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

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

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.

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.

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. See also the articles in Il mondo animale/ The World of Animals, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). 3. For a discussion of these texts see chapter two of Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); or for an old but still useful detailed catalogue of most well-known manuscripts see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2, During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era (1923; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1947). 4. For scholars who focus on scholastic debates, see William A. Wallace, "The Scientific Methodology of St. Albert the Great,” in Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, ed. Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980), 385-407. Or John M. Riddle and James A. Mulholland, Albert on Stones and Minerals (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). A prime example of the focus on symbolism in bestiaries and lapidaries is Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users. 3 sources together. One of the approaches produced by these attempts was the concept of the emblematic world-view, originally expressed by William Ashworth as “an entirely different world from ours, a world where animals are just one aspect of an intricate language of metaphor, symbols, and emblems.”5 Peter Harrison built on this foundation and moved the locus of discussion much earlier in his book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, tracing the development of the emblematic world-view in the Middle Ages and how its destruction in the Reformation made the Scientific Revolution possible.6 Implicit in the discussion of the emblematic world-view, however, is a distancing of medieval and early modern natural philosophers from the world around them. Harrison made this distance more explicit than other scholars, but all save the most sensitive treatments of the emblematic world-view imply that the medieval scholars were not exploring the world as it is, but rather the world’s symbolic meanings. It is a view that functions well for the purposes of scholars of early modern natural philosophy, producing a clearly identifiable distinction between the character of medieval investigation and the empirical investigations of early modern philosophers.

The concept of the emblematic world-view is one means of dealing with a problem that modern scholars often encounter when reading medieval discussions of nature: namely, the particular phenomena medieval scholars reported. Many of the creatures, phenomena, or

5. William B. Ashworth Jr., "Natural History and the Emblematic World View," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Robert S. Westman David C. Lindberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305. In many ways the idea of the emblematic world view seems to be a reformulation of M.D. Chenu’s concept of the medieval symbolic mentality discussed in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 41-42.; cf. Ashworth “Emblematic World View," 311-313. 6. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a more succinct and somewhat more sensitive restatement of his argument see Harrison, "Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life," in The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23-44. 4 properties of nature reported seem outside the bounds of modern reality.7 While it is certainly necessary to understand that medieval readers engaged with the symbolic meaning and figurae they saw as inscribed in both text and nature, it is neither accurate nor especially helpful to gloss over their engagement with the natural world. In pushing back against this trope, however, medieval historians sometimes focused on bringing to light specific figures held up as exceptional champions of an empirical approach to nature.8 Other studies attempted to focus on finding the empirical roots of the seemingly fabulous. Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, for instance, have attempted to approach the ‘fabulous’ animals found in bestiaries as misunderstandings of ‘real’ animals; the tales of sailors or travelers that were gradually embellished into a creature virtually unrecognizable as to its original, ‘real’ aspect.9 In the history of medicine there exists a line of research, exemplified by the works of John M. Riddle, that seeks to identify the active ingredients in natural remedies that must have been known to the empirical practices of medieval folk medicine even if they were unknown to the theoretical construction of educated medicine.10 Both of these approaches unfortunately seem to rely on a somewhat naive approach to empiricism. They rely on the notion that experience of an objective

7. Modern readers might have difficulty crediting the existence of sirens, the phoenix, or dragons, all of which are reported frequently in medieval texts ranging from De animalibus to The Book of John Mandeville. 8. Albertus Magnus, for example, used to be seen as an early empiricist. See as an example Robin S. Oggins, "Albertus Magnus on Falcons and Hawks," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 441-62. Recent explorations of Roger Bacon are more thoughtful but still somewhat interested in finding heroes of empiricism in the Middle Ages. Jeremiah Hackett, “Ego Expertus Sum: Roger Bacon’s Science and the Origins of Empiricism” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 145-173.

9. Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991). 10. See John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Riddle, Goddesses, Elixirs, and Witches: Plants and Sexuality throughout Human History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For an excellent critique of this position see Michael McVaugh, “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism,” in Natura, scienze e società medievali: Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, eds. Claudio Leonardi e Francesco Santi (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 177-194. 5 world will always render the same information that can then be correctly or incorrectly interpreted. Possibly more importantly, they also rely on an assumption that the language used to discuss evidence concerning nature can be easily translated into modern concepts.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump marked a turn in the focus of historians of science to reflect on aspects of the process of natural investigation that had long been considered intuitive, objective, or universal, particularly questions of the social process by which experience and testimony could be turned into facts.11 Since then there has been a great deal of work exploring these issues in the history of science, but medieval historians are presented with a unique problem in this line of investigation. In the attempt to understand the process of natural investigation medieval historians must walk a careful line between the necessary assertion that natural investigation in the Middle Ages did in fact engage with testimony and experience, and carefully articulating the precise complexities of terms like experientia or observatio, terms that cannot be simply assimilated into the modern concept of experience.12

We can see some of the complexities of this problem illustrated in the works of those historians seeking to find the roots of the new empirical science developed in the Early Modern period and in the connected discussion of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature.

Peter Dear has argued for an intellectual shift in the conceptualization of experiment that marks the division between medieval Aristotelianism and early modern experimentalism. On his account, to the extent that Aristotelians made use of experience, it was necessarily experience of

11. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. For examples see the articles in Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants, eds., Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009) (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011); Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 6 the normal course of nature. The Aristotelian division between art and nature meant that intervention in the process of nature made experiment invalid for creating natural knowledge.

Intellectual shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, connected to changing mathematical approaches, led to the rise of experimentalists who ascribed value to the highly constructed experiences they developed from experiments as a means of creating natural knowledge.13 This strong division between art and science in Aristotelian natural philosophy has been challenged recently, particularly by the work of Mark J. Scheifsky. He has argued that the division between art and nature in Aristotle, and Antiquity more generally, presented a much more complex distinction, one that saw art as imitating nature on the one hand but also capable of going beyond nature to bring about effects that unaided nature could not. He also attempts to carve out a space in which mechanics was considered capable of producing natural knowledge: through machines used as models for understanding natural processes and through the use of mathematical properties of physical bodies as a means of explaining behaviors. Scheifsky suggests that the modern interpretation of a hard distinction between art and nature in Antiquity, with art necessarily in an inferior role, has created a warped perception of the role of art in Aristotelian natural philosophy.14

William Newman has presented an even stronger form of this argument, suggesting that the modern misunderstanding of this distinction has led to a collection of false assumptions about the value of experiment in medieval thought. He argues that modern scholars have constructed

13. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), particularly chapter 1, 21-25; Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Introduction. 14. Mark J. Scheifsky, “Art and Nature in Ancient Mechanics,” in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, eds. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 67- 108; For a discussion of alchemy and this division between art and nature in the thirteenth century, see William Newman, "Art, Nature, Alchemy, and Demons: The Case of the Malleus Maleficarum and Its Medieval Sources,” in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, eds. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 109-133. 7 what he terms the non-interventionist fallacy: inappropriately representing medieval scholars as opposed to experience or experiment. Newman, however, does not give a great deal of thought to the complexities of speaking about experience and experiment. While he points to a line of interventionist alchemical practice performed by educated alchemists, we must be wary of overextending this to other aspects of medieval natural investigation.15

Exploring the role of craft knowledge in the development of empirical science, Pamela O.

Long, Pamela Smith, and Deborah Harkness all point to technical, artistic, and cultural changes—that mostly begin in the mid fifteenth century—linked with the rise of the intellectual programme of humanism and the interaction between the educated elite and the artisans who were developing new techniques and machines.16 Long particularly has argued that the

15. William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34-114, 238-250. As we will discuss in this thesis, references to experience and experiment were not necessarily references to the direct experience of the author. For an example see John B. Friedman, "Albert the Great's Topoi of Direct Observation and His Debt to Thomas of Cantimpré," in Pre- Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (New York: Brill, 1997), 379-392; Isabelle Draelants, “Expérience et autorités dans la philosophie naturelle d’Albert le Grand,” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), ed. Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 89-121. For an example of the complexity of generalizing the status of experience in alchemy to other forms of natural investigation see Chiara Crisciani’s excellent exploration of the differing role of experience in alchemy and medicine. As she points out, although these are both disciplines that must fundamentally mix theory and practice, the role of experience in their knowledge construction is significantly different. She also suggests that these epistemic differences may be related to the different reception of medicine and alchemy by educational institutions. Chiara Crisciani, “Experientia e opus in medicina ed alchimia: Forme e problemi di esperienza nel tardo medioevo,” Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L'esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004): 149- 73. 16. I group these authors together because they share a broad argument focusing on the importance of contact between skilled practitioners and educated natural philosophy as the root of scientific change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All three authors discuss the existence of empirical values in the broader culture that contact with craft knowledge helped to transmit to educated natural philosophy. While not identical to Long, Pamela H. Smith’s arguments about the role of Flemish art in the development of a culture of empirical values has many strong similarities with the broad argument Long lays out. Similarly, Deborah E. Harkness focuses on the importance of Elizabethan London in developing the cultural and epistemic values that Francis Bacon articulates as a new science. See Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400- 1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), chapters 3 and 4; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 8 dichotomous categories that we have used for this discussion have obscured our understanding because it is precisely the breakdown of these categories in the fifteenth century—thanks to the development of the humanist intellectual program and the rise of the artisan/practitioner—that causes natural investigation to take on a new empirical focus. This breakdown of categories leads to what she sees as an encounter between educated natural investigation and a broader culture of empirical values that spurs the use of experience in the construction of natural knowledge. All of these studies, however, are interested in understanding the changes in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries that led to a new investigation of nature and so are very focused on new developments and articulating divisions between the mid to late fifteenth century and the previous culture.

Although Long repeatedly reminds the reader that humanism can be traced back to as early as the mid fourteenth century, her focus is primarily on the breakdown of divisions between the artisan/practitioner and the learned elites that she articulates as located in the fifteenth century.17

While Long, Smith, and Harkness do not argue for a radical break with previous culture, they are focused on novelty and the significant social, cultural, and technical changes of the fifteenth century, rather than articulating connections with the past. Additionally, experience as a category in craft knowledge seems much less difficult to pin down than the category of experience in natural philosophy we will attempt to track here. We will return to Long’s discussion of a broader culture of empirical values in discussing the different epistemic structures at play, particularly in the experimenta and The Book of John Mandeville.

Stephen Epstein’s The Medieval Discovery of Nature takes a different approach, attempting to track the development of the concept of Nature itself. By the engagement with

Nature Epstein means the living ecology of the world. He manages to address to some extent the

17. Long, Artisan/Practitioners, 1-9, 127-131. 9 issue of direct engagement with the world even while the main discussion focuses on the development of an idea of nature as Nature.18 While his work is interesting and insightful, it is only tangentially related to this project as he is focused on tracking the development of a specific notion of nature rather than exploring the ways evidence concerning nature was evaluated.

Much recent scholarship has done invaluable work articulating the complexities of concepts like experience as well as the actual role of sense experience in in medieval natural investigation.19 In the introduction to the collection of essays on experience in the Middle Ages,

Expertus sum, Draelants points out that the medieval approach to experience does not give it the kind of independent status it, theoretically, acquires in early modern science. It is one argumentative tool whose objective, like the tools of reason and authority, is to convince the reader of the truth of what is said. Experience is not treated as something exterior to the theory that can be used as an objective test but as one tool among several that can be easily mixed with the tests of reason and authority.20 These works explore the historical categories associated with

18. Stephen Epstein, The Medieval Discovery of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19. In addition to the two collections in n.12 see also, Marco Veneziani, ed., Experientia: X Colloquio Internazionale Roma, 4-6 gennaio 2001 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2002); Constantino Esposito and Pasquale Porro, ed., Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L’esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004); Alexander Fidora, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, et al., eds., Erfahrung und Beweis: die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/ Experience and Demonstration: The Sciences of Nature in the 13th and 14th Centuries (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007); Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Alexander Fidora, eds., Handlung und Wissenschaft: Die Epistemologie der praktischen Wissenschaften im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/Action and Science: The Epistemology of the Practical Sciences in the 13th and 14th Centuries (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Michael McVaugh, “The ‘Experience Based Medicine’ of the Thirteenth Century,” in Evidence and Interpretation in Studies of Early Science and Medicine: Essays in Honor of John E. Murdoch, eds. Edith Sylla and William Newman (Boston: Brill, 2009) 105-130; Danielle Jacquart, “Médecine universitaire et créativité intellectuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Sedes Scientiæ: L’émergence de la recherche à l’Université: Contributions au séminaire d’ histoire des sciences 2000-2001, eds. Patricia Radelet-de Grave and Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 17-32; for a discussion of the issue in the particular context of magic see Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre Science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006). For recent extensions of these questions into antiquity see the articles in Jason König and Greg Woolf, eds., Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Francesca Rochberg, Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 20. Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants, “Introduction,” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 3-5. 10 knowledge construction but a complimentary line of work has developed within the philosophy of science that has also returned to reevaluate the epistemology of medieval scholars partly through the history of skepticism and error.21

Christine Silvi has illustrated the wide variety of ways these categories can be employed through her careful linguistic study of French vernacular encyclopedias. She has catalogued and counted the references to specific authorities and drawn a collection of interesting and informative conclusions based on her analysis of this data. While she is careful to limit her claims to vernacular French literature, her discussion of the uses of authority is informative for considering Latin encyclopedic texts as well.22 As interesting as her analysis is, however, I believe that further examination and interpretation of these works may contribute to our understanding of the balance between the categories of experience, reason, and authority as well.

Her careful linguistic study has yielded interesting results but it is not a methodology I am equipped to imitate.

Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s Wonder and the Order of Nature brings together the figurative and literal readings of nature through a history of the category of wonder and marvel. They treat wonder as a category at the margins of the natural that points to the unknown, the unexplained, and the symbolically meaningful. The categories of wonder and marvel are also important to my work for the same reasons, because as Daston and Park have discussed, wonder is a category that points to the boundaries and breaches in the system of knowledge.23 By exploring the phenomena that cross the boundaries of categories, from natural to preternatural,

21. See particularly G.R. Evans, Getting it Wrong: The Medieval Epistemology of Error (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Henrik Lagerlund, ed., Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background, (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds., Uncertain Knowledge: Skepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 22. Christine Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité: Étude linguistique de l’expression du vrai dans le discours scientifique en langue vulgaire (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2003). 23. Daston and Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 13-21. 11 from known to occult, we can examine the ways different categories of evidence are martialed to determine the reality of phenomena and to understand or explain them. I will use wonder as a springboard to questions of the use of evidence to incorporate wonder and marvel into a coherent picture of nature.

The focus of this study is on nature, but particularly the marvelous or exotic nature that exists near the boundaries of natural philosophy. The same phenomena that offer a challenge to the modern reader’s understanding of medieval depictions of nature frequently offer windows into the ways in which diverse and complex nature was made coherent and comprehensible.

Daston and Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature offered an interesting view of a history of monstrosity and wonder in medieval and early modern Europe, but our understanding of both wonder and experience as categories in medieval writing have changed since their book was published.24 The monstrous and marvelous stand out as particular natural phenomena that required explanation and incorporation into a coherent view of nature. Despite the continued assertions that natural philosophy could only be a science of generalities and universals we see a fairly consistent interest in both audiences and authors to deal with the particulars of nature.25

Particular phenomena need to be explained. For all that medieval scholars asserted that the goal of natural philosophy was to understand universals, the literature of natural philosophy seems fascinated with explaining the particulars. The marvelous, the exotic, and the unusual are

24. The view of wonder has been significantly complicated by Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages: The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast, 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Caroline Walker Bynum in both Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); and Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) since the publication of Wonder and the Order of Nature. Also, as the list in n.19 shows, the majority of the work on epistemic categories of experience and observation were also subsequent to this book. 25. Benedict M. Ashley, “St. Albert and the Nature of Natural Science,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 73- 102. 12 fascinating to readers and authors and they provide windows into the ways in which evidence categories are balanced in the assessment, explanation, and presentation of these phenomena.

I will be focusing on certain broad commonalities as a means of linking texts that exist in significantly different intellectual contexts; their participation in the broadly defined category of encyclopedia and their interest in describing and presenting the particulars of nature. Each text excerpts, organizes, or explicates information in ways that create a particular and coherent view of nature. I am focusing on discussions of particulars; animals, plants, and stones, on the exotic and marvels precisely because these create a liminal intellectual space where experience could, and must, be deployed alongside reason and authority as a means of constructing or presenting natural knowledge. This thesis is not about experience as such, although experience is a significant preoccupation. Instead it seeks to make use of the excellent work that has been done establishing our understanding of epistemic structures of medieval natural philosophy and explore the balance of experience, authority, and reason as epistemological tools used by authors compiling and explicating information about the natural world. Mary Franklin-Brown has argued that the textual practices of knowledge construction in Scholastic encyclopedias both reflect and influence the intellectual development of the period. On her account “genre shapes both scientific writing and scientific thought, both philosophical writing and philosophical thought, because there is no viable distinction to be maintained between them.”26 While I do not follow

Franklin-Brown completely,27 I do agree that we need to pay close attention to the ways that

26. Mary Franklin-Brown, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 16, more generally 8-17. 27. Her study focuses on authority and textual acts as the primary means of making truth claims. While she is conscious of experience as a minority paradigm for knowledge construction her focus is very explicitly on authority and knowledge construction as literary practice founded primarily on citation. As we will see in the discussion of De proprietatibus rerum in chapter 3 the majority of epistemic weight is given to the kind of citation practices and textual authority that Franklin-Brown focuses on. The texts used in this thesis, however, show that other knowledge-making paradigms, including experience, should also be present in our discussion. See Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, Introduction, especially 14-16. 13 genre and audience shape a given author’s approach to evidence and the expression of scientific information. The goal here is to gain a better understanding of the contextually sensitive ways these epistemic tools were adopted and presented by authors writing in related but different works intended for different audiences and participating in slightly different genres. In this thesis

I look at four related works, each in its own way encyclopedic—in a broad understanding of the term28—and 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—though not uniform—body of ancient and contemporary works, they each speak to different audiences29 and participate in different genres of literature. As such, as I will argue, the balancing of experience, reason, and authority as epistemically valuable categories of evidence for evaluating and presenting information shifts significantly. A part of my goal here is to suggest that this does not make one author any more credulous or intellectually critical than another; rather, it represents a contextually sensitive approach to the evaluation and presentation of evidence on the part of both the author and the audience in medieval natural investigation.

