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Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge

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Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge Assessing the Exotic: Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge by Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto © Copyright by Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt, 2018 ii Assessing the Exotic: Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto 2018 Abstract This study explores evidence structures in the medieval investigation of nature, particularly the marvelous or exotic nature that exists near the boundaries of natural philosophy. The marvelous, exotic, and unusual are fascinating to both readers and authors, providing windows into the ways in which the evidence structures of reason, authority, and experience were balanced in the assessment, explanation, and presentation of these phenomena. I look at four related works, each engaged with the compilation and presentation of particular information concerning animals and the diversity of the natural world. While these texts are bound together by shared topics and draw from a shared body of ancient and contemporary works, they each speak to different audiences and participate in different genres of literature. I argue that we can see in these works a contextually sensitive approach to the evaluation and presentation of evidence on the part of both the author and the audience. This project also seeks to bridge a gap between the intellectually rigorous medieval texts and works targeted at a wider reading audience that made use of the knowledge base of natural philosophy but were not necessarily produced or consumed within the scholastic context. Albertus Magnus’s De animalibus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum were iii produced, and expected to be consumed, within the Friars’ studium. While these texts also enjoyed a complex life outside these educational houses, they are marked by the scholastic educational context they were designed within and for. The Pseudo-Albertus experimentum texts Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium and De mirabilibus mundi as well as the travel narrative The Book of John Mandeville, on the other hand, may have been produced within an educated context but were consumed by a diverse cross-section of the reading population. By looking at these four texts together I explore the ways epistemic structures shift from the more scholastically inclined to the more popular texts, as well as point to the cross-pollination of medical, legal, and natural philosophical epistemologies in the ways each text shapes its epistemic structures to reflect the needs of its genre and audience. iv Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks first and foremost to my supervisor, Dr. Bert Hall, for his support and guidance. Thank you for pulling me out of intellectual rabbit holes and reminding me that dissertations have to finish. Thank you also to the members of my supervisory committee who have helped guide me through this project. To Dr. Suzanne Akbari, for her encouragement to look outside my self- imposed boundaries and to see the interesting and novel connections in my work. To Dr. Faith Wallis for pushing me to define my categories and for her amazing questions, for which I am never prepared, that always point me in the most enlightening and fruitful directions. Without their guidance this thesis would be at once less clear and far less interesting. I am grateful to Dr. Pamela O. Long and Dr. Rebecca Woods, for their questions and direction that pushed me to look to the future of this project even as I defended it. I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Brian Baigrie for his efforts in arranging my defence. Thank you to my parents, my partner, and my dog, for their attempts to keep me (mostly) sane throughout this process. I could not have made it through without you. Finally, I would like to thank Denise Horsley and Muna Salloum at the IHPST. Thank you for years of help dealing with paperwork, for accepting forms “just in time,” and for always knowing how to deal with the latest crisis. Without you this thesis would never have been submitted. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1 Overarching Goal 1 2 Epistemic Structures 16 3 Chapter Outline 25 Chapter 2: Albertus Magnus and De animalibus 33 1 Introduction 33 2 Methods of Reasoning About Nature 45 3 Creating a Coherent Picture of the World: The Bestiary Section of De animalibus 49 4 Diversity as the Underpinning of Albertus's Construction of the World 60 5 Evidence in Law and Natural Philosophy: Legal Evidence and the Reasoning of Albertus Magnus 71 6 Conclusion 76 Chapter 3: Bartholomaeus Anglicus and De proprietatibus rerum 78 1 Introduction 78 2 The Goals of the Text 88 3 Cosmology 101 4 Particulars 112 5 Active Contradictions 124 6 Experience and Experiment 129 7 Conclusion 134 vi Chapter 4: Experimenta and Books of Secrets 136 1 Introduction 136 2 Theory and Practice in Medicine 141 3 Pseudo-Albertus 148 4 De Virtutibus 155 5 De Mirabilibus 167 6 Texts of Practice 173 7 Conclusion 179 Chapter 5: The Book of John Mandeville 181 1 Introduction 181 2 The Book of John Mandeville and its Context 183 3 The Evidence Structures of The Book 192 4 Creating a Witness 199 5 A Comprehensive Worldview 210 6 Conclusion 217 Chapter 6: Conclusion 220 Bibliography 228 Chapter One: Introduction 1 Overarching Goal There is a long-standing trope in the history of science, perpetuated particularly in works on early modern science, that medieval scholars were focused primarily on organizing, interpreting, and parsing a body of natural knowledge inherited from antiquity. The tenacity of this view can be partially accounted for by the multi-faceted complexity of the medieval approach to nature. Modern investigations of how medieval scholars viewed the natural world have generally drawn on a set of sources that can be roughly divided into two types; what might be called popular texts such as the bestiaries, books of marvels, maps and travel literature, and the scholastic encyclopedias and studies of nature produced in the universities and studia.1 The popular manuscripts vary greatly in content but are frequently focused on the descriptions of particular plants or animals alongside discussions of their medical use, special powers, or symbolic meaning. There is still debate over exactly who used these texts and what purpose they served in medieval Western thought: from natural histories, to sermon resources, to reading instruction, the wide variety of these popular texts has led to equally varied speculation on their use and meaning.2 The medieval academic investigations of nature provide a different set of 1. This already introduces an artificial distinction based more on content than actual context of production or consumption. Many of the works here labeled popular, such as experimenta for instance, were produced by university or studium educated scholars and would have circulated within this educated community as well as outside it in the community of the courts. For some discussion of the production of experimenta and books of secrets see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 38-53. 2. Numerous excellent works exist dealing with these texts, so I will list only a few. For descriptions of the Bestiaries and varying views on their uses see Willene B. Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second- 1 2 information. They also vary greatly in content but they generally focus on theoretical questions about the materials, structure, and composition of the material world and the process of change within it.3 The medieval scholars who wrote them focused on questions of how the natural world worked, how animals were generated, how the function of sight was performed, and so produced a different type of text than the bestiaries, lapidaries, or experimenta. These very different sets of sources have led to a collection of different approaches taken by modern historians trying to unpack and interpret medieval understandings of the natural world. Through much of the twentieth century these two loosely categorized medieval bodies of literature on the natural world led to two lines of scholarly investigations by modern historians. One focuses on scholastic texts, attempting to situate medieval scientific debates within the context of the transformation of classical and Arabic learning as well as the development of a Western discourse of natural philosophy, particularly in relation to theological concerns. This separates it somewhat from the scholarship on what might be called popular works of bestiaries and lapidaries, that has tended to focus on the symbolic interpretation of plants, animals, and stones.4 The late eighties and nineties saw the beginning of attempts to bring these two sets of Family Bestiary (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006); and Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998). For discussion of the other popular texts see Margriet Hoogvliet, "Animals in Context: Beasts on the Hereford Map and Medieval Natural History," in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: The British Library, 2006), 153-165; Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400- 1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Evelyn Edson, "Mapping the Middle Ages: The Imaginary and Real Universe of the Mappaemundi," in Monsters, Marvels and Miracles, ed. Leif Søndergaard & Rasmus Thorning Hansen (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005), 11-25.
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