1 Turning the Tables on Bacon: Computer-Assisted Baconian Philology Peter Pesic St John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico ppesic@sjc.edu Because of its formative role in the development of modern science, Francis Bacon’s ‘new organon’ has long been the object of study and controversy. Students of history and philosophy of science look to his precise formulations in order to gauge the intent and character of the new natural philosophy he envisaged. This has given rise to long-standing controversies about his terminology and its meaning. For instance, a number of scholars have interpreted Bacon as having explicitly advocated the ‘torture of nature,’ a phrase they have taken as emblematic of the procedures and stance of experimental science as tending to violate and disbalance the natural order. 1 Others have pointed out that Bacon never used this phrase anywhere in his writings, but did describe what he called the ‘vexation’ of nature in I am grateful to Christopher Johnson, Katharine Park, Andrei Pesic, Brian Vickers, and Sophie Weeks, who gave me valuable advice during the long process of revision, as did several anonymous referees; I especially thank Daniel Cadman for his exemplary editorial care. I also thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its support. 1 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 164-190 (the tenth anniversary edition [1990] includes a new preface by the author but no changes in the text); and Merchant, ‘The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature,’ Isis, 97 (2006), 513–533 (pp. 530, 532). In the intervening years, she continued to assert that Bacon’s arguments ‘subtly turned into sanctions for exploiting and “raping” nature for human good’: Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 45–46. But long before Merchant, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), p. 4, read Bacon as advocating that man wholly ‘dominate [nature] and other men.’ In the decades after 1980, Merchant’s advocacy was later cited by many others as authoritative.