This project also seeks to bridge a gap between the intellectually rigorous medieval texts that typically form the basis of modern examinations of medieval epistemology and works

28. For a short discussion of the modern use of broad or narrow definition of encyclopedias in the Middle Ages, see Elizabeth Keen, “Shifting Horizons: The Medieval Compilation of Knowledge as Mirror of a Changing World” in Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds. Jason König and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 277-300; Robert L. Fowler, “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3-30. 29. I should note here that each of the texts discussed was fairly widely read in its own intellectual context and frequently took on new life and new readership over time. Because of the complex lives each of these texts led the audience and distribution of each text will be addressed individually at the beginning of each chapter. To say that the texts spoke to different audiences, however, is not intended to indicate that there is not significant overlap in the readership of each text. Indeed it is entirely possible that one individual would have read all four texts. I am trying rather to suggest that the texts were produced and read in related but different intellectual contexts with different assumptions. 14 targeted at a wider reading audience that made use of the knowledge base of natural philosophy but which were not necessarily produced or consumed within the scholastic context. Albertus

Magnus’ De animalibus marks the first point along this scale as a text produced within a scholastic intellectual context and intended to be consumed within the educational context of the

Dominican studia.30 De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus is the truest encyclopedia among these texts and also a direct product of the scholastic intellectual environment intended for use within the Franciscan studia. It enjoyed a complex and wide- ranging life outside the studium, however, both as an educational resource in universities and in private libraries as well as undergoing translation into multiple vernacular languages.31 Similarly the Pseudo-Albertus experimentum texts Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium and De mirabilibus mundi were most probably produced within a scholastic intellectual context but exist as texts of practice in a way entirely unlike the other texts considered.32 They allow us to reflect on the cross-pollination of information between medical and natural philosophical intellectual contexts as well as exploring a work that highlights experience in a particular way.

Finally we will explore The Book of John Mandeville, one of the most widely read and copied works of the Middle Ages. This work, most likely produced in a monastic context, was read by a

30. James A. Weisheipl, “Life and Works of St. Albert” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); Kennith F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven M. Resnick, "Introduction: The Life and Works of Albert the Great," in Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, eds. Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven M. Resnick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 40-42. 31. Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” in De Proprietatibus Rerum eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele, Heinz Meyer, et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 3-34. 32. Isabelle Draelants, “Partie I. Commentaire,” in Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium (Liber aggregationis): Un texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, ed. and trans. Isabelle Draelants, Micrologus’ Library 22 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni Dell Galluzzo, 2007), 32-56; Antonella Sannino, “Il testo,” in Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale, ed. Antonella Sannino, Micrologus’ Library 41 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni Del Galluzzo, 2011), 15-24, 55-57. 15 huge cross-section of the population and through it I will suggest the importance of legal and well as philosophical concepts of evidence particularly in popular works.33

1.1 A Note on Audience

I should note here that each of the texts discussed was fairly widely read in its own intellectual context and frequently took on new life and new readership over time.34 Because of the complex lives each of these texts led, the audience and distribution of each text will be addressed individually at the beginning of each chapter. To say that the texts spoke to different audiences, however, is not intended to indicate that there is not significant overlap in the readership of each text. Indeed it is entirely possible that one individual would have read all four texts. I am trying rather to suggest that the texts were produced and read in related but different intellectual contexts that would produce differing assumptions concerning their construction of natural knowledge. The individual who read both Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus and The Book of John Mandeville would surely have approached them with significantly different expectations, even though the texts share certain broad commonalities in source material and content. It is fair to say that a text like De animalibus is written to participate in a scholastic discourse in a way

33. John Larner, “Plucking Hairs from the Great Cham’s Beard,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, eds. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 137- 142; Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 34. For example, De proprietatibus rerum had several distinctly different audiences at different times. For a brief overview of the ways the text was reshaped for different audiences see Heinz Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte von, De proprietatibus rerum’ (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 232-237. For two more detailed examples see Juris Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 393-406; and Christine Silvi, “Jean Corbechon «revisité»: Revoir, corriger et diffuser le Propriétaire en françois dans les incunables et les post-incunables,” in Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires, eds. Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 89-123. 16 that The Book of John Mandeville, or even De proprietatibus rerum, is not. Similarly, even though I have said that these texts all take part in the broad genre of encyclopedia—a genre that is as much a useful modern construct as a medieval reality35—they also participate in aspects of other literary and intellectual genre that contribute to their different approaches to evidence. At the same time each text attempts to present a coherent picture of the world and the ways the author chooses to do so reflect their context and audience.

2 Epistemic Structures

The recent work exploring the meanings of the terms experientia, auctoritas, and ratio demonstrates that it is difficult to draw hard distinctions based on the uses of these terms by medieval authors. These terms are multifaceted in themselves and intertwined in a complex manner that does not lend itself to the kind of delineation necessary for articulating how they interact in medieval natural knowledge. In her masterful linguistic discussion of authority in Old

French literature, for instance, Christine Silvi highlights a collection of complex and provocative ways to understand argument from authority, but in doing so it becomes an expansive category that almost encompasses truth claims as a whole.36 In this work I am seeking to explore the relationship between types of evidence so I must attempt to find productive ways of defining the epistemic categories in play that both follow contemporary understandings of these concepts and are also useful categories for the purpose of our investigation. This is the reason I have chosen to

35. Margriet Hoogvliet, “Mappae Mundi and Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image versus text,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 63-74; Bernard Ribémont, “On the Definition of an Encyclopaedic Genre in the Middle Ages,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 47-61; Michael W. Twomey, “Inventing the Encyclopedia,” In Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, eds. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 73-92.

36. Christine Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité. 17 use the English terms experience, authority, and reason to designate the epistemological structures at play in medieval natural philosophy. While each category is built on the recognizable structures of contemporary thought, the need to focus them and establish lines between them as a means of discussing their balance makes it necessary to acknowledge that they are, at least to some extent, idealizations and not perfect representations of contemporary categories.

2.1 Experience

Experientia and experimentum are complex terms that do not map cleanly onto our own understanding of what experience would mean. As Isabelle Draelants articulates in her introduction to the study on experience, Expertus sum, the medieval use of the terms experientia and experimenta cannot be assimilated into the modern understanding of experience. For medieval scholars experience is not always direct. Medieval knowers frequently invoke experiences that they have not personally had but that they find recorded in texts. References to experience can occur through supernatural or spiritual phenomena: it is not limited to the common order of nature nor necessarily to what can be perceived by the senses. Finally, even when experience is direct and concerns physical phenomena it does not constitute a rigorous program of investigation intended to confirm a hypothesis.37 While no medieval scholar would deny the possibility of forming knowledge through experience, the diversity of natural phenomena and the fallibility of the human senses meant that it was extremely difficult to generalize from individual experience. It was thus the most suspect of the three evidence

37. Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,” 5-6. 18 categories we are discussing. Under the best conditions experience produced an immediate knowledge that is distinct from the abstract knowledge desired by scientia.38

Having established what medieval experience was not, it becomes harder to pin down exactly what it was. Experientia could be used to indicate first-hand experience of the senses, evidence from the senses capable of being combined with the epistemic tools of ratio and auctoritas for the purpose of convincing a reader or supporting a knowledge claim. It is equally likely to refer to written accounts of experience from reliable authors, or to represent a quality possessed by a particularly knowledgeable or skilled individual; expertise.39 Similarly experimentum has its own range of meaning from concerning an identified and measured fact of nature or, more frequently, a catalogue of recipes or animals, plants, and minerals where the properties and effects are detailed. In this sense it refers to the product of experience.40

In this thesis I am most interested in moments that suggest the author or reader is evaluating or employing sense experience of the natural world, whether their own or derived from the claims of an expert or reliable witness. While the category has the potential to tell us about the role that sense experience and the interaction with the world play in medieval natural philosophy, we must always be aware that the terms used to refer to experience do not necessarily relate to the author’s direct intervention, even though they do imply the value of sense engagement as a means of approaching nature.41 As is well known in the works of Albertus

Magnus, claims to experience were often drawn from previous authors stripped of their citations.42 The introduction of experimentum or experientia frequently draws on a known body

38. Arnaud Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui?”, in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 22. 39. Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,” 7-10. 40. Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui,” 20-23. 41. See Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,”; and Zucker “Expertine sunt Antiqui.”

42. Friedman, "Albert’s Topoi of Observation"; see also Isabelle Draelants, “Expérience et autorités.” 19 of exempla from authorities and can be seen as a means of gathering support from authority. We must be careful, therefore, not to assume that all references to experientia or even statements beginning with “I saw” refer specifically to, or conjure in the reader, the assumption that the author is relating their own sense experience.43 We can, however, still attempt to dig for an understanding of the role sense experience played in medieval knowledge construction, as long as we are careful to understand that the terms experientia, experimentum, and even expertus sum, cannot be simply translated into sense experience. At the same time there does exist—within the terms experientia and experimentum but also conveyed through other means—the importance of sense experience to understanding and communicating information about nature. While we must be careful to consider the range of possible meanings wrapped up in the terms experientia, experimentum, and expertus sum, we can still attempt to sift through medieval texts to gain an understanding of how sense experience could be used as an epistemic tool for gaining knowledge about the world and for convincing others of the truth of a knowledge claim.

For the purpose of this thesis I will be focusing on instances where claims to experience do appear to be appealing to sense experience of nature for part or all of their epistemic value.

Whether the individual is actually articulating his own experience is less important than the choice to use sense experience as a tool for establishing the credibility of his knowledge claim.

In all cases we are dealing with textual sources so the value of experience lies in its presentation in the text and the weight that its author and reader grant it. In this context experience is always necessarily mediated by the text it is presented in. It is therefore, at a certain level, always testimony and extremely difficult to entirely disassociate from the authority that backs it.

Questions of the author’s or witnesses’ credibility will always, therefore, play a role in

43. Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui,” 23-24. 20 experience claims. As such we will be paying more attention to the ways in which references to experience are presented, evaluated, and used in order to support or refute knowledge claims about the world. The question is rarely “did this experience happen?” as much as “what is the value ascribed to experience as a means of producing knowledge or supporting this knowledge claim?”

We should not be surprised to find phenomena referred to in the texts as being proven by experience even if we do not believe that they are possible. As Michael McVaugh has pointed out, we must be conscious that we frequently have very little information about how—or if—a test was conducted or what was considered to constitute proof in this context. For medical recipes this makes it very difficult to know exactly how to assess a recipe that asserts it was proven by experience, or proved to be effective.44 Experience, even when assumed to be exclusively first-hand sense experience, is fundamentally enmeshed with the theoretical commitments of the subject and cannot be perceived as some outside test against which a theory could be compared and discarded. When John Mandeville tells us that he has tested or proved the claim that diamonds can be made to grow we will be more interested in the deployment of a claim that implies sense experience as an important means of supporting this knowledge claim, than on the question of whether he was, in fact, lying.45 Albertus Magnus is known to reproduce claims to experience by the unidentified author referred to as Experimentator without citation.

This certainly has an impact on his status as a champion of sense experience, but for our purposes it is more interesting that he found these claims to experience useful to demonstrate his arguments. We must be conscious that his use of the term experientia can tell us something about

44. McVaugh, “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism,” 177-194. 45. Iain Macleod Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 99; Christiane Deluz, Jean de Mandeville: Le Livre de merveilles du monde (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 306. 21 the use of experience as an epistemic tool but we must approach it carefully and it certainly does not necessarily mean that Albertus himself had the experience. It must be acknowledged, therefore, that in this thesis for experience to be a useful category of evidence we must recognize that it must also be at least somewhat artificial.

2.2 Authority

Similarly, we must define what we mean by authority as an epistemic structure here.

There has been a great deal of work on authority in medieval literature and frequently these studies have taken a wide-ranging approach to use of the term authority. From nearly its earliest uses the term auctoritas was bound up with concepts of political and familial power and it is extremely difficult to disentangle literary authority from political and social authority, particularly in the context of translation into vernacular languages.46 Taking this broader approach to examine the uses of auctoritas, authority can thus become not a specific category of evidence but a term encompassing all textual acts that provide support for the author’s truth claims in the work, as well as referring to the construction of political and religious authority.47

While these studies have been extremely productive in understanding authority, power, and authorship in medieval literature, this approach creates a category far too expansive to be used in this particular study of epistemic tools. For this reason, I intend to use a much closer definition of

46. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39-47. 47. For examples see the articles collected in Michel Zimmermann, ed., Auctor and auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en- Yvelines (14-16 join 1999) (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001); Marianne Børch, ed., Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004); Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power; Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). On authority and vernacular texts, see Alastair J. Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyens, eds., Translation and Authority: Authorities in Translation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016). 22 authority that draws on a specific contemporary use of auctores as a body of credible textual sources.

In his natural histories Pliny the Elder—in recounting the physical variety, manners, and customs of peoples living in remote places—states that he will not put forward claims based on his own credibility but ascribe the facts to the authorities (auctores) because of their greater diligence and devotion to study.48 To Pliny’s values of superior industry and devotion to study medieval scholars added the divine authority of scripture and the divine inspiration present in the works of the Church Fathers, but it is this sense of authority as constituted by a textual body of reliable sources that we are interested in here. Technically auctoritas could be used to refer to excerpts and quotations of the auctores, a collection of authors whose texts were considered to possess sagacity and veracity, whether through divine inspiration, literary quality, or intellectual merit. The auctores were generally not contemporaries of late medieval scholars and we can consider auctoritas––in this usage––to represent a body of literature made up predominantly of ancient writers and Church Fathers whose works had gained credibility of their own through the belief in the intrinsic value of the works as well as the knowledge and dedication to study of the auctor.49 In practice, however, authoritative texts were more complicated and much less fixed than this description suggests. While there were generally recognized auctores each discipline also had its own collection of authoritative works.50 As we will see over the course of this study, particularly in the discussion of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum, the use of sources to provide authority is not limited strictly to ancient auctores. In the context of

48. Pliny, Natural History, vol. 2, Books 3-7, trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 352 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2:VII.i, 510-513. 49. Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 10-14, 85-117. Although rather old, this work remains an important and frequently cited resource on authority and authorship. 50. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 12-14. 23 encyclopedias we can more usefully break authorities down into the categories of Scripture, the patres, doctores, and philosophi. These categories could include contemporary scholars and were not fixed groupings but fluctuated between encyclopedias.51 It is also important to note that this textual body of authority has often been perceived as creating a constraining body of work but medieval scholars were also able to excerpt it, rearrange, it and make use of it in constructing novel and expansive works.52 By collecting and re-interpreting the works of auctores though commentary, compilatio, or other forms, medieval authors were able to build their own work in important ways that used auctoritas rather than being limited by it.

Authority as a category of evidence cannot, therefore, be perfectly constrained to this technical definition of auctoritas. It does, however, identify a manageable starting point for a category of evidence that would be recognizable to medieval scholars in practice. I shall discuss the epistemic structure of authority as pertaining to the reliance on excerpts, references, and citations in which the name of the author or work—whether the authority of these authors derives from philosophical, religious, or literary qualities—is deployed as an important part of the evidence for the credibility of the knowledge claim. I will also attempt to differentiate between authority as an epistemic structure and credibility, which I will use more generally to describe the reliability of authors and compilers as well as the acts aimed at supporting the truth value of their own—or in the case of The Book of John Mandeville the narrator’s—knowledge claims rather than drawing on the auctores.

51. For two studies that attempt to create useful typologies of the authorities used in encyclopedic texts see Christine Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité; and Isabelle Draelants, “La science naturelle et les sources chez Barthélemy l’Anglais et les encyclopédistes contemporains,” Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 43-99. It is important to note that this does not exhaust the meanings of the term auctoritas. As Scanlon points out, the concepts of literary and political authority are entangled nearly from the earliest known uses of the term. For further discussion see Scanlon, Narative, Authority, and Power, 39-46; Minnis, Translations of Authority. 52. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, chapter 3; Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité, Particularly chapters 2-4. 24

2.3 Reason

Ratio is, happily, a comparatively uncomplicated and recognizable category in medieval texts referring to argument based on logical structures and, particularly in the context of natural philosophy, the process of rational demonstration. This mode of argumentation was passed down through the works of late antique scholars like Boethius, which used reason rather than theological authority to demonstrate theological truths. With the translation and adoption of

Aristotelian philosophical works from Greek and Arabic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rational demonstration became generally recognized as the foundation of scientific knowledge.

Axiomatic premises are, however, hard to come by when dealing with nature. In the practice of natural philosophy Aristotle became the model for a rational method of investigating nature; as

Burnett puts it “In this form of argumentation, which twelfth-century commentators (following

Boethius) referred to as ratio, premises are inferred from the experience of the senses. The resulting arguments are ‘probable’ (‘probabilis’) and their validity must be judged on the basis of their reasonableness (ratio).”53 Particularly in the context of natural philosophy ratio was often used and presented as a tool capable of either opposing or supporting auctoritas.54

Reason is thus largely able to map on to the contemporary category of ratio, since in its contemporary use it was frequently perceived as a specific tool for the production and presentation of knowledge. I will thus use it for those knowledge claims where the argument or reasoning itself is expected to provide the necessary support.

53. Charles Burnett, “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 2, Medieval Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 380. 54. Burnett, “Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” 378-382; For a more general and wide-ranging discussion of the category of reason see Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly chapter 5. 25

As may be illustrated by this attempt at creating useful definitions, the categories of evidence in medieval thought are complex, overlapping, and interrelated. In attempting to sort through them and understand their balance we must attempt to understand the contemporary categories themselves as well as possible, but for the sake of clarity we must also attempt to differentiate them in ways that may appear to create the existence of firm lines that did not exist in contemporary minds. These epistemic tools could be, and were, combined in inventive and complex ways, particularly when considering the employment of experience and experiments passed down through authoritative texts. While the categories I have outlined represent useful heuristic tools we should be careful not to interpret them too rigidly.

