religion. His outline of a history of English prose has yet to be 
examined seriously by literary historians. When, for example, 
Bacon says: “Then grew the learning of the Schoolmen to be 
utterly despised as barabarous” he does not say that he 
himself despises it. He has no respect for the ornate and 
affected eloquence that was currently trumped up.

     After this outline of some of the features of applied 
knowledge in Bacon’s medievalism, it is time to consider some 
of the applications of print technology to individual and 
national life. And here it is necessary to consider writers and 
the vernaculars as shaped by the new extension of the visual 
image by means of the press.

     Some writers have recently suggested that we can almost 
regard the whole of creative writing since the Renaissance as