. Those histories were: (i) the much discussed Historia vitae et mortis, Bacon’s history of life and death; and (ii) his altogether less familiar Historia ventorum, or history of the winds.It’s the latter work, of course, that I’m going to focus on. Bacon’s first and only work of meteorology, the Historia ventorum is a comprehensive historia in the early modern sense of that word: in other words, it’s a systematic description of a natural phenomenon, in this case the wind, based on both the collection of particulars, on what we today might call data, and on experience (experientia). It’s also a work that demonstrates the centrality of the idea of improvement to the Baconian way forward and the extent to which dominion over nature predominated in his understanding of that idea. For the Historia ventorum illustrates how, for Bacon, an enhanced understanding of a universal natural phenomenon might be used to transform that phenomenon from a threat, in this instance a climatic one, to something that had the potential for the widespread improvement of human affairs. 