3 Chapter Outline

3.1 Chapter 2: De animalibus of Albertus Magnus

In De animalibus Albertus demonstrates a careful and critical approach to the task of constructing a coherent picture of nature. He shows us a complex approach to evaluating evidence concerning parts of the world he has no access to. The epistemic structures of reason, experience, and authority are carefully weighed in each case, but reason offers the only certain way of refuting a claim. The diversity of nature creates a wide possibility space, where experience may be used to confirm or call into question reports, but it is not sufficient to refute a claim. It is possible for something to be contrary to our expectations of nature but still explicable through natural causes. Monstrous births occur because of the subversion of certain natural processes but they occur extremely rarely and still are explicable by natural mechanisms. They violate expectations, but not natural reason. Reason allows Albertus to sift through testimony to determine that which is possible based on natural mechanism and that which is not, such as a 26 creature capable of living in fire. Reason allows him to throw out a claim that suggests that natural principles are violated on a regular basis, such as the birth of a basilisk from the egg of a cock. These things Albertus is willing to refute entirely. The rejuvenatory power of the eagle, however, is susceptible to explanation via natural reason. It is unexpected but it does not violate natural principles or natural mechanism in any way. Thus, even though it has not been experienced by contemporaries, his understanding of the diversity of the natural world makes

Albertus unwilling to reject the story. He includes it in the information considered accurate as he attempts to construct an image of the natural world.

The evidence structures traced in the work of Albertus Magnus form the foundation of this study. In subsequent chapters we will explore texts that move gradually toward a popular or extra-scholastic context and see the ways that the authors’ use of evidence shifts according to changing context. There is no one universal approach in medieval natural philosophy to balancing the epistemic value of reason, experience, and authority; rather, there is a spectrum of shifting practices that seems closely tied to the intellectual context of the intended audience.

3.2 Chapter 3: De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus

The De proprietatibus rerum shows us a very different set of epistemic structures following its own genre and goal. The task Bartholomaeus has undertaken is one of compiling and, as such, he avoids articulating his reasons for choosing between authorities in the way

Albertus does. Bartholomaeus instead attempts to present a coherent view of the world by ordering and juxtaposing the accounts of his authorities in such a way as to present room for concordance in matters of cosmology. The concept of the diversity of nature once more plays an important role in allowing Bartholomaeus freedom to present conflicting information from 27 authorities in the context of the particulars of nature. The goal of compilation marks the text and places authority as its epistemic core. Natural diversity serves as a means of producing a coherent view of the world out of the widely varying reports of authorities. Conflicts of cosmology are smoothed away while marvel and diversity create a space where conflicts on the particulars of nature can be tolerated.

The world Bartholomaeus describes encompasses all the texts discussed in this thesis.

The careful natural history of Albertus is visible in discussions of generation and corruption, while the practice-oriented medico-magical information of the experimenta is visible in the individual properties of animals or diseases. The world he describes is also recognizably the world of Mandeville and the mappae mundi. The reader is capable of engaging with these different texts equally because each establishes its epistemic structures according to the genre and context of the work.

3.3 Chapter 4: The experimenta of Pseudo-Albertus

As we move towards works connected to what might be called the popular sphere, we also move away from knowledge of the work’s author. While De animalibus and De proprietatibus rerum were unquestionably written by the individuals they are ascribed to, the two experimenta I will discuss are pseudonymous and, as we will see shortly, the figure of John

Mandeville is completely fictional. Such complexities of authorship offer us interesting windows into the relationship between the author and the credibility of the text. These two experimenta are ascribed to Albertus Magnus as a means of supporting their knowledge claims through his established credibility, despite being written by an unknown hand.55 Likewise the development

55. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 15-17, 26-29; Sannino, “Il testo,” 55-57. 28 of the figure of Mandeville can offer us an excellent window into the creation of a credible author precisely because John Mandeville probably never existed.56 These works enjoyed a wide circulation and have as much to tell us about the construction of credible knowledge as those works by well identified and well established authors.

In the discussion of the Pseudo-Albertus experimenta I hope to highlight two points.

First, a shared understanding of the epistemic role experience plays in understanding the particulars of nature between medicine and natural philosophy. Medical practice, like the discussion of specific plants and animals in encyclopedias, must delve into the complex world of the particulars of nature, the properties of specific ingredients and even their connection to the complex forces of nature and astrology. As such the readers and authors show a shared understanding of the importance of experience as a means of knowing despite the theoretical structures that exist to explain nature. We will examine the epistemic structures of the experimenta texts attributed to Albertus Magnus as an example of this popular genre and of works with strong links of context and genre to both the medical and philosophical worlds. It is a text that focuses upon the marvelous properties of nature while also explicitly naturalizing these properties. It shares links to the medical, magical, and philosophical traditions both in its structure and its sources.57

The second point I wish to show, is that the obsession of these texts with practica––the knowledge of how to manipulate the world rather than just knowledge of understanding its causes––and the condensed nature of the natural philosophy it does present, meant that the reader is being presented with a somewhat simplified version of the epistemic principles we can see

56. For a short discussion of the potential identification of the author of The Book of John Mandeville, see Iain Macleod Higgins, “Introduction,” in The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), xvi-xx. 57. Isabelle Draelants, “Commentaire,” 17-26. 29 active in the “more scholastic” works. The nuance of the relationship between reason, authority, and experience that we can see in the production of a rational medical practice and in the encyclopedia’s exploration of natural particulars is washed away. We are presented with an epistemic view that not only relies strongly on claims to experience, but even appears to present experience and reason as opposed epistemic tools. The experience here, however, is specifically a pre-authorized experience derived from an authoritative witness. It is not sufficient that it was witnessed generally, the specific credibility of the witness is important. As texts of practice we will also briefly explore possible lines of connection between the Pseudo-Albertus experimenta texts and the work that has been done by Long, Smith, and Harkness on the broader culture of empirical values they see as important to the development of empiricism in early modern science.

Experimenta texts, with their medical and/or magical information about the attributes of plants and animals, were extremely popular among a certain section of the reading public.58 As such experimenta, like the Pseudo-Albertus text discussed here, constitute an interesting window into the view of nature experienced outside the realm of formal university disputation. The texts offer a bridge between those written in a specifically educational context––such as the texts by

Albertus and Bartholomeus previously discussed––and the most popular of works I intend to discuss, The Book of John Mandeville. Taken together this produces a text that is focused on interesting and engaging the reader but provides a simplified natural philosophical structure with a strong focus on the epistemic importance of experience. It insists that the causes of these marvelous phenomena are natural but their particularity and complexity leave them knowable only through experience. In its justification of experience—rather than rational demonstration—

58. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 38-90; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 24-26. 30 as a means of gaining knowledge it drives a much firmer wedge between reason and experience than seen in the writings of Albertus or the medical theory of Montpellier.

3.4 Chapter 5: The Book of John Mandeville

The Mandeville author appealed to a wide and varied audience of readers and his methods of knowledge construction offer us some insight into the evidence practices of this eclectic audience. In this chapter we will point to some distinct similarities to the evidence practices demonstrated in previous texts as well as some new avenues of investigation. The

Mandeville author constructs the narrator’s credibility both through establishing his social status and demonstrating Mandeville’s knowledge of natural philosophy: the principles of the natural world. The Mandeville figure is thus presented as a credible knower and his report focuses on the particulars of nature, a context where experience is a valid means of gaining natural knowledge.

The contextually sensitive approach to evidence is highlighted dramatically because of this work’s structure as a travel narrative. While it remains closely related to encyclopedic texts in its formation, it also shares formulae and tropes with pilgrimage and romance literature giving it a special structure that brings to the foreground many of the evidence practices discussed in previous chapters.59 The negotiation between depicting the literal and figurative meaning of geography and the natural world––characteristic of medieval travel narratives––highlights the contextually sensitive approach to evidence we have been developing during this study. In the

59. “Travel narrative” is a modern descriptor that focuses on one aspect of a very diverse collection of works. Contemporaries would probably have referred to most works as part of a specific genre such as pilgrimage narrative or missionary account. One of the most interesting aspects of late medieval travel narratives, like The Book of John Mandeville, is that it bridges a collection of contemporary genres to create something very new. This can be seen partly in the wide variety of ways the text was read as discussed by Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences. See also Paul Zumthor and Catherine Peeble, “The Medieval Travel Narrative,” New Literary History 25, 4, part 2 (1994): 809-824. 31 context of the natural world we see the Mandeville author relying on experience as a means of knowing the particulars of nature while other evidence structures, reason and authority, establish the universals. The author’s approach to the spiritual meanings of geography is no less rigorous, but he relies, of course, on the authority of scripture rather than experience or disputation as a means of establishing spiritual truths about the world. Where these systems overlap we can see their evidence practices interact, making use of multiple evidence structures to establish a “fact” that exists in multiple contexts. In negotiating these spaces the author highlights both the social and intellectual practices that seem important to constructing the epistemic value of the narrator’s claims. The natural philosophy and pilgrimage narrative structure of The Book provide a backdrop for the author’s primary interest, describing the particulars of the world. Even though not considered appropriate as the focus of natural philosophy, the knowledge of the diversity of the world was ever present in natural discussions. In this context experience, like that of the traveler, was considered the best method for gaining knowledge of the natural world.60

Mandeville’s discussions of the diversity of the world, and his focus on the marvelous and strange, locates the natural information of his book within a context where the experience claims he makes may become the most appropriate kind of knowledge claim. Experience, however, is not valuable in and of itself but must be judged in reference to the reliability of the subject and their ability to accurately recount that experience. In the context of law the reputation and ability to recall and recount the information accurately is key to their experience being considered credible. In the context of natural philosophy their reputations remain important but their natural knowledge and standing are also at issue to ensure that they are capable of correctly

60. Katherine Park, “Natural Particulars: Epistemology, Practice, and the Literature of Healing Springs,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999), 347-67. 32 interpreting what they have experienced as well as simply remembering it. Whether the legal assumptions of witness inform the approach of natural philosophy or vice versa will have to be the subject of a subsequent investigation. I contend, however, that the coincidence between the two approaches to the epistemic use of witness are strongly suggestive and bear further investigation. Chapter Two: Albertus Magnus and De animalibus

1 Introduction

In the mid 1260s the Dominican friar Albertus Magnus finished writing his work De animalibus libri XXVI.1 It was one of the largest of his works, collecting and commenting upon all of Aristotle’s texts on animals, and with a significant amount of original material creating a great opus of medieval ‘zoological’ knowledge. Albertus was one of the first medieval natural philosophers to explore the world in light of the full corpus of Aristotelian natural knowledge, and his extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s works concerning physics, metaphysics, plants, stones and animals were important resources for university teaching.

The works of Albertus have to be seen in the context of his lifetime of teaching and preaching in the Dominican Order. Albertus was probably born in the area of Cologne to a knightly family associated with the castle of Bollstadt around 1200, but there is still significant debate among historians as to the precise date and location of Albertus’ birth.2 He entered the

Dominican order between 1223 and 1229 while studying liberal arts at Padua and became a

Master of Theology at Paris by 1245.3 Albertus lectured in Paris until 1248 when he was sent to

1. Identifying a precise date is difficult but most scholars agree that the composition began sometime between 1256 and 1260 and was completed around 1263 at the earliest and 1268 at the latest. Kennith Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick, "Introduction: The Life and Works of Albert the Great,” in Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, eds. Kennith F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 35. 2. While most historians seem to accept 1200 as the most likely date, possible dates range from as early as 1193 to as late as 1207. Identifying his location of birth is complicated by the fact that Albertus refers to himself as both Albertus of Cologne and Albertus of Lauingen at different times. Irven M. Resnick, “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction,” in A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, ed. Irven M. Resnick (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 3-4. 3. As Resnick recounts, the sources surrounding Albertus are somewhat contradictory concerning the dates of his entry into the order and the precise date he arrived in Paris. Simon Tugwell has argued that Albertus entered the Dominican order around 1229, rather than 1223, making Albertus significantly older when he entered the order.

33 34 establish a Dominican studium generale in Cologne. Thomas Aquinas accompanied him to

Cologne and was his student from 1248-1252. Albertus was elected the Dominican prior provincial of the province of Teutonia in 1254 and, as part of his duties, visited each of the

Dominican priories in Teutonia (covering roughly modern Germany and Austria). His visits to the priories gave him access to their libraries and the diverse materials there. It is speculated that

Albertus wrote many of his Aristotelian commentaries during his period as prior provincial using the resources afforded him by the priory libraries. He stepped down as prior provincial and returned to teaching at the studium generale in Cologne in 1257 before being appointed as

Bishop of Regensburg in 1260 until his resignation in 1262. Although Albertus was allowed to resign from his bishopric, Pope Urban IV commanded Albertus to preach the crusade in all

German-speaking lands. He also served as vicar general for the archdiocese of Cologne, becoming what Irven M. Resnick refers to as a papal troubleshooter. In 1264 Albertus was able to retire to the Dominican Kloster to continue writing, first in Würzburg and then in Heilige

Kreuz, until his death in 1280. During his lifetime Albertus was an influential figure in the

Dominican order and was frequently referred to as Doctor universalis for his wide-ranging knowledge of nature, philosophy, and theology.4 Most of his commentaries on natural philosophy were composed between 1250 and 1270, and these works show a particular interest not just in the explication of the universals of nature (the fundamental principles that are always true) but also nature’s particulars (individual phenomena as instantiations of natural principles).

Conversely he believes that Albertus arrived in Paris significantly earlier, possibly as early as 1240, while Weisheipl places Albertus’s arrival in Paris around 1244. They are agreed, however, that Albertus was lecturing as a master in theology in Paris in 1245. Resnick, “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction,” 1-7; Simon Tugwell ed., Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 4-7; Weisheipl, “Life and Works of St. Albert,” 17-20. 4. Weisheipl, “Life and Works of St. Albert,” 13-51; Irven M. Resnick, “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction,” 1-11. 35

In scholastic natural philosophy the focus was placed on universals as the only unchanging aspects of nature that would allow for the creation of a proper science of nature. The further outside the realm of mathematics the scholar looked, however, the harder this ideal of pure demonstrative knowledge was to achieve. Particularly in the case of what might be called natural history, there was a tension between the desire for universal deductive principles of the ideal science and the knowledge that the content of a study of nature must always be connected to the variable and complex particulars of the natural world. Natural history must always rely at some level on observation and must seek to explain individual phenomena as well as creating general principles.5 Albertus is remarkably open about this necessity in his work. In one of his quaestiones on Aristotle’s De animalibus, Albertus states that there is a double mode of proceeding in natural philosophy, a descriptive aspect that provides knowledge of accidents and another based in assigning causes to phenomena.6 As we will discuss later in this chapter,

Albertus was well aware that the study of particulars about animals can never achieve the ideal of the demonstrative science, but in order to create accurate knowledge of nature we must understand the accidents of both noble and ignoble things, for which he uses the examples of the spirit and excretion respectively. He also points out that particulars of nature are most important

5. Benedict M. Ashley, “St. Albert and the Nature of Natural Science,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 73- 102; for a discussion of the importance of the division between what he terms the mathematical sciences and the descriptive sciences, see Thomas Kuhn, “Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science” in The Essential Tensions: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 31-65. 6. A quaestio text was a literary format where the author posed a series of questions usually followed by arguments for and against before, sometimes, presenting a conclusion. These are educational texts intended to teach the reader both the material and the process of reasoning. This particular text is a record of questions Albert used to introduce Aristotle’s De animalibus to his students in Cologne in 1258. These questions were, however, collected from the notes of Albert’s student Conrad of Austria rather than recorded by Albertus himself. Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great: Questions Concerning Aristotle’s On Animals, trans. Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 337-339; Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell, “Introduction,” in Albert the Great: Questions Concerning Aristotle’s On Animals, trans. Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 3-9. 36 for the practice of teaching “for the teaching [doctrina] of a wise person not only concerns a universal nature but also should include some knowledge of the natures of any given thing and the particular knowledge of its particular and individual accidents.”7 The student is then potentially able to apply his knowledge to understanding other particular phenomena. Each natural philosophy text Albertus wrote incorporates a significant discussion of nature’s particulars, either in digressions or, very often, in a special section at the end of the text.8

Albertus’ dedication to this approach is particularly useful for our purposes because it is in these sections dealing with information about individual plants and animals that Albertus’ methods of constructing the natural world and evaluating evidence become most clear.

Albertus’ explicit intent in De animalibus is to instruct students and other Dominican friars in natural philosophy.9 From their very inception in the early thirteenth century, education was central to the Dominican order. Their purpose as an order was to produce a body of mendicant preachers capable of the learned preaching of doctrine. In the 1220s, only a few years after their founding, they developed a presence for recruitment, study, and preaching at the universities of Paris and Bologna. It was primarily from members recruited at the universities, like Albertus, that they drew the needed educators to establish independent Dominican educational houses known as studia. The early curriculum of the order was focused entirely on theology, but many of their members had a strong intellectual background in secular studies, and the precise position of natural philosophy within the Dominican order was contentious. During

7. Albertus Magnus, Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irvine M. Resnick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999), 858-859, see also 857-893. 8. Paul Hossfeld, "Die Arbeitweise des Albertus Magnus in seinen naturaphilosophischen Schriften," in Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, eds. Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias- Grünwald-Verlag, 1980), 195-204; Miguel de Asúa, “Minerals, Plants and Animals from A to Z. The inventory of the Natural World in Albert the Great’s philosophia naturalis,” in Albertus Magnus: Zum Gedenken nach 800 Jahren: Neue Zugänge, Aspekte und Perspektiven, eds. Walter Senner et al. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 389-400. 9. Kitchell and Resnick, "Introduction,” 40-42. 37 this early period, friars were able to receive a dispensation to study natural philosophy, but it wasn’t until the 1260s that natural philosophy was formally included in the Dominican curriculum. Albertus, while teaching in Cologne in the 1250s, had been one of the scholars tasked with revising the Dominican curriculum and his Aristotelian commentaries were intended to provide a needed resource for teaching natural philosophy within the studia. The Dominican interest in natural philosophy was partially an outgrowth of their membership. Albertus himself was convinced that logic and natural philosophy were essential to understanding theology and many other members of the order—like him recruited from university scholars and students already studying law, medicine, and the liberal arts—were of like mind.10

The intellectual interests of their membership made it unlikely that Dominican study would remain strictly focused on theology, as had originally been envisioned, but an interest in natural philosophy was also a consequence of the order’s specific task of preaching against heresy. The Catholic church saw the Dominicans as a resource to be used to oppose heretical preaching, and specifically the oppose the Cathar preachers in southern France. Unlike most groups the Catholic church declared heretical in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Cathar preachers were, largely, educated and well read in the secular arts. They espoused a dualist belief that held that the material world was the product of an evil principle and the spiritual world the product of a good principle. They made use of arguments that drew on Aristotelian natural philosophy, as well as their own interpretation of the Bible, to support their dualist theology. The

Dominican preachers needed to be educated in natural philosophy as well as theology to engage

10. M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study…”: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998), 24-36, 60-70, 267-277. 38 with Cathar preachers in public debate, and Albertus’ Aristotelian commentaries were a part of this educational program.11

Albertus’ commentary, therefore, does not simply reproduce Aristotle’s text but also provides analysis and discussion of the points, such as the generation, physiology and behaviour of animals, drawing on a collection of other sources in order to compare information and presenting what Albertus believes to be the most accurate and correct view of any particular aspect of the science of animals. Determining the most correct view, however, is not a simple matter. Albertus was widely traveled within Europe, having journeyed through most of the

Teutonic lands and Italy as a scholar and Provincial of the Dominican order in Teutonia.12 As widely traveled as he was within certain parts of western Europe, however, we have no records of Albertus voyaging outside this area, thus he has no personal experience to draw on in determining the truth of claims made about animals outside of western Europe. Albertus relied heavily on Aristotle as an authority, but he also drew from a wide variety of other sources to critique and correct Aristotle where necessary, including natural philosophers such as Pliny,

Averroes, and Avicenna, as well as the reports of sailors and experienced laymen. This gave

Albertus a large but conflicting set of resources to work with as he attempted to construct this summa zoologica, and present a coherent and comprehensive picture of the natural world.

