REBUILDING SOLOMON’S HOUSE: A COLLECTION OF UTOPIAS AND OTHER TEXTS BELONGING TO THE 17th CENTURY
Dana Jalobeanu (ed.), Casa lui Solomon sau fascinatia utopiei. Stiinta, religie si politica în Anglia secolului al XII-lea (Bucuresti: All, 2011), ISBN 978-973-571-992-0, pp. 431
Laura PRECUP-STIGELBAUER*
New Atlantis is today probably the most renowned of Bacon’s writings, although it has been often considered to belong to totally different genres: utopia, unaccomplished project for the reformation of knowledge, a manifesto for the new science or a work of fiction. Among these, the image of Solomon’s House represents the first pattern of “scientific” organization
featuring the knowledge as a cumulative, community and experimentally testable establishment.
Bacon had never finished New Atlantis thus provoking his followers to continue his work and his uncompleted projects. Some of the writings belonging to the 17th century literature recurrently claim not only to use the literary pattern of Solomon’s House, but to continue and to popularize – at different levels, and from different perspectives, the projects announced in New Atlantis.