Hieroglyphic Matter in Bacon’s New Atlantis

This essay charts the status of hieroglyphs in Francis Bacon’s writings, considering his praise of these precise and mimetic real characters in tandem with his opposition to modes of rhetorical volubility engendered through copia and varietas. The practice of imitation offers an interface between both models – where promising rhetoricians were trained to imitate Cicero, Bacon presents hieroglyphs as perfect representations of the natural world. I argue that Bacon and William Rawley borrow familiar compositional prompts, but gear the imitative impulse of the orator away from the domain of humanistic learning and towards artisanal constructions of nature. Like hieroglyphs, such simulacra seek to approximate and represent creation in miniature, and in the utopia of New Atlantis they emerge as the implausible endpoint of a society moving further from speech and closer to a regimen of pictographic communication.