The text of De animalibus is divided into 26 books. The first 19 books are paraphrases, with significant digressions, of the authentic Aristotelian corpus translated from Arabic by

Michael Scot around 1230. Books 20 and 21 are Albertus’ original works discussing comparative anatomy of “perfect” and “imperfect” animals. Books 22-26 comprise what is often called the

11. Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 105-120; Mulchahey, First the Bow, 42-54; Kitchell and Resnick, “Introduction,” 14-15, 18-22. 12. Kitchell and Resnick, "Introduction," 5-10; Weisheipl, “Life and Works of St. Albert,” 13-51. 39 bestiary section of the work, a discussion of the forms and behaviours of specific animals.13 In this chapter I will focus predominantly on the sections of the De animalibus that are written entirely by Albertus Magnus, books 20-26, in an attempt to sidestep some of the problems produced by trying to separate the approach of the commentary from the original Aristotelian text. To avoid potential problems stemming from reproduction errors when dealing with the

Latin of the text I will use the critical edition of De animalibus published by Hermann Stadler that reproduces the Cologne autograph manuscript that is believed to have been written by

Albertus himself.14

There remain, of course, a number of potential problems peculiar to medieval texts. The foremost is the question of what Albertus wrote and what he copied from other scholars. De animalibus is an encyclopedic commentary. It is meant to collect all the useful knowledge on a certain subject in one place, and as such it is expected to reproduce information from other authors. Whether to give credit to those authors or not was at the time mostly a matter of personal choice. Albertus does fairly frequently refer to the sources of his information, but not at all times. In some places he even appears deliberately to leave out his sources for rhetorical reasons.15 John Friedman has argued that in certain places Albertus has drawn from the works of

Thomas of Cantimpré, taking from his work the information gleaned from an unknown twelfth- century author referred to by Thomas as Experimentator. Friedman has argued that Albertus

13. James A. Weisheipl, "Appendix 1. Albert's Works on Natural Sciences," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 572-574. 14. Albertus Magnus, Albertus Magnus, De animalibus libri XXVI, nach der Cölner Urschrift. Mit unterstützung der Kgl. Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München, der Görres-Gesellschaft und der Rheinischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Forschung, ed. Hermann Stadler (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1916), 2 vols. For the sake of the reader I will make use of the excellent translation produced by Kenneth Kitchell Jr. and Irvine M. Resnick, Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, based on the Stadler critical edition. All English translations are taken from Kitchell and Resnick, References to the Latin will be to the Stadler text. 15. For a full discussion of this argument see John B. Friedman, "Albert the Great's Topoi of Direct Observation,” 379-392. 40 increases his apparent importance by taking observations reported by this Experimentator and eliminating the name of the source, amplifying the statements with concrete details and suppressing fantastic or improbable ones, and relocating the creature to his own geographical sphere.16 This method of rhetorically enhancing the apparent importance of Albertus’ own role as observer has significant impact on the view of Albertus as one of the first important observers of the Middle Ages but, as we have discussed in the introduction, this use of experience recorded in other texts is a common aspect of the medieval approach to experience.17 For the topic of this chapter, however, its ramifications are less problematic. While the question of experience is important, the question we shall deal with is not Albertus’ own importance as an observer, but his methods of engaging and evaluating different types of evidence and the role of experience in his understanding of the natural world. In fact, one interesting question is Albertus’ choice of what to include or exclude from other authors, making it particularly noteworthy that Albertus chose to include these observations. While the lack of identification of some authors makes the project more complicated, Freidman has identified most of the sections he believes to be taken directly from Thomas of Cantimpré, and Kenneth Kitchell and Irven Resnick have also attempted to identify sources wherever possible. To the best of my knowledge none of the statements of experience that we shall discuss as made specifically by Albertus Magnus are taken from Thomas of Cantimpré or the two lost authors Thomas cites.

Even dealing with references to experience that seem to originate with Albertus we must be cautious in our approach. Isabella Draelants has worked to categorize and quantify the references to experience in Albertus’ natural history, focusing specifically on his work on the

16. Ibid., 386-388. 17. On Albertus as observer see particularly Wallace, “Scientific Methodology,” 385-408. For the use of experience, see Isabella Draelants, “Expérience et autorités,” 89-121. 41 natures and properties of stones in De mineralibus. In doing so she articulates at least two types of appeal to experience the first is what she terms a bookish experience. This category of bookish experience represents the appropriated references to experience from Albertus’ sources, both ancient and contemporary. In De mineralibus particularly we see general references like “this has been experienced” (de expertis est), or “this virtue is tested” (huius virtus probata est) marking entries on stones that Albertus has adopted from previous authors, like Thomas of Cantimpré or

Isidore of Seville, without citation.18 While these appropriations are still presented as appeals to experience, they are also fundamentally enmeshed in the appeal to authority. The appeal to what

Draelants terms the challenge by the senses, is thrown back on, and draws weight from, authority whether through knowledge of the specific author or through the implication of knowledge possessed by many and passed down from the ancients.

The second type of experience Draelants identifies is more recognizable to the modern reader, a strain of references to experience that do appear to present themselves as the personal experience of Albertus or his companions. These references are frequently tied to identifications of time and location. They refer to experiences “in our time” (nostri temporibus), when he was young, or when he visited a specific place.19 These appeals foreground Albertus as the experiencer or may call upon the members of the Dominican Order by referencing his companions. They appear to present challenges by the senses that were verified by contemporaries and frequently by Albertus himself. 20 In dealing with references to experience— whether through phrases like experimentum or expertus sum—we must therefore recognize that there is an intention to foreground knowledge construction by the senses, but the experiencer

18. Draelants, “Expérience et autorités,” 107-109. 19. Ibid., 102-104. 20. Ibid., 97-110. 42 may be Albertus himself, one of his companions, a contemporary, or an authoritative source.21

To understand experience in the Middle Ages is to acknowledge this dual concept of both bookish and personal experience, each considered an appropriate means of invoking sense experience and each tied up with problems of authority and credibility. The written record of an authority’s experience seems to carry epistemic weight, but so does the record of an appropriately knowledgeable or expert contemporary’s personal experience. We will return to this point particularly in our discussion of the experimentum text where experience is more frequently deployed but also most commonly takes the form of this authorized, bookish experience. In this chapter I will focus on references to experience that appear to foreground

Albertus, or an experienced contemporary, as the experiencer. As we will see in this chapter— and as Draelants discusses briefly22––experience can play an important role in the construction of natural knowledge but it must be deployed appropriately in conjunction with reason, and it must come from a credible experiencer.

The text of De animalibus, and particularly the last four books we shall be focusing on, has been characterized in dramatically different ways by scholars with different assumptions about the engagement of medieval scholars with the world around them. The last four books of

De animalibus are often referred to as the bestiary section because they follow a format broadly similar to thirteenth-century bestiary texts. These four books provide alphabetically organized lists of specific animals, birds, fish and insects with each entry providing a discussion of their characteristics. While this is superficially similar to the thirteenth-century bestiary texts, bestiaries were rarely alphabetically organized and Albertus rarely provides overt moralization of

21. Ibid., 110-111. 22. Ibid., 110-114. 43 the animal lore he recounts.23 With the modern title of ‘bestiary section,’ however, has come a tendency to think about these four books in the same ways that have been productive in considering true bestiaries. This particularly draws De animalibus into the argument over how animal descriptions in bestiaries should be read: whether they should be seen as a locus of symbolic information or a precursor to the genre of natural history.24 Albertus’ ‘bestiary section’ has been variously praised for its use of experience, discarded as an ‘unscientific’ bestiary or taken as part of the evidence to show that Albertus was focused on describing a world taken from texts not the world around him.25 For instance, in Peter Harrison’s analysis of De animalibus he draws heavily from this bestiary section in an attempt to show that Albertus Magnus had no particular interest in writing about the natural world as he experienced it, but was only interested in reproducing the natural world as it appeared in authoritative texts.26

I think Albertus gives us many good reasons to doubt Harrison’s conclusions. To some modern authors Albertus’ unwillingness to reject information based on observation has suggested credulity, or a symbolic understanding of the world. While the concept of the symbolic approach to nature is an interesting and potentially fruitful way of looking at some bestiary texts

I do not think it is a useful way of approaching De animalibus. Albertus’ intentions in this work

23. It is difficult to make a coherent statement about ordering principles of medieval bestiaries as a whole other than to point to their moral lessons and references to fifth and sixth days of creation. The most popular form of the bestiary in the thirteenth century loosely followed the division of animal kingdoms in book 12 of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. For a brief discussion of the ordering principles in medieval bestiary texts, see Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts, 21-23. Clark also discusses the need for a close definition of the term bestiary and the problematic tendency in past scholarship to lump all lists of animals into the category of bestiary. Ibid., 9-13. 24. For scholars who view it as a sort of natural history see Wallace, "Scientific Methodology”; or Riddle and Mulholland, Albert on Stones and Minerals. A prime example of the focus on symbolism in bestiaries and lapidaries is Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users. 25. For examples of these positions see respectively Oggins, "Albertus Magnus on Falcons and Hawks,"; Christien Hünemörder, "Zoologie des Albertus,” in Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, ed. Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980), 235-248; and Harrison, Rise of Natural Science, 64-68. For a more nuanced view, Miguel de Asúa argues that the inclusion of the bestiary section reflects both the needs of instruction and Albertus’s conception of natural philosophy. Asúa, “Minerals, Plants, and Animals,” 395-400. 26. Harrison, Rise of Natural Science, 65-68. 44 seem fairly clear; it is a work of natural philosophy and natural history and intends to describe the world accurately and with reference to the world as it is, not as a system of symbolic relationships. Even his bestiary section is clearly intended to relate to the world itself and to aid students in their understanding of the universal principles explicated in the previous 22 books.

Albertus presents us with a careful and critical approach to the difficult task of evaluating evidence concerning parts of the world he has never experienced, based on a collection of conflicting testimonials from widely varying sources. Natural reason and experience both play important roles in this analysis of sources, but natural reason provides the only certain way of refuting a claim. This is connected to Albertus’ consciousness of the diversity of nature and the limits of sense experience. Experience is a powerful positive tool, capable of confirming or calling into question a deduction made via natural reason, but it cannot refute a claim on its own.

The diversity of nature creates a space within the order of nature, which Albertus signifies through the category of marvel, denoting those things contrary to natural expectations but still explicable by natural principles and natural mechanisms.

Albertus’ work and his method of reasoning begin this study because it stands at one extreme of this investigation. The De animalibus is the text most defined by an academic discipline of the texts under discussion here, but it also shows us the beginnings of important threads of reasoning that we will draw out of the subsequent texts. As we move through this study we will discuss texts that gradually become both more “popular” in their appeal and less scholastically rigorous in their evidence structures. These texts have different goals and audiences, which shape their use of these epistemic categories. Common to these texts, however, is an attempt to make nature explicable, made difficult by their engagement with the particulars of nature and the multiplicity of conflicting accounts of the world. The balance between 45 authority, reason, and experience shifts with the different audiences that the texts are written for as each author seeks to shape their epistemic claims to best suit their genre and context. At the same time the developing legal concept of the eyewitness lends a new context and language to the attempt to create a convincing picture of the world. The category of marvel plays an important, if slightly different, role in each text allowing the author to claim strange and unexpected phenomena as explicable parts of the natural world.

2 Methods of Reasoning About Nature

In a manner similar to bestiary texts—and some encyclopedias—Albertus organizes the last four books of De animalibus following the categories of quadrupeds, birds, fish, serpents and vermin. Unlike the bestiary texts, however, he does not use the descriptions of the animals to convey any particular moral message. His concern is to provide a description of the particular natures of individual animals, rather than to make use of them in an overtly symbolic fashion. He explains his choice of organizing according to the bestiary or encyclopedic method by stating,

for although we have said above that this method is not appropriate for philosophy (since it is necessary when using it always to repeat the same thing), we will append just such a tract at the end of our book since we feel we are under obligation to both the learned and unlearned alike, and since we feel that when things are related individually and with attention to detail, they better instruct the rustic masses.27

Here he is probably referring to the needs of teaching students of differing education levels in the studia. He expresses himself in a similar vein, though a little less condescendingly, at the beginning of book 23 saying that,

since every scientific [physica] investigation moves from the general to the particular, we will first speak in general about the nature of birds. Afterward, moving according to the order of the Latin alphabet, the birds will be set forth by name in accordance with their species and types. Though it is granted that this procedure is not entirely philosophical

27. Albertus, On Animals, 1440. 46

insofar as the same thing is repeated many times…it nevertheless is an effective procedure for easy teaching and many of the philosophers have held to this procedure.28

Albertus states that his choice of format here is to aid the instruction of friars and their students.

He may well have been influenced by the bestiary tradition,29 but he does not seem to be attempting to imitate its content in any substantial way. He focuses on the description of an animal and its behaviours in a naturalistic way eschewing the moralization that usually accompanies the descriptions in bestiary texts.30 We shall, therefore, examine this section of the text as a work of natural philosophy and natural history and leave discussions of the symbolic meanings of the animals or their connection to the bestiary traditions for subsequent work.

Despite his somewhat deprecatory statements, Albertus’ choice to include a discussion of the accidents and particulars of animals is more than simply an aid to instruction. He also asserts that it is essential to communicating a perfect knowledge of animals and nature. This offers us a starting point for understanding his process of reasoning and his evaluation of evidence. Albertus suggests that there are at least two different methods for reasoning about and engaging with nature. The first is by way of definition, which instructs us as to the nature of a thing and for what purpose it exists in a substantial way. It can produce demonstrative knowledge of creatures, but it does not suffice for a complete knowledge of animals. The second way to gain knowledge of animals is by acquiring knowledge of their accidents. This follows a common distinction

28. Ibid., 1544. 29. Bestiaries go through phases of production, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the production of a number of second family bestiaries. The second family bestiaries have a number of additions to the first family texts that were primarily based on the Physiologus. These additions were primarily drawn from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, the Hexameron of Ambrose, and the works of Gaius Julius Solinus. Characteristic of these bestiaries is a change to the moralization of the animals. Second family bestiaries tend not to reproduce the theological moralization of Physiologus characteristic of first family texts and focus on ethical or social lessons in their animal lore. In Second family bestiaries the animals typical role is as commentary on good or bad human behaviour. It has been suggested that these were used to teach reading to children so it is possible that Albertus grew up using second family bestiaries. For a discussion of this, see Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts. We have very little information about his early life and education so it is difficult to say with certainty. He is, however, clearly familiar with the format of these popular works. 30. Daston and Park, Wonders, 116-118. 47 between methods of reasoning and engaging with nature from the late twelfth century. Drawing on Aristotle’s articulation in Posterior Analytics, demonstration was taken to proceed from first premises intuited from self-evident axioms to conclusions related by cause and effect. This produced scientia, the philosophically rigorous knowledge sought by Aristotelian natural philosophers. It was derived from creating necessary causal relationships from prior causes to effects. This kind of reasoning cannot be properly applied to nature, however, because natural effects are not produced perfectly regularly. This was the primary mode of reasoning in

Philosophy, Mathematics and Geometry, but, as Albertus is keenly aware, the study of nature–– and particularly the study of animals––required an ability to engage with sense experience and the particulars of the world. Physical speculation, as Charles Burnett translates it in his discussion of twelfth century reasoning, began in sense experience––though not necessarily the sense experience of the author––and built knowledge of causes from the knowledge of effects.31

A perfect study of animals, according to Albertus, requires the use of both demonstrative reasoning about the general principles of animals and reasoning through physical supposition.

The key in reasoning by physical supposition was not demonstration but plausibility. As Albertus puts it,

nor are we here calling knowledge that which is the conclusion of demonstration, for we cannot have that concerning the particular natures of animals, but we can rather form an opinion based on things that are plausible.32

William Wallace has helped refine our understanding of Albertus’ approach to this principle arguing that Albertus employed what he terms the concept of suppositional necessity. Because

31. Charles Burnett, “Scientific Speculations,” in A History of 12th Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 155-166; see also Leen Spruit, “Albert the Great on the Epistemology of Natural Science,” in Erfahrung und Beweis: die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/ Experience and Demonstration: The sciences of nature in the 13th and 14th centuries, eds. Alexander Fidora und Matthias Lutz-Bachmann et al. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 61-75. 32. Albertus, On animals, 857-858. As Kitchell and Resnik point out here in n.5, the term Albertus uses, opinio, should be taken in this context to mean a plausible conclusion that best interprets the evidence. 48 causal relationships in nature are not immediate, there is a gap of time between the cause and the effect. It is difficult, if not impossible, to create perfect relationships between the cause and the effect. In nature there is also the potential for accident, the possibility that, because of other factors, a cause will not have the expected outcome.33 This problem is outlined and dealt with in

Book 11 tract 1 chapter 2 of De animalibus where Albertus asks whether there can be a science of animals.34 We first have to acknowledge that there is an intelligence in nature and that all causes in nature are generated with a goal. In animals, the final cause is the form to be generated––a sensible form defined in relation to sensible matter.35

Albertus embraces the ideal of demonstrative knowledge but recognizes that it cannot be achieved in studying animals. The proper procedure is that, “those things ought to be described first which pertain to the visible activities and passions of animals, just as we did in all previous ten books. But now we ought to introduce the causes of those things we have enumerated and which we have said are common to the genuses of animals.”36 So reason must follow the effects back to the cause, and Albertus states that we are able to treat the effect as we would one of the premises in a syllogism. Still the inability to perfectly connect the cause and the effect, and the presence of numerous other causes that might affect the causal relationship, leads Albertus to accept that this reasoning by suppositional necessity is not as perfect as demonstration by syllogistic necessity.37 This is a form of reasoning that leaves room for the irregularities of nature, like monstrous births and unexpected phenomena, embodied in the category of the marvelous.

