Ernst Curtius, in his most well-known work, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, writes that ‘the great scholastics of the thirteenth century are not interested in poetry. You will look in vain for a scholastic vindication of it’. It is not until the end of the century, and within the humanist coteries of northern Italy, that we first discover the applied desire to promote the status and function of poetry and defend its appointment as an essential category of study. However, this enduring assessment of the period has more recently been challenged by an increasing critical awareness of the poetic and humanistic interests of the early university men.

In particular, the work of Roger Bacon OFM (d. 1292) represents perhaps the most substantial and egregious exception to this broad historical narrative. Compelled by his ambitions for pedagogic reform, Bacon argued for the privileged utility of poetry, claiming it as an important mode of moral persuasion and insisting on the recovery and re-evaluation of antique texts. Writing in the mid-thirteenth century in Paris and Oxford, Bacon not only offers us a unique response to the category of the poetic, but also serves as an important marker in charting the development of literary humanism in the period.

Central to Bacon's high estimation of poetic discourse is his assertion that moral science was the most noble part of philosophy and the final purpose of all knowledge. Bacon had recognized that the procedures of speculative logic were unable to adequately influence right action. The abstract complexities and linearity of dialectic and demonstration, which relied on the imperfect and fallen mechanisms of human perception, had only a limited impact on the will, and were considered unfit for the practical rigours of moral philosophy. Thus, while the speculative sciences culminated in naked truth, the practical sciences – moral philosophy and theology – pursued behavioural reform by stirring the individual to good works. The immediacy of poetic discourse, then, which appealed directly and suddenly to the mind, worked to circumvent the defective systems of logical analysis, and to configure the moral habits of the individual in a revelatory process of forceful induction.