33. William A. Wallace, "Albertus on Suppositional Necessity in the Natural Sciences," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 111-114. 34. Albertus, On animals, 860-867. 35. Wallace, “Suppositional Necessity,” 122-125. 36. Albertus, On animals, 861. 37. Wallace, "Scientific Methodology,” 390-393. 49

There is at the root of these approaches to the world a fundamental assumption that nature was a system of regularities organized by God in such a way as to be comprehensible by man. Philosophy was the study of these regularities, but scholars were also faced with reports and experiences of nature’s irregularities: the exceptions and anomalies that produced unusual and surprising creatures or phenomena. Such individual cases could strain the regularities used for the explanation of nature. The category of marvel signals the scholar or observer’s attempt to expand the category of nature to include the irregularities and anomalies and differentiate the unknown and unexplained marvel from the unexplainable miracle.38 It is a category that implicitly acknowledges the unusual as still within the bounds of nature (particularly in the thirteenth century the marvelous is still within the bounds of nature and potentially explainable), as differentiated from the fundamentally unknowable actions of God that produce true miracles.

As we will see in the discussion below, the marvelous, both when explicitly used by Albertus and when implicitly invoked in the terms of the diversity of nature, plays an important role in tempering Albertus’ evaluation of evidence.

3 Creating a Coherent Picture of the World: The Bestiary Section of De animalibus

We can begin our investigation of Albertus’ construction of the natural world by looking at his discussion of a creature he has direct access to, the eagle (aquila), especially the variety he calls herodius. Albertus begins with a discussion of varying reports about the reproductive habits of the herodius, particularly a collection of conflicting stories about why it ejects chicks from the nest. He begins with statements drawn from the Historia Orientalis of Jacques de Vitry and the

38. Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 18-20. 50

Hexameron of Ambrose that the female herodius sometimes mates with a male from another species and the male herodius recognizes the offspring of this as a debasement of the species.

Other unnamed scholars are said to suggest that another bird destroys the herodius’ eggs and leaves its own young in their place; the adult then pushes these out of the nest when they hatch.39

Albertus judges these stories as improbable because of the fierceness with which the herodius guards its nest. Interestingly, he gives greater credence to the idea that the herodius leaves its eggs under another bird and then returns for them, ejecting the young of the surrogate parent.

Albertus says, “I would judge this to be the more probable explanation, if it had been based on personal experience, for hatching eggs involves work and emaciation…something the herodius does not endure easily on account of its mobility and the abundance of food which it is accustomed to have.”40

Finally he deals with what he considers the most erroneous claim about the herodius’ reproduction and presents what he considers the most likely explanation of the ejection of the young from the nest. He tells us that certain philosophers claim that the herodius always produces two or three young, with two coming from one egg. Albertus thinks this is false because

Although this eagle has a large body, it has but little power in its semen and it therefore produces only one or two eggs, or conceivably three if it is young. Out of each egg there is produced but one young unless it occurs by error, as happens in other birds. But when more than two are created it frequently ejects them due to the difficulty in nourishing them. This has been shown to be true many times in many birds.…I sought experiential proof of this fact among many bird catchers and, through the course of many years, have never found herodius to have more than one young.41

39. Albertus, On Animals, 1548. 40. Ibid. 41. Albertus, On Animals, 1548-1549; Albertus, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, 1434. The Latin phrase used is experimentum quarens. 51

According to Albertus the hatchlings require a large amount of food and so the herodii cannot support more than one at a time and so raise only the strongest. This example gives us an idea of how Albertus works through a problem with conflicting sources. He looks for the claim that coincides with his understanding of the principles of nature and then compliments it with information gained from the experience of knowledgeable laymen. The exploration is motivated by differing explanations and apparent departures from natural order. He is noticeably more critical of the claim that multiple offspring are produced from one egg. As he has discussed earlier in his commentary, it is not part of the normal course of nature for an egg to produce two offspring. The creation of multiple offspring from one egg might result from an error in the formative power of generation, generally relating to the astrological conditions during conception and development. He explains how conception can produce such errors or monstrous individuals earlier in his commentary on animals. While such occurrences are certainly possible they are exceptions, not the normal course of nature.42

The other explanations, such as the idea that another bird substitutes its own offspring, are considered more or less unlikely but still plausible because they do not contain any claims that violate his understanding of the normal course of nature. The idea of producing two chicks from one egg, however, violates the common order of the natural world and so goes against natural reason. So we are seeing what seems to be a fairly simple pattern in his analysis of this section, conflicting stories and a claim that violates natural order lead to logical investigation which is confirmed through, or at least compared to, the experience of knowledgeable contemporaries to come to a firm conclusion.

42. Albertus, On Animals, 529-542, 1303-1307, 1312-1314; on monstrous generation, see also Albertus, Questions, 538-541. 52

The situation becomes a little different when we get to Albertus’ discussion of the claim that, when old, the eagle regains its youthful appearance by flying near the sun into the hottest layer of the air, then plummeting into cold water. This is a means of rejuvenating the heat of its marrow, which allows it to slough off the older feathers and grow back its youthful plumage.

Albertus finds these reports suspect because “it does not agree with what I have observed in two herodii which are in our land,”43 nor has he heard of such behaviour from falconers. Although the lack of observation makes him unsure, Albertus seems unwilling to reject this behaviour entirely. He deliberately qualifies his point, saying that the animals he observed were domesticated and thus did not behave the same way as wild birds.44

Unlike the previous discussion, where the deciding factor seems to be experience— whether his own or from reliable and knowledgeable sources—lack of observation isn’t enough to warrant refuting the claim. The key difference between the two cases, I think, is that where the first question was motivated by reason and resolved by experience, this question is motivated by experience alone. Strange as the eagle’s rejuvenatory behaviour is, it is explicable through natural mechanism. Drawing from Galen and Aristotle, medieval scholars understood heat and moisture to be particularly important in causing change and development of the body.45 In book

12 of De animalibus Albertus shows that the appearance and vigour of youth is a function of the internal heat and moisture. These elements gradually diminish during the aging process resulting in bodily changes.46 By replenishing the heat and moisture of its body it could therefore be possible for the eagle to renew its plumage and appear to have rejuvenated itself, not particularly

43. Albertus, On Animals, 1549. 44. Ibid. 45. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 64- 66,125-130, 332-333; Albertus, On Animals, 918-922. 46. Albertus, On Animals, 918-922. 53 likely, but possible.47 Here Albertus comments, “I do not know what to say to this except that the wonders of nature are many.”48 We will come back to this statement in the next section but for the moment I want to point out that, even in this creature which he has access to, the differentiation between when he chooses to reject a behaviour as ‘real’ and when he is at least cautiously willing to accept it seems to rely heavily on reason and his understanding of natural processes.

We can see the same process in Albertus’ discussion of the salamander. Albertus seems concerned with ensuring that he presents an accurate picture of the salamander and, to this end, we can see his use of natural reason and experimentation to evaluate the various reports of the salamander’s behaviours. He describes a salamander as a strange type of lizard with a composite face made from that of a monkey and a pig, rough skin, and a long slender tail.49 From Pliny and other sources, he recounts a number of amazing stories about the salamander but Albertus focuses specifically on the reports that salamanders are capable of living in fire.

As in the case of the rejuvenating herodii, Albertus seems to express doubt about these stories because they violate the expected course of nature. He first discusses the product known as salamander wool, a fire-resistant substance sold by peddlers. Yet closer examination of a sample obtained from a peddler leads Albertus to state that he has “found by testing it that a sample of this wool brought us is not animal wool…I have proven, however, that it is iron

47. Albertus addresses this to some extent in questions 29 and 30 of his quaestio concerning Aristotle’s De animalibus “Whether youth can be restored” and “Whether old age can be slowed down.” He does not specifically discuss the eagle but he does mention that snakes and birds both sometimes appear to grow younger. He separates aging into two categories, natural and accidental. Natural aging is the process of losing the natural or radical heat and moisture and this age cannot be restored as the natural heat and moisture cannot be restored. Accidental aging arises from the consumption of nutrimental heat and moisture and this can potentially be renewed. If the consumption of radical heat and moisture is only imperceptible compared to accidental aging then it is possible for the consumption of nutrimental heat and moisture to allow the appearance of growing younger. In reality, even though the snake may shed its skin or the bird regenerate feathers, they are still growing older. Albertus, Questions, 260-262. 48. Albertus, On Animals, 1549. 49. Ibid., 1731. 54 wool.”50 This is a by-product of iron working, a dust or vapour that collects on the ceiling of a forge and forms something like dusky or white wool. According to Albertus, this can be turned into a fire-retardant material. This then eliminates a possible explanation as to why the salamander could live in fire and, still in search of an explanation susceptible to natural reason,

Albertus follows Galen and suggests that if the salamander stays for a brief time in a small fire it will not be harmed, but could not survive for long periods of time.51 Albertus is willing to accept this modified version because the animal is reported to have a very thick skin and its natural humors are supposed to be exceedingly cold. This offers it natural, if short term, protection in a fire. As he explains:

The fire is therefore not able to enter its pores. But if the animal remains in the fire a long time, the fire opens up its pores bit by bit and burns up the animal. So great is the salamander’s coldness that the fire is put out by its opposition if the fire is small and does not overcome the animal’s qualities.52

Albertus stresses that the salamander’s resistance to fire is not due to some affinity for fire, and that it does not live in fire. He accepts only the explanation via natural mechanism that the cold humor and thick skin allow it to go through small flames unharmed. In this case he has even claims to have put the theory to the test. He tests it on spiders that are also supposed to have a thick skin and cold humor. The results of his tests agree with what he suspects about the salamander:

Now, I have put this to the test in one similar to this one when I placed a spider with a thick skin and a cold humor on a piece of glowing iron and it lay there a long while before it twitched and felt the heat burning. I also held a small light up to another, large one, and it extinguished it as if it had been blown out.53

50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 1731-1732. 52. Ibid., 1732 53. Ibid. 55

Albertus’ acceptance of the salamander is related to his ability to explain its supposed abilities via natural mechanism. He refuses to believe in a creature that can live in fire, but he can understand one that can survive a short time in fires due to the thickness of its skin. His investigation is motivated by his disbelief and consists of reasoned determination of what is naturally possible, and experience to confirm the conclusions. While we cannot say that his work demonstrates a program of experimentation he does make use of experience and experiment when it is available. Albertus seems here to value what Draelants would term the personal experience over ancient authority, but the motivation for the use of experience is natural reason.

In the case of the basilisk there is not even a way to test its reported abilities by analogous experiment. Here we see Albertus attempting to create an accurate picture of the world from texts but without the aid of experience, instead he relies entirely on natural reason. The basilyscus (now known as the basilisk) is, according to his account, a serpent with a crowned head spotted with white and hyacinth blue and its breath, hiss and gaze are all capable of killing.54 This is one of the animals that often raises an eyebrow for the modern reader, including some historians, and makes them question Albertus’ apparent credulity. Albertus does not accept reports of this creature exactly at face value, but he seems far less skeptical of it than he is of many other creatures. So let us take a look at what it is about this creature that makes it fit coherently into the picture of the natural world he is trying to create.

In attempting to understand this animal Albertus begins with the information given by his sources, and accepts the general claims, that the creature is a serpent, and that it kills with its gaze, breath, and hiss. These are sensible statements to him; what he rejects is the statement by

Pliny that, should a man see the basilisk first, the basilisk cannot kill him with its gaze.55

54. Ibid., 1720-1721. 55. Ibid., 1720-1721 56

Albertus considers such a statement ridiculous and against natural reason. I suggest this is because it conflicts with his understanding of the natural mechanisms of vision, and it is through the natural mechanism of vision that Albertus understands the basilisk's deadly gaze.

In the thirteenth century there was debate over the question of how sight functioned. Two theories had come down from antiquity, with modifications along the way, to medieval scholars; intromission and extramission. Albertus writes extensively concerning the mechanism of vision throughout his corpus. He seems to have been very well acquainted with most of the works on optics and vision extant in the thirteenth century except for the works of Alhazen. He dedicates substantial sections of his commentaries De anima, De homine, and a section of the earlier books of De animalibus to explicating the mechanisms of vision.56 He expresses a staunchly

Aristotelian view, with some additions drawn from Averroes and Avicenna, and refutes contrasting views. Albertus argues that vision occurs through the object creating alterations that propagate through the intervening medium, air, water, etc., and impress their form on the humor of the eye without leaving matter. This was a thoroughly intromissive theory of vision with the visual power residing in the crystalline humor of the eye. In his work De homine Albertus argues quite vehemently against all non-Aristotelian theories of vision, particularly the neoplatonic extramission theories.57

It is surprising, therefore, that in his reference to the poisonous power of the basilisk's eyes Albertus uses terms that seem to imply a connection to the extramissive theory of vision,

56. Albertus, On Animals, 120-126; Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edenda apparatu critico notis prolegomenis indiciums intruenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside, vol. 27, part 2, De homine, ed. Henryk Anzulewicz and Joachim R. Söder (Aschendorff: Monasterii Westfalorum, 2008), 145-202; and De Anima, bk. 2, tract. 3, chap. 7-9, Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edenda apparatu critico notis prolegomenis indiciums intruenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside, vol. 7, part 1, De anima, ed. Clemens Stroick (Aschendorff: Monasterii Westfalorum, 1961), 108-112. 57. Albertus, De homine, 185-202; Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 104-107. 57 that is, the emission of the visual spirit through the eyes to the object. This visual spirit was thought to be a substance that moved from the brain, through the eyes to objects out in the world.

It was then impressed with the form of these objects and returned through the eyes to the brain where the form was interpreted by the soul.58 This is quite the opposite of the intromissive view

Albertus has built up elsewhere, yet it seems important to the way he describes the basilisk's lethal vision. While Albertus is clear that the eyes do not send forth rays, the basilisk still possesses a destructive and corrupting influence that accompanies the visual spirit.59 Albertus states that, “the reason for the destruction is that the visual spirit [spiritus visivus] is dispersed very far due to the thinness of its substance. It is this that destroys and kills everything."60

Albertus does not state that his understanding of the basilisk is predicated on extramission, but a connection seems implied through his discussion of the dispersion of the visual spirit. It does not send forth rays, but it is still the visual spirit that extends from the animal carrying the poison. It would be possible to accommodate the basilisk while holding to the intromission method Albertus has laid out in his other works. In both accounts, whether the visual spirit is sent out from the eye or the form is impressed on the eye, the subject and the object must interact. While an extramissive account of vision might seem to lend itself to the

58. Adelard of Bath, Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and On Birds, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett, with Italo Ronca, Perdo Mantas España, and Baudouin van den Abeele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135-145; William of Conches, A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy: A Translation of the New Latin Critical Text, trans. Italo Ronca and Mathew Curr (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 156-160: David C. Lindberg, "The Science of Optics," in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 339-341, 349-350; for a general discussion of optical theories see, David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau, “The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2, Medieval Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 485-511. 59. Albertus, On Animals, 1721. An important aspect of the discussion of the extramissive theory of vision was the rays emanating from the eyes and encountering objects at different angles. This allowed for a mathematical discussion of perspective and vision. Lindberg and Tchau, “The Science of Light and Color,” 487-491; Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 105-108. 60. Albertus, On Animals, 1721. 58 powers of the basilisk, it was by no means necessary. It would be just as possible for the alterations the form of the basilisk makes in the surrounding medium to be poisoned and for their engagement with the active spirit in the eye to bring death as it would for the basilisk's visual spirit to carry a poison on its course out from the creature’s eyes.61 Just as its breath carries with it a tainted spirit so might the form propagating from the basilisk's eyes carry a taint that could harm the intellective power that engages with the form to produce vision. I think it is interesting that Albertus seems to have chosen to place the powers of the basilisk in the terms of an extramissive theory of vision. As we saw with the herodius, Albterus seems to have been reluctant to deny the possibility of phenomena if they could occur according to the causal mechanisms of nature, but that does not necessarily mean he thinks them probable. In his account of the herodius he indicates that contemporary experience seems to conflict with authority, while acknowledging that experience may be flawed. In his account of the basilisk it is possible we may be seeing him manipulating conflicting accounts of vision to indicate his skepticism. His description of its deadly force in terms of extramission, a mechanism of vision he has elsewhere refuted, might be a subtle, even playful, indication to the reader that all that is naturally possible does not necessarily exist. While he does not have even the evidence of experience, or reason, to contradict the accounts of authorities he connects the animal’s powers to a flawed account of vision, possibly suggesting that to disagree with the extramission account is to bring into doubt the claims concerning the basilisk's powers. Albertus is acutely aware of the diversity of nature and the importance of occult powers—forces imperceptible to the normal senses—in the functioning of nature, as evidenced by his complex discussion of astrological

61. The physician Bernard de Gordon, for instance, appears to hold a firmly intromissive theory of vision while also accepting the poisonous power of the basilisk. For a brief discussion of this see Luke Demaitre, Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2013), 73-74. 59 forces in several of his other works.62 It is possible he may be subtly indicating his doubt concerning the powers of the basilisk, while recognizing that he has little evidence to contradict the authorities.

In contrast to his care with the basilisk’s powers, Albertus simply rejects the stories that the basilisk can hatch from the egg of a cock as impossible; because it is not part of the normal course of nature for a cock to produce an egg.63 For it to happen it would be a marvel, an irregularity that could not be the normal process of producing a basilisk. What we are seeing is the rejection of those things that are inconsistent with natural reason and natural mechanisms. He is careful to leave open the possibility of the deadly breath and gaze of the basilisk because it is subject to explanation according to reason and natural causes, even if he may signal his doubt by using a mechanism of vision he has elsewhere refuted to explain it. The idea of a serpent being generated from the egg of a cock, or that for some mystical reason the serpent’s gaze would only kill a man if it sees him first, these do not have natural explanations within Albertus’ system and so are rejected.

In his evaluation of previous authors’ claims natural reason seems to act as the final arbiter. Experience performs an important role in confirming natural reason, or aiding in the selection between two possible alternatives, and it can even call into question a claim that does not violate natural reason, but it is not enough to warrant the complete rejection of that claim.

With the single exception of the arpya (harpy) where he states that the stories told by poets are not borne out by the experience of sailors, experience alone is not grounds for outright rejection

62. See H. Darrl Rutkin, “Astrology and Magic” in A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy and the Sciences, ed. Irven M. Resnick (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 451-506; “Astrology in Albert’s Undisputed Works” in Paola Zambelli, The Speculum astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and his Contemporaries (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 61-74; Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, ed. and trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 18-35. For further discussion of the role of astrology in Albertus’s natural philosophy, see the following section of this paper. 63. Albertus, On Animals, 1721, 1628. 60 of a creature.64 This hesitance to reject the existence of a creature through lack of experience alone is, I think, based on Albertus’ recognition of the wonder and diversity of nature. This concept underlies his evaluation of previous works and leads Albertus to be unwilling to reject previous claims without very careful consideration. The concept of marvel he uses, however, is a complicated one and we will take a moment to try to understand exactly what it means and how it is used before briefly showing its effect on his approach to the natural world.

4 Diversity as the Underpinning of Albertus's Construction of the World

As we have seen above, Albertus sorts through the conflicting information presented him by previous authors through natural reason, experience and authority, but his construction of the natural world cannot be understood as just the interplay of these epistemic structures. While experience can serve to motivate a question or to confirm the deductions of natural reason, it does not appear to be able to provide conclusive evidence to refute a claim. This ability of experience to confirm but not refute is interesting and, I think, strongly tied to the diversity of nature expressed by the concept of marvel.

Marvel is a complex category that can only be understood through its relationship to the categories of miracle and wonder. We should start by establishing the difference between marvels or wonders (mirabilia) as things in the world, and the emotion of wonder (admiratio) as

64. Albertus, On Animals, 1555. In this context it is also important to think about questions of the credibility of the source. By referring to stories told by the poets Albertus may well be presenting the source as of questionable credibility. The contrast is thus not simply between information from authority or experience but draws in questions surrounding the credibility of the ‘authority’ and the experienced sailor. 61 the psychological response to the marvelous and miraculous.65 Marvels were things that caused wonder, but wonder was an emotional response that could be induced by the beautiful, surprising, and horrifying. Marvels as things in the world, however, were understood in contrast to miracles. In the Early Middle Ages Augustine dominated the discussion with an approach to marvel that centred on the meaning of phenomena. For Augustine, miracles had clear meanings that could be interpreted by the Christian observer. Marvels were phenomena that caused wonder but had unclear or muddied meanings. At the same time, Augustine emphasized that marvels caused wonder because they were unusual and diverged from the expected course of nature. He thus laid the foundation for a developing understanding of wonder as a situated response to what is unusual to the individual viewer, while also asserting that marvels were not contrary to nature itself but only to the expected course of nature.66

By the thirteenth century a much clearer, ontological distinction had developed between marvel and miracle. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus’ student, provided one of the most influential articulations of the scholarly approach to marvel, asserting that miracles were phenomena that were caused solely by God and occurred above the operation of nature. Marvels were the surprising, unfamiliar, irregular, and wonderful phenomena that occurred contrary to the normal course of nature, but still through natural causes. This characterization admits that the order of nature can be violated, but it also emphasizes that order and encourages scholars to discover it. It also expands the category of the natural to include magic and other occult causes. If miracles are

65. As Bynum points out, there were multiple wonder discourses in the Middle Ages. In this work I am primarily concerned with what she terms the theological and philosophical discourse. For a discussion of the wider range of wonder discourses, see Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 42-73. 66. For excellent discussions of the development of the concept of miracle and marvel in western Europe, see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Wonder,” The American Historical Review 102.1 (1997): 1-26; Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, particularly 42-73, 90-92; Daston and Park, Wonders, Chapter 3; Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, chapter 1; and Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1982), 3-19. 62 limited to those things that God does directly, magical and even demonic interventions— something scholars were unwilling to deny because of biblical precedent—must function through natural causes. Creating an ontological distinction between marvel and miracle meant that natural explanations increasingly became the first resort for understanding phenomena, even in discussions of miracles.67

This ontological distinction increased the importance of a phenomenon’s categorization as miracle or marvel and made natural philosophical arguments crucial to the debate. Thus we see, for instance, complex and nuanced medical and physiological distinctions used in debates between Dominicans and Franciscans on the status of blood relics and eucharistic miracles. As

Caroline Walker Bynum maps out, philosophical concerns surrounding the nature of identity and change were fundamental to the theological debates between the two orders, with the

Dominicans following Thomas Aquinas and Albertus and the Franciscans primarily following

Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus. Careful physiological debates erupted over human growth, the relationship of blood to essential human nature, and the continuity of matter during the resurrection. While both sides acknowledged that some material aspects of the human body were superfluous, like fingernails, they disagreed over whether Christ’s blood at the crucifixion could be considered superfluous and thus whether it could have been left behind or must necessarily have been assumed to heaven when he was resurrected. In this way, debates over the status of eucharistic miracles and blood relics became the sites of intense debate in natural philosophical as well as theological terms. Dominican scholars were, in general, suspicious of blood relics and eucharistic miracles because they exposed the immutable matter of God to earthly change and decay. These miracles could, in fact, possibly be understood as the result of earthly change and

67. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 48-51, 90-92; Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 6-17. 63 thus entered into a questionable status in the Thomist distinction between miracle and marvel.

Franciscans, on the other hand, focused on the utility of visible manifestations of God that aroused devotion. They theorized these relics as remnants of the superfluous matter, unconnected to the essential nature of Christ. As such, their susceptibility to change and corruption was not as threatening to the immutability of God. At the same time, in taking this approach Franciscan theologians in some ways naturalized the physical relics left on earth separating them somewhat from the divinity of Christ by identifying them as superfluous and allowing them to be subject to natural change. For Dominicans and Franciscans particularly, theological and philosophical issues inform each other to create complex and differing approaches to both nature and devotion.

Even in these theologically important contexts the status of a phenomenon as marvel or miracle was not fixed, but was up for debate. That debate, however, now took place largely in natural philosophical terms. These debates reinforce the ordered nature of the natural world even as they acknowledge the potential for that order to be suspended by divine will.68

In the thirteenth century then, within the works of university intellectuals, we see both a clear terminological difference, and an ontological difference between mirabilia (marvels) and miracula (miracles) but both are capable of inspiring admiratio (the psychological reaction of wonder) in the viewer. The status of a given phenomenon might be debatable, but the distinction between categories was generally recognized. This terminological difference gradually worked its way into vernacular works as well, where the terms for marvel and miracle also became distinct categories, reflecting an adoption of the ontological difference between categories. While

68. Bynum reminds us that we should be careful not to over-emphasize the difference between these two orders. In their soteriological practice they two orders were much closer that they have sometimes been portrayed. Neither order categorically denied the existence of bodily relics, but both were also cautious of their veneration. The Dominican “high blood theology” required that the bodily relics be miraculously derived from images or other sources rather than being remnants of the body of Christ from the crucifixion. Franciscan theology, on the other hand, “saved” the bodily relics by naturalizing them and, in some ways, lowering their theological importance. see Bynum Wonderful Blood, particularly 98-106, 127-130. 64 miracles were inherently wonderful, marvels were wonderful only because they were unusual or to those who did not understand their causes. This philosophical discourse of wonder focuses on a perspectival understanding of the wonder response to marvels, one fundamentally based in the viewer’s understanding of the natural forces at work.69 In doing so it promoted a rhetoric associating wonder with ignorance. Scholastic philosophers frequently characterized wonder as the response of the ignorant to nature. It was the experience of those who did not understand the causes of nature confronted by the unfamiliar or irregular. This negative picture of wonder is particularly present in the works of natural philosophers as a contrast to the project of natural philosophy and the university. The project of the university-based natural philosophers was to create certain knowledge of the causal structures of the world; in doing so they would, supposedly, make wonder cease.70

As prevalent as this rhetoric of the ignorance of wonder is in the works of scholastic philosophers, however, the role of wonder, and the marvels that inspire it, is much more complex. Daston and Park seek to create a distinction between wonder and marvel as negative categories associated with ignorance and the praeternatural––a term used particularly by

Aquinas––as the category of irregular and unusual natural phenomena. While Aquinas does develop the category of the praeternatural, and some scholars followed him in using it, Bartlett argues that the division of these two categories was not as strict as Daston and Park suggest.

Medieval scholars were, in general, quite inconsistent in the value given their use of the terms for marvel and wonder.71 Albertus is an excellent example, even though he does explicitly share the

69. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 48-51, 210-211 n.31. 70. Daston and Park, Wonders, 109-120. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, "Miracles and Marvels: The Limits of Alterity,” in Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Franz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert with Stephanie Haarländer (Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1999), particularly 806-810. 71. Daston and Park. Wonders, 120-123; Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 18-26. 65 negative approach to wonder (admiratio) in some contexts, the language of wonder and marvel frequently creeps into his works devoid of any negative force. Marvel (mirabilia) is, however, importantly associated with the unusual, it refers to phenomena that strain the category of the natural by stretching or breaching the regularities of nature established by natural philosophy. In many places Albertus seems to use the language and category of marvel to do the work Daston and Park ascribe to the praeternatural.

The gall bladder serves as a good example of this, and of the work the category of marvel does. According to Albertus, the gall bladder is usually located above the liver, but not all animals have it and sometimes a gall bladder will be found in one individual of a genus but not in others; this includes humans. Some humans possess it, though some do not, and “it sometimes happens that it seems to be so large in size that it is [wonderful] and monstrous. For example…there was a person whose gall bladder took over almost all his liver.”72 The bladders are used for storing superfluities, the gall bladder stores the bile, and nature then ordains this superfluity for other purposes.73 So an excess of bile in generation might cause a human to possess a gall bladder, even though humans who have properly balanced humors will probably not possess one. A massive excess of bile might cause an excessively large gall bladder. Albertus understands the natural regularities behind the creation of a gall bladder, and even behind a gall bladder of excessive size, but it is an unexpected occurrence produced by the complex causes of nature that straddle the line between known and unknown. It is mirabile because it is an enactment of the irregularity of nature.

72. Albertus, On Animals, 1031; Albertus, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, 937. Although Kitchell and Resnick translated “mirabile” as miraculous here, the term should be translated as wonderful or marvelous. 73. Albertus, On Animals, 1032. 66

With the thirteenth century turn to a causal definition of marvel it becomes a category that implicitly claims irregular phenomena as part of the natural world––rather than the supernatural––making them fundamentally explicable while recognizing the complexity of natural causes and the difficulties of explaining the diverse particulars of nature. This category reaches out to embrace the complexities and irregularities of nature caused by the contingency of human understanding. We can see this at work in Albertus’ discussions of astrology, and particularly its role in the process of generation. Albertus sees the celestial bodies as possessing influences stemming both from their motions and from emanations, and the emanations are particularly important for generation. Albertus understands the formation of a fetus or stone as a product of a series of natural causes linked to matter but requiring the presence of the insensible generative force to begin the process and give the generation form.74 As Lynn Thorndike has discussed, Albertus saw magic and astrology as part of a complicated system of natural causes, some of which he understood better than others.75 The generative force is marvelous because of its complexity and the impossibility of creating true and complete knowledge about it. It must be there because it is part of the causal chain: in fact, it is the final cause linking back to the divine.

Yet because it is insensible and a product of the celestial bodies it is something we cannot deal with directly but can only view through its effects.76 This does not mean we cannot know it, but only that we cannot know it with the kind of certainty that scientia is supposed to be based on.

For Albertus generation––and particularly monstrous generation––is very strongly connected or attributed to astrological influence.77 For instance we hear that:

Moreover, the heavenly powers in the seeds of plants and animals are wondrous. For they are very many and multiple, coming from the multitude of the heavenly bodies, their locations, and movements, and from the multiplicity of the rays, and the angle of the rays

74. Albertus, On Animals, 1396-1401. 75. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:556-583. 76. Zambelli, The Speculum astronomiae, 61-64; Rutkin, “Astrology and Magic,” 458-483. 77. Albertus, On Animals, 1303-1307. 67

which they acquire in every way, whether as they intersect one another or whether they are falling on the material of the thing generated, or whether they reflect back toward some given place of generation. The power which is more powerful among all these, however, is that which is in them because they are the instruments of the first intellect and of the lower, moving intellects.…An indication of this is that we see that each and every thing in the bodies of animals follows the powers of the soul more than it does those of the body. Therefore, these heavenly powers are wondrous and they are all in the spirit and heat of the semen. They are in the spirit as in the subject upon which they bestow form, and they are in the heat as in the instrument by means of which they fulfill their activities in the material of conception.78

The heavenly generative force is an important aspect of all generation for Albertus, including plants, animals, and even stones.79 Generation for him is a complex matter involving not only the material and natural causes of the world, but also an insensible ‘generative force’ emanating from the creator via the celestial bodies. The motions of the celestial bodies influence the environment. By influencing the dryness or heat of the environment, they affect humoral balance and a nested system of other natural causes that can incline generation in various directions, increased size, frailty, etc. There is also an emanation from the celestial bodies—a reflection of the intelligence of the creator—that provides the guiding principle and the force for generation.80

In animal generation this force is contained in the semen, though the emanations can have a varying degree of impact. The action of this generative force is largely responsible for monstrous births. As he explains:

Sometimes too they resemble neither of their parents but still preserve the shape of the species…. But at other times they do not even retain a human shape or that of those that generated them, but take on instead a monstrous and wondrous form. An offspring which is in no way like its parent, either in the nature of the species or individual shape, is monstrous and is called a wonder of nature. For this offspring, according to the nature it possesses, was never in the power of the parents. For, by its own genus and nature it is

78. Albertus, On Animals, 1187; Albertus, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, 1092. 79. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 18-35; Albertus, On Animals, 1393-1406. For a more general discussion of astrology in Albertus Magnus and thirteenth-century natural philosophy, see Rutkin, “Astrology and Magic,” 451-506; “Astrology in Albert’s Undisputed works,” chapter 7 of Poalo Zambelli’s The Speculum astronomiae; and Lynn Thorndike, "The True Place of Astrology in the History of Science," in The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Michael H. Shank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 239-243. 80. Adam Takahashi, "Nature, Formative Power and Intellect in the Natural Philosophy of Albert the Great," Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 460-465; Albertus, Book of Minerals, 30-31. 68

not analogous to its parents save in that there is generation of male and female according to an analogy to its nature and species.…The reason for all these things is taken from the harmonic proportion of the complexion of the sperm to the nature of the one conceived and vice versa.81

The category of marvel is used here not to so much indicate a lack of knowledge but to extend the category of the natural to encapsulate the unusual and irregular. It coincides with a system of insensible forces that he refers to as marvelous in themselves, possibly because they are so complex as to be beyond the abilities of humans to truly know, but the important work of marvel here is to ensure that the monstrous birth is identified as a product of nature.

The category of marvel is important to Albertus’ reasoning. It is a way in which he extends philosophical investigation to encapsulate the irregularities of nature, laying claim to the unusual and irregular, bringing it within the confines of the natural. With the turn to a causal definition of marvel produced by Aquinas and implicitly supported by Albertus,82 marvel becomes a means of marking the wonderful and the irregular as still natural. To be marvelous is to be natural and, at least potentially, knowable in an important way. The association of marvel with the generative force gives an important example of this. The generative force itself is understandable and knowable through its effects, but it is so complex and contingent as to be outside the bounds of human knowledge in any specific sense. It straddles the line between the known and the unknown. Similarly its product, the monstrous birth, is surprising and wonderful, but it is marked as natural and knowable by its being marvelous not miraculous. The category of the marvelous acts as an important means of expanding the reach of natural philosophy, allowing for a way to encapsulate the strange and irregular within the regularities of nature. At the same time it marks the very diversity of nature that prevents the creation of a science of animals. The

81. Albertus, On Animals, 1295; Albertus, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, 1206. 82. Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 18-26 69 diversity of nature, sometimes marked by the language of the marvelous, plays an important role in the caution with which Albertus approaches his evidence.

As Albertus said in relation to the rejuvenatory behaviour of the herodius, “I do not know what to say to this except that the wonders of nature are many.”83 Earlier in the work he makes a similar statement, expressing doubt about the reality of a creature called the maricon morion, but despite his very explicit doubts, he tells us “the following fact leads me to believe that these monsters, and those that we will speak of in the following books of this investigation, do exist.”84

He then tells us of hairy, humanoid monsters he saw that were captured in the forests of Saxony.

They are described as bestial and lacking all intellect but capable of being taught the rudiments of speech.85 While these monsters that Albertus mentions might well be wild and hairy humans, he perceives them as a marvelous race. To Albertus, these hairy men represent a cross between man and beast, and since there was a male and a female, they represent a marvelous race not a monstrous individual birth, not dissimilar, apparently, from composite creatures like the maricon morion. These examples of the strange and unexpected creatures he has personally observed support the possible existence of other equally unexpected creatures. Albertus appreciates the endless diversity of the created world and recognizes the world as a place full of strange and complicated, yet natural, events that could be called marvels. I think that this can be seen as the underlying principle of Albertus’ natural investigation. He uses reason and experience in order to sort through the testimonies of natural philosophers, travelers, poets, and sailors, attempting to

83. Albertus, On Animals, 1549. (mirabile) 84. Ibid., 308. It is unclear exactly where this name comes from but it probably involves some degree of textual corruption. The description of this composite animal seems very close to the usual description of the manticora; a lion’s body, the face of a man with three rows of teeth, and a tail like a scorpion. As Kitchell and Renick point out, this identification is somewhat confused by the fact that in book 22 Albertus lists the manticora and the maricon morion separately describing the two creatures very similarly but dividing secondary characteristics, which are here listed as all belonging to the maricon morion, between the two. See Albertus, On Animals, 308 n.103, n.104, 1521-1522. 85. Albertus, On Animals, 308-309. 70 construct from there an accurate depiction of the world he has little direct access to. His understanding of the complications of a science of nature and nature as a place of marvels lead him to be unwilling to reject reports of animals that might potentially be true, even if he finds reason to doubt them.

Nature may be marvelous but Albertus is also committed to nature as fundamentally rational and explicable via natural systems. His natural systems are admittedly complicated and incorporate astrology and magic, but these too are believed to function by harnessing natural causation and properly understanding the natural influences of the celestial bodies.86 Only miracles can operate against nature and, as discussed above, the miraculous was a carefully defended category. Albertus is willing to refute any claim that is not susceptible to explanation through natural reason and natural mechanism. For him the world is a place of knowable rules and regularities, but at the same time the complexity of those regularities requires the scholar to take care. He is unwilling to refute information based solely on observation because he is conscious of the diversity of nature, the strangeness that he has personally experienced and the massive potential for variety in nature. Thus the mere fact that no one has observed an event does not mean that it necessarily cannot occur; only a violation of natural mechanism must be categorically false (unless the phenomena is miraculous). Our one exception is the harpy, and there is no clear explanation given as to why he chooses to ignore this.87 He does state that what we know of the harpy is “according to a certain man of no great authority and whose statements are not proven by experience.”88 After providing some further information about the harpy,

Albertus again says, “but these things are not borne out by experience and seem to be

86. Thorndike, History of Magic, 556-583. 87. Albertus, On Animals, 1555. 88. Ibid. 71 fabulous.”89 I think in this case we can be fairly sure that he is suggesting that the sources that support the existence of the harpy are simply too unreliable to counter the consistent lack of experience among contemporaries. Apart from this one case, however, it is violation of natural reason that leads to the refutation of a claim. Lack of experience inclines him to doubt, and to express his skepticism, but does not generally make him willing to reject the story outright.

5 Evidence in Law and Natural Philosophy: Legal Evidence and the Reasoning of Albertus Magnus

I also want to briefly mention the potential relationship between legal reasoning and

Albertus’ approach to evidence. While it seems a sensible place to look for influences on his use of evidence, establishing the precise relationship between Albertus’ approach to evidence and the legal use of evidence in the thirteenth century lies beyond the scope of this study. So here I only want to point out a few potential relationships between the changing approach to evidence in thirteenth-century law and Albertus’ interest in, and slightly hesitant approach to, evidence from experience. In 1215 the fourth Lateran Council banned the use of ordeals as legal evidence leaving only two means of evidence substantial enough to provide proof for conviction according to the Ordo Juris, as laid out in Gratian’s Decretum (the fundamental legal resource for the

Middle Ages, completed in 1140). Conviction without the use of an ordeal required either uncontested testimony from two eyewitnesses, or the confession of the accused.90 Gradually the laws were revised to allow for conviction based on public knowledge and for strong

89. Ibid. 90. James A. Brundage, "Proof in Canonical and Criminal Law," Continuity and Change 11.3 (1996): 330-31; Richard M. Fraher, "Conviction According to Conscience: The Medieval Jurists' Debate Concerning Juridical Discretion and the Law of Proof," Law and History Review 7.1 (1989): 24-25. 72 circumstantial evidence to carry partial weight in producing a conviction, as well as a variety of other limitations to turn this incredibly strict standard of proof into a functioning part of the law code.91 At the same time, canon and civil law were becoming more firmly intertwined as legal education became increasingly a part of the universities and the reasoning practices and legal decisions of canon law bled over into the ius commune.92

While there are similarities between Albertus’ approach to evidence in natural philosophy and the changing approach to evidence within the law, it is unclear whether this reflects the influence of legal reasoning on Albertus or the influence of the twelfth-century turn to rationalism and concepts of natural regularity on the legal system. We know that Albertus was involved, at least peripherally, with the thirteenth-century legal system. He studied at Padua at the time when many legal lecturers were moving from Bologna to Padua, although we have no record of his actually studying law. He was also called upon to arbitrate a collection of litigations while Regent Master in Cologne, 1248-1254, and as Bishop of Regensburg and vicar general for

Cologne, 1260-1264, but it is unclear what training or background in the legal system Albertus actually had.93 A few authors have examined Albertus’ contributions to the theory of law in the

Middle Ages, looking primarily at his theological and moral discussions of natural law and natural right in De Bono.94 But no studies that I am aware of have explored the potential

91. Brundage, “Proof in Canonical Law,” 335-36. 92. See James A. Brundage, "Universities and the 'Ius Commune' in Medieval Europe," in The Profession and Practice of Medieval Canon Law, ed. James A. Brundage (Aldershot: Ashgate-Variorum, 2004), 237-253; and Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 93. Weisheipl, "The Life and Works of St. Albert,” 16-17, 28-33; On Albertus’s adjudication of litigations, see Thomas M. Schwertner, St. Albert the Great, Science and Culture Series (New York, Milwaukee: The Bruce Pub. Co., 1932), 120-150. 94. For example, see Stanley B. Cunningham, "Albertus Magnus on Natural Law," Journal of the History of Ideas 28.4 (1967): 479-502; Aloysius Obiwulu, Tractus de legibus in 13th Century Scholasticism: A Critical Study and Interpretation of Law in Summa Fratris Alexandri, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003). 73 relationships between legal reasoning and Albertus’ natural philosophy. We can possibly draw parallels between Albertus’ distinct interest in firsthand experience and the increased weight being placed on eyewitness testimony in the legal setting. At the same time it is possible that his hesitance to rely solely on reported observations to reject a plausible claim might be partially related to the legal approach to circumstantial evidence. Full proof in a legal setting is derived from two un-contradicted eyewitnesses. Based on this standard of evidence Albertus is unlikely to ever find what would be considered full proof as he sorts through the works of natural philosophers and other ‘witnesses.’ This might possibly offer an explanation as to why the harpy is the only creature categorically rejected based on lack of observation. Fama, common knowledge of a fact or of an individual’s reputation played an increasingly important role in thirteenth-century legal structures. It could determine an individual’s legal ability to provide testimony, but common knowledge could also be used as evidence itself. Particularly in the cases of land and marriage disputes, if it could be established that common knowledge of an event existed, that could be used as evidence on one side of a dispute.95 If Albertus’ approach to evidence was influenced by the developing structures of fama in canon and civil law, he might have taken the lack of experience among sailors as to the harpies’ existence as a common knowledge proof.96 He might also not consider the status of the poets who provide the original testimony to the harpies’ existence as sufficiently reliable to outweigh common knowledge.

95. F.R.P. Akehurst, “Good Name, Reputation, and Notoriety in French Customary Law,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 75-94; Chris Wickham, “Fama and the Law in Twelfth-Century Tuscany,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 15-26; Chris Wickham, “Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry,” Past and Present 160 (1998): 3-24. 96. Albertus, On Animals, 1555. As Brundage has pointed out in the early thirteenth century, the law of proof was modified to incorporate proofs based on common knowledge. If a person was widely known to be guilty of a crime, they could be convicted per notorium. This feeds into the potential explanation of the rejection of the harpy, but the relationship remains very speculative. For further discussion of this legal point see Brundage, “Proof in Canonical and Criminal Law.” 74

These are tenuous connections and subject to a number of problems. Andrea Frisch has recently called into question the meaning of witness in both travel literature and the medieval court system, suggesting that it was less connected to epistemic claims of personal experience than scholars have previously assumed.97 Her suggestion that the reputation of the witness is of more importance than the claim to firsthand experience appeals to the problem of determining the distinction between legal theory and legal practice. While we can point to the rules laid out in the Decretum to indicate the status and meaning of witness in legal theory, establishing it in legal practice is another matter entirely. Certainly to assume that eyewitness testimony is an unproblematic concept is flawed, but recent research into legal practices, particularly the import of Romano-canonical law into other countries and the role and practice of fama as a legal status and category of evidence, can help us to understand the line between theory and practice. Charles

Donahue has explored the importation of Romano-canonical law into the English church courts and indicates that, while there are some distinct irregularities, the witness practices largely conform to the legal theory, prizing eyewitness as a source of testimony.98 Likewise, in the development of fama, common knowledge, as a category of evidence, we can see in the objections to witnesses not only that the court and participants were concerned that witnesses have some direct knowledge of events, but appellants frequently knew enough about the

97. Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures (Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 2004), Chapter 1. Frisch raises the excellent point that there is a performative aspect to witness and that an audience may have interpreted claims of eyewitness as having different degrees of epistemic force in different contexts. She accurately points out that many scholars of both travel literature and law have taken for granted the connection between claims of eyewitness and epistemic claims to experience. I find Frisch’s claim problematic, however, in light of much of the other literature on the thirteenth century changes in medieval law, particularly the extensive collection of works by Brundage, Fraher, and Wickham (see notes 90, 92, and 95 above) that do indicate that the medieval courts were gradually giving increased epistemic weight to experience. 98. Charles Donahue Jr., “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne eds. Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally Scully, and Stephen White (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1981), 127–158. 75 structure of witness testimony to object to witnesses because they were too old or young to provide reliable evidence concerning events. The methods of investigating witness statements and the reasons for rejecting certain witnesses seem to strongly imply that courts were placing some epistemic value on the testimony itself, not just the status of the individual. This is not to say that status did not matter. It is clear that the status of the witness played an important role in the evaluation of their testimony, but status was not the only factor at work in medieval court witness as Frisch claims.99 This seems to map quite well onto the way we have seen Albertus deal with experience. His interest in contemporary witnesses seems at least partially located in the claim to first-hand experience, but he is also clearly careful in taking experience as a primary means of engaging the world. Most interesting, I think, is Brundage’s suggestion that the development of canon and civil law in the thirteenth century can actually be viewed as the influence of the scholastic methods of reasoning on debates over legal matters and the location of law as a part of the university.100 So the similarities between Albertus’ approach to evidence and the legal approach may stem not from the application of legal principles to the natural world, but from the shared resource of scholastic thought applied to both the natural world and the law. We will come back to this point in later chapters, particularly as we discuss The Book of John

Mandeville, and the possibility that the presentation of evidence in the text might be shaped by the author’s assumptions that the audience would be influenced by the legal concept of witness.

99. Frisch, Eyewitness, 24-29. For investigations into the category of fama that shed some light on the distinction between reputation, the performative aspect of witness, and the epistemic value of eyewitness, see Wickham, “Fama and the Law,” particularly 15-23, for a discussion of the early development of the category fama as ‘common knowledge’ and its distinction from witness testimony in civil disputes. From a slightly different angle, Thomas Kuehn focuses on the reputation aspect of fama. He argues that fama in the legal context is connected to common reputation but is mediated through legal procedure and serves an important role in determining an individual’s access to legal rights. Thomas Kuehn, “Fama as Legal Status in Renaissance Florence,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 27-46. For an example of one of the important ways fama as reputation could negatively affect an individual and their ability to participate in legal proceedings, see Akehurst, “Good Name, Reputation, and Notoriety,” 75-94. 100. Brundage, “Universities and the ‘ius commune,’” 245-253; Brundage, Legal Profession, chapter 6. 76

6 Conclusion

Modern historians have frequently struggled with how to approach the natural lore that appears in medieval natural philosophy. I think they sometimes overlook the fact that medieval natural philosophers struggled with it too. In De animalibus Albertus demonstrates a careful and critical approach to the task of constructing a coherent picture of nature. He shows us a complex approach to evaluating evidence concerning parts of the world he has no access to. The epistemic structures of reason, experience, and authority are carefully weighed in each case, but reason offers the only certain way of refuting a claim. The diversity of nature creates a wide space of possibility, where experience may be used to confirm or call into question reports, but it is not sufficient to refute a claim. It is possible for something to be contrary to our expectations of nature but still explicable through natural causes. Monstrous births occur because of the subversion of certain natural processes, but they occur extremely rarely and still are explicable by natural mechanisms. They violate expectations, but not natural reason. Reason allows

Albertus to sift through testimony to determine that which is possible based on natural mechanism and that which is not, such as a creature capable of living in fire. Reason allows him to throw out a claim that suggests that natural principles are violated on a regular basis, such as the birth of a basilisk from the egg of a cock. These things Albertus is willing to refute entirely.

The rejuvenatory power of the eagle, however, is susceptible to explanation via natural reason. It is unexpected but it does not violate natural principles or natural mechanism in any way. Thus, even though it has not been observed by contemporaries, his understanding of the diversity of the natural world makes Albertus unwilling to reject the story. He includes it in the information considered accurate as he attempts to construct an image of the natural world. 77

The epistemic structures traced in the work of Albertus Magnus form the foundation of this study. Reason, experience, and authority are used as a set of tools that function together but do not have a perfectly fixed relationship. One category may be given greater weight than others, but they are epistemic tools that are each applied to a question as a means of creating a coherent view of nature. These epistemic structures are underwritten by a strong sense of the diversity of nature. The category of marvel extends natural explanation to the diverse particular phenomena that push at the boundaries of natural knowledge. For Albertus, reason plays the central role, modified by, and modifying, authority and experience. There is no one universal approach in medieval natural philosophy to balancing the epistemic value of reason, experience, and authority; rather, there is a spectrum of shifting practices that seems closely tied to the intellectual context of the intended audience. In subsequent chapters, we will explore this spectrum through texts that move gradually toward a popular or extra-scholastic context and see the ways that the author’s use of evidence reflects that changing context. Reason will remain an important tool but its relationship to experience and authority will change substantially. In

Bartholomaeus’ work the task demands that authority be given the place of primacy, while in the

Pseudo-Albertus experimentum we will encounter information so particular and occult it can only be approached through experience, although an experience that must be tempered by reason. Finally, in The Book of John Mandeville not only will we see an author seeking to define new relationships for the epistemic structures that push experience to the front, but the role of legal thinking in approaching experience will become even more clear. Chapter Three: Bartholomaeus Anglicus and De

proprietatibus rerum

1 Introduction

Bernard Ribémont, among others, has pointed out that the term encyclopedia was not actually used in the Middle Ages. At the same time, medieval writers clearly were aware of, and participated in, a compilatory genre that sought to organize and propagate knowledge of the natural and human worlds loosely based on a model passed down to them through Latin writers like Pliny and Isidore of Seville.1 There is difficulty in defining exactly how the genre of encyclopedia should be understood in the Middle Ages. Modern scholars tend to favour an expansive category that can encapsulate materials from the Aristotelian commentaries of

Albertus Magnus—viewed as a sort of fragmented encyclopedia—to the mappae mundi as visual encyclopedia.2 This thesis links its texts together partly by pointing to their shared participation in this expansive category of encyclopedia: participating in the encyclopedic task by drawing

1. Ribémont, “On the Definition,” 47-55; For a useful definition of encyclopedia based on its function, see Michael W. Twomey, “Middle English Translations of Medieval Encyclopedias,” in Literature Compass 3, 3 (2006): 331-333; for a brief and general discussion of different approaches to the definition of encyclopedia see Elizabeth Keen, “Shifting Horizons: The Medieval Compilation of Knowledge as Mirror of a Changing World,” in Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds. Jason König and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 277-300. 2. Margriet Hoogleivt discusses and qualifies this notion. She suggests that there are certain similarities between the two but we need to be conscious of the very different ways the image of a mappae mundi and the text of an encyclopedia function. Margriet Hoogleivt, “Mappae Mundi and Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image versus Text,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 63-74. Isabelle Draelants has pointed out that a characteristic of the encyclopedic genre is a self-referential and self-feeding nature. Each text is built by compiling and reorganizing previous texts including the other medieval encyclopedias. All the texts dealt with in this thesis participate in this, excerpting, altering, and above all reordering information drawn from the same collection of sources and from each other. Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 43-99.

78 79 from and reordering the information of ancient authority as well as each other, which is a key aspect of encyclopedic practice.3 This view also focuses on the intent to reflect the world in the text, or image, with a desire to allow the reader to contemplate salvation and divine order by presenting them with an ordered catalogue of the world. There is a tension in the genre between the universal intent and particular nature of the natural, social, and historical information it presents. This means that the encyclopedia is a genre without an ideal exemplar and each text must navigate this tension by defining its bounds and its organization.4

In this chapter we are engaging with a text that is frequently used to define the genre of encyclopedia in the Middle Ages.5 It is therefore also important to think about the tighter definition of the genre, or about the medieval way of thinking about and expressing the encyclopedic programme. This follows from a characteristic tension of summa and brevis: a desire to be at once all-encompassing and brief. Its scope is self-defined as with all encyclopedias; in De proprietatibus rerum the stated goal is to compile the statements of the authorities, both theological and philosophical, concerning the aspects of nature mentioned in the

Bible or its primary gloss. An encyclopedia’s brevity stems from its compiling and excerpting of other works and as a function of its utility. It is a work intended to give the reader easy access to the accumulated knowledge of authorities that would be otherwise spread across a large collection of books.6

3. Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 81-85. 4. Robert L. Fowler, “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3-30; Bernard Ribémont, “L’établissement du genre encyclopédique au Moyen Âge,” in Littérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Orléans: Paradigme, 2002), 5-23; Elizabeth Keen, “Shifting Horizons,” 277-300. 5. See Fowler, “Encyclopedias: Definitions,” 18-25; Keen, “Shifting Horizons,” 277-278. 6. Christel Meier, “Organization of Knowledge and Encyclopaedic Ordo: Functions and Purpose of a Universal Literary Genre” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 111-126; Ribémont, “On the Definition,” 55-61. 80

De proprietatibus rerum helps us see how genre and goals shape the epistemic structures of medieval natural texts. The task Bartholomaeus has undertaken is one of compiling and, as such, he avoids openly choosing between authorities in the way we have seen Albertus do in the previous chapter. Bartholomaeus instead attempts to present a coherent view of the world by ordering and juxtaposing the accounts of his authorities in such a way as to present room for concordance in matters of cosmology. I will further suggest that the concept of the diversity of nature underwrites his text in such a way as to allow him freedom to present conflicting information from authorities in the context of the particulars of nature.

Bartholomaeus sets off what will become a trend in this thesis: an ever-diminishing knowledge of the author as an individual. As confident as we are that De proprietatibus rerum was written by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, we have little information about who exactly this individual was. There has even been some suggestion that Bartholomaeus was, in fact, French despite the appellation ‘Anglicus.’ Lynn Thorndike believed this last suggestion could be easily dismissed by looking at the way Bartholomaeus discusses the people of the British Isles in his work. Certainly Bartholomaeus draws a loving picture of his supposed homeland in his entry on

Anglia, casting it as the most fertile land in the world.7 The Scots and Irish, on the other hand, are discussed as inferior and brutish, though potentially attractive if only they wouldn’t wear their national costume.8 As Thorndike suggests, surely only an Englishman could be so comprehensively and specifically prejudiced against the inhabitants of those islands.9 What we

7. Suzanne Conklin Akbari points out that Bartholomaeus participates in a tradition of literature that places at the center of a supposedly objective description of the world, a careful and positive depiction of the author’s homeland. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville” Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1500, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 170-171. 8. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M.C. Seymour et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 733-734, 740-741, 767-768, 812. 9. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:428. 81 can say with confidence is that Bartholomaeus studied in Paris in the 1220s, where he lectured on the sentences of Peter Lombard and on the Bible. What we know of Bartholomaeus’ life comes mostly from two Franciscan chronicles, the Chronica Fratris Jordani of Giordano de

Giano, dictated around 1262, and the Chronica Fratrum of Salimbene di Adam of Parma, written in about 1284. Giordano de Giano’s record mentions a Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and a certain

John Anglicus, being sent from Paris to the newly created Franciscan province of Saxonia where

Bartholomaeus was made head lector at the Franciscan studium of Magdeburg in 1231.

Salimbene di Adam cites De proprietatibus rerum as a source and refers to Bartholomaeus as being a great cleric, who taught briefly on all of the parts of the Bible in Paris.10 While he may have been working on De proprietatibus rerum at Paris it is likely that it was finished between

1242 and 1247 during his period as lector at Magdeburg.11 It is important to recognize that this makes De proprietatibus rerum a product of both the Parisian scholastic environment and the

Franciscan studia.

As Van den Abeele points out—in his introduction to the first volume of the new Latin edition of De proprietatibus rerum currently in progress—this is all we can say with certainty about Bartholomaeus. There have been further suggestions that he might be the Bartholomaeus who is mentioned by Giordano de Giano as becoming provincial of Saxonia and then of Austria.

It is also possible that he could be the Bartholomaeus referred to as Bartholomaeus of Prague who was made provincial of Bohemia and Bishop of Lukow in 1257. Unfortunately, however, the records do not give us the necessary information to firmly make such a connection. Only his

10. Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 3-4; M.C. Seymour, “Introduction,” in Bartholomaeus Anglicus and His Encyclopedia, eds. M.C. Seymour et al. (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 1-6. 11. Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 1-35; Van den Abeele “Introduction générale,” 3-10; Heinz Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von, De proprietatibus rerum (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 13-22. 82 literary career seems confidently traceable. Outside of the works he wrote, the life of

Bartholomaeus remains obscure.12

The literary work he left behind, however, forms a solid base for immortality. De proprietatibus rerum was a hugely popular work and remains conserved in roughly 200 manuscript versions. Its popularity in Latin is attested to by its appearance in stationers’ lists associated with the University of Paris in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. A spate of vernacular translations brought the text into Italian, French, English and Spanish, which all took place during the latter part of the fourteenth century. A secondary bout of translation took De proprietatibus rerum into Dutch in the fifteenth century. Its popularity persisted into the age of print. Heinz Meyer, in his comprehensive reception history, cites twenty-four editions of De proprietatibus rerum before 1500. These are predominantly in Latin but with nine editions of

Jean Corbechon’s French translation—the most popular of the vernacular translations—two each of the Spanish and English versions and one of the Middle Dutch translation.13

Early evidence of the spread of De proprietatibus rerum points to its use as a manual for developing sermons. It rapidly appears on the list of books available from the Paris university stationers, although most probably in connection with the study of theology rather than natural philosophy.14 The text itself is a catalogue of realities without overt moralization. The moralizing lessons are taught by an accompanying gloss that is present in the majority of the early

12. Seymour suggests we can make an argument for his being made provincial of Bohemia but acknowledges that it is not conclusive. Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 7-8; Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 3-5; Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:401-406. 13. Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 13-16; Juris Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 394-400; Mary A. Rouse and Richard Rouse, “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, ca. 1250-ca.1350,” in Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, eds. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 287-308; for a list of manuscripts, see Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 397-407. 14. Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century,” 393-406. 83 manuscript versions. While it is not entirely clear if this gloss is authorial, in the manuscript versions surveyed by Juris Lidaka it was incomplete, but consistent in the portions glossed or left unglossed. He suggests that this indicates that the gloss was original to the manuscript tradition—although he also notes that scribes were clearly willing to add or subtract somewhat in copying—and was intended to help fulfill Bartholomaeus’ intent to help the rude and simple understand the riddles in nature. The glosses did just that, they helped the reader understand not the text itself, but the riddles and meanings of things, as well as providing a useful grounding for the development of sermons.15 Authorial or not, the gloss is such a significant feature of the early manuscript tradition that it is more its abandonment that is a feature of reception than its presences. This gloss disappears in later versions—and is entirely absent in the vernacular translations—and we see the rapid development of a line of Latin transmission that leaves only the catalogue of natural realities.16 It is clear that by the time the vernacular translations were being made in the late fourteenth century, the text’s reputation had changed to that of a more general textbook resource among a large portion of its audience. The French translation, composed by Jean Corbechon in 1372 at the behest of Charles V of France, enjoyed extensive circulation.17 Both the French and Latin versions appear in the libraries of private individuals and, as Draelants has shown in the library of Amplonius Ratinck de Berka, often were listed under the category of natural philosophy.18 The presence of multiple copies of De proprietatibus

15. Juris Lidaka, “Glossing Conception, Infancy, Childhood, and Adoloscence in Book VI of De proprietatibus rerum,” in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Reception, eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 117-126; For a more general discussion of the gloss see Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 283-293. 16. Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 156-158, 283-293; Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale, 11-12. 17. Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 325-327; For an interesting discussion of the complex and varied ways Corbechon’s translation was reshaped by its transmitters, see Christine Silvi, “Jean Corbechon «revisité»: revoir, corriger et diffuser le Propriétaire en françois dans les incunables et les post-incunables,” in Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires, ed. Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 89-123. 18. Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 54-57. 84 rerum in the libraries of Oxford colleges at the end of the fifteenth century, listed under both theology and natural philosophy and kept both reserved in the library and available for circulation, suggests that the text was being widely used for instruction at the university.19 The evidence from library catalogues, as well as the patrons and owners of vernacular versions, shows a wide and extremely diverse readership found among religious houses, universities, and wealthy courtiers. This diverse distribution requires us to recognize that De proprietatibus rerum was not a closed text but clearly open to multiple readings and reshaping by its audience. It is clear that the text was quickly taken up, amended, and adapted to a wide variety of interests and tasks. Medical and natural history interests loom large in this catalogue but we also see it reshaped to a more directly moralized purpose or for other theological and natural philosophical interest.20 In its many reproductions both in manuscript form and in print it is constantly reshaped to the needs and interests of its copyists, translators, and the various patrons for whom it was reproduced.

Of the many versions of De proprietatibus rerum that survive, only the Middle English translation by John Trevisa, completed around 1398, has been produced in a complete modern critical edition.21 In contrast to Bartholomaeus, we know quite a bit about John Trevisa. He was born in Cornwall in the early 1340s. He was educated at Oxford, entering Exeter College in

1362, and became a fellow of Queen’s College in 1369 studying theology. Around 1374 he was

19. Sue Ellen Holbrook, “A Medieval Scientific Encyclopedia ‘Renewed by Goodly Printing’: Wynkyn de Worde's English ‘De proprietatibus rerum,’” Early Science and Medicine 3.2: The Vernacularization of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Late Medieval Europe (1998): 119-156. 20. Michael W. Twomey, “Inventing the Encyclopedia,” 82-86; For a brief overview of the various texts thus reshaped, see Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 232-237; For a much more detailed discussion of the texts and their different topics, see Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 239-324. 21. In this thesis I will refer to Seymour’s edition in short form as Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, to differentiate it from the two Latin editions used, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De rerum proprietatibus: Frankfurt 1601 (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964); and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 6, Liber XVII, ed. Iolanda Ventura (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 85 appointed vicar of Berkley, and died in 1402. His translation of De proprietatibus rerum was probably made during a two year stay in Oxford at the behest of Lord Berkley.22 It is generally agreed by scholars that Trevisa’s translation compares well to the original Latin edition. While

Seymour has not been able to track down the manuscript version used by Trevisa, suggesting he may have used multiple versions, the translation is notable for aiming to produce an accurate reproduction. Trevisa preserves some of the Latin terminology and clearly aimed for literalness in his translation.23 Several concerns with this edition have recently been raised by A.G.S.

Edwards. He suggests that the published version may not have accurately reproduced Trevisa’s lost holograph partly because of emendations based on manuscripts that are closer to the continental tradition than that of the insular.24 While these concerns raise significant problems for

Seymour’s critical text as a representation of Trevisa’s translation, the fact that it has been over- corrected to be similar to the Latin continental tradition makes it less of an issue for this thesis because we are interested in what we can learn about Bartholomaeus’ work rather than

Trevisa’s.25 It is clear that Trevisa is attempting to adhere closely to the content of

Bartholomaeus’ work. As Michael Twomey states, Trevisa effectively uses contemporary Middle

English to reproduce the learned language and body of learning that was part of the cultural

22. Twomey, “Middle English Translations,” 331-340; for a full biography of Trevisa see David C. Fowler, Life and Times of John Trevisa: Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 23. For a detailed discussion of Trevisa’s translation, see Traugott Lawler, “On the Properties of John Trevisa’s Major Translations,” Viator 14 (1983): 267-288. 24. A.G.S. Edwards. “The Text of John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 15 (2002): 83–96. 25. While examinations of the changes made by translators can be extremely illuminating—as can be seen from the recent spate of work on the French translation by Jean Corbechon—that is not the goal of this chapter. For further discussion of such translational changes, see the articles in Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires, ed. Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014); as well as Saskia Bogaart, “Vernacularisation of Latin Science: On the Properties of Things and Van den proprieteyten der dinghen,” 31- 41; and Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Barthélemy l’Anglais et Jean Corbechon: enquêtes sur le livre XII, De avibus,” 245-266. Both in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). 86 milieu at the time of Bartholomaeus’ composition in 1240. Most importantly, throughout the text

Trevisa left many of Bartholomaeus’ Latin terms untranslated, reproducing each term in Latin and often then rephrasing it in English. He also often makes use of doublet expressions, providing two complimentary Middle English terms as a sort of semi-gloss of the Latin term.26

Bartholomaeus’ technical language is only rarely translated into English, demonstrating a distinct preference for accuracy over anglicization in Trevisa’s translation. He seems to recognize that the simple anglicization of the Latin words would not be able to accurately reproduce the concepts under discussion.27

Meyer and Van den Abeele are currently overseeing a large-scale project to produce a

“best text” edition of the original Latin version, but to date only books 1-4 and book 17 of De proprietatibus rerum are available in this format. A similar project is underway to produce an edition of the French translation by Jean Corbechon, which was probably the most widely reproduced vernacular edition of De proprietatibus rerum, but this work is also still in progress.28

For the purposes of this thesis, the Seymour critical edition is the most useful as it reproduces

Bartholomaeus’ text faithfully enough to work with until the Abeele-Meyer edition is finished,

26. Twomey, “Middle English Translations,” 333-334; Bogaart, “Vernacularisation of Latin Science,” 31-41; D.C. Greetham, “Models for the Textual Transmission of Translation: The Case of John Trevisa,” Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984), 148-149. 27. Twomey, “Middle English Translations,” 333-334. There is, of course, a broader social and political context to Trevisa’s translation work. As Fiona Somerset points out, the act of translation from Latin to Middle English can be understood as participating in the redistribution of intellectual capital. While the text of De proprietatibus rerum is largely unaltered and uninterpolated by Trevisa, the act of placing the text in English made information that had previously been the purview of the educated cleric available to a wider, and significantly different, audience. Somerset locates Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum within the context of Trevisa’s other translation works, which show a distinct interest in outlining the principles of good governance and criticisms of clerical power to an English speaking audience. She suggests that these texts are intended allow the predominantly noble audience to advance the interests of the laity while deploying arguments and information that had previously been restricted to the educated clerics. Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 3, particularly 62-68. 28. Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 18-22. 87 and more importantly it is accompanied by a comprehensive volume listing the sources, both openly cited and un-cited. This apparatus has proved invaluable for this project.29

De proprietatibus rerum is a compilatio, a text formed from the excerpts and abbreviations of authoritative works, so we must be conscious of Bartholomaeus’ sources.30 He uses a wide variety of theological and philosophical sources, condensing for his reader a library of theological and philosophical source material into nineteen books, ordered to be easily searchable. We can break these sources down into a rough typology that can be seen across the genre of encyclopedias: Scripture, the patres, doctores, and philosophi. While exactly which authors might fall into these categories can vary according to encyclopedic compiler, Isabelle

Draelants has given an interesting breakdown that can help them to be understood.31 Scripture itself stands primary; beside this are the Glossa ordinaria of Anselm of Laon and his followers, and the Sententiae of Peter Lombard, that form a theological core from which discussions begin.

The patres can be considered the biblical commentaries of the ancient Church Fathers including

Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, and Gregory the Great. De proprietatibus rerum has a distinctly Augustinian tone, thoroughly embracing the notion of using the classical works to illuminate and investigate sacred writing. While Bartholomaeus does not himself refer to the category of doctores, as some encyclopedic writers do, Draelants identifies these in the encyclopedic tradition as the ancient and medieval theological authorities that are not canonized.

In Bartholomaeus these are primarily the theological sources of the Parisian intellectual milieu in the thirteenth century. The philosophi are the largest category, authors writing on nature and

29. M.C. Seymour et al., eds., Bartholomaeus Anglicus and His Encyclopedia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992). 30. For a definition of the structures of compilatio and its development, see Neil Hathaway, “‘Compilatio’: from Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 19-44. For a summary of arguments surrounding the relationship between compilatio and authorship, see Alastair Minnis, “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari: The Late- Medieval Discourse of Compilation,” in La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, eds. Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 47-63. 31. Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 43-99. 88 natural philosophy both ancient and modern, Christian and non-Christian. Bartholomaeus made use of the newly available Greco-Latin and Arabo-Latin translations of Aristotle and the Arabic commentators—such as Avicenna—and particularly translations of medical works including

Galen, Hippocrates, and the pharmacological works and therapeutic manuals (notably by

Platerarius) produced in Salerno. This wide collection of sources, both ancient and contemporary, bears the strong mark of the Parisian intellectual milieu.32 Encyclopedias, as a genre, are also texts that feed upon each other, as Draelants has pointed out, and so we can also see distinct relations and borrowings in Bartholomaeus’ work from De natura rerum of Alexander Neckam and De floribus rerum naturalium of Arnoldus of Saxony. Draelants has particularly argued that the sharing between Arnoldus and Bartholomaeus could point to his continuing to work on De proprietatibus rerum while lector at Magdeburg. For the moment, however, such questions cannot be conclusively answered.33

2 The Goals of the Text

If we wish to understand how De proprietatibus rerum shapes its presentation of natural knowledge, we must begin by discussing what its goals are. The text’s purpose is stated clearly in the general introduction. It is a text that is predominantly aimed at the uneducated novices in the

Franciscan order and intended to act as a reference resource. Bartholomaeus states in his introduction that:

32. Van den Abeele points out that we can actually distinguish three cultural milieus at play, the English, Parisian, and German. It is hard to separate these, however, as we do not know whether the English texts Bartholomaeus cites were available in Paris or brought with him, nor can we be certain what was made available to him. Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 9. 33. Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 7-10; Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 17-35; Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” see particularly 71-80 and 92-99. 89

With the help of God this work is compiled, in order to benefit me and in that situation others that do not know the natures and properties of things, that are scattered and spread widely in books of holy saints and philosophers, to understand the riddles and meanings of scripture and the writings that the Holy Spirit has left veiled and wrapped under analogy and figures of properties of things of nature and craft.34

His purpose is to provide an introductory text that gathers together natural information written by the authorities on all the things mentioned in the Bible or its primary glosses. This is to give the audience the basis in natural knowledge necessary to properly understand the meaning and messages ‘hidden by God in His creation’—that is, the natural knowledge enables the reader to discern the hand of the creator in the created world—as well as to allow the preaching brothers to use anecdotes from nature as exemplars in their sermons.35 As Bartholomaeus states “Our wit may not move unto the contemplation of unseen things unless it is led by consideration of things that are seen.”36 The text is designed to condense and epitomize the works of philosophers and theologians so that the members of the Franciscan Order might find everything they need in a single place. His intent is not to write a work of his own scholarship; in fact, he is quite clear that the authority of the text does not rest on his own name or knowledge: “In this work I have put little or nothing of my own will, but all that shall be said is taken from authentic books of holy saints and of philosophers compiled briefly and diligently, so that by all the titles alert readers may explore.”37 He repeats this protestation in the conclusion, where he makes even clearer what his goal was in this text: “These things about properties of natural things, that are digested and

34. In this chapter I will provide my own translations of the Middle English to make matters easier on the reader while the original text is reproduced in the footnotes. “By help of God þis werk is compiled, profitable to me and on cas to oþir þat knowith nouȝt þe kyndes and propirtees of þinges þat beth toschift and isprad ful wide in bokes of holy seyntes and philosophris, to vndirstonde redels and menynges of scriptures and of writinges þat þe holy gost hath iȝeue derkliche ihid and wrapped vndir liknes and fygures of propirtees of þinges of kynde and craft…” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 41. 35. Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus In the Thirteenth Century,” 393-406. 36. “oure wit may not stiȝe vnto þe contemplacioun of vnseye þinges but it be ilad by consideracioun of þinges þat beþ iseye.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 41. 37. “In þis work I haue iput of myne owne wille litil oþir nouȝt, but al þat schal be seid is itake of autentik bokes of holy seyntes and of philosophres and compile schortliche witoute idilnesse, and þat by alle þe titles wys reders may assaye.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 43. 90 treated in nineteen books, shall suffice to find some meaning [of] similarity, for what reason

Scripture so readily uses analogy and figures of ordinary natural things [and] the properties thereof.”38 He is collecting this information in order to aid “simple” readers in understanding and interpreting the references to nature in the Bible. It is a work designed to allow the reader to quickly access the large collection of information provided by authorities:

And I make protestation in the end of this work, as I did in the beginning, that in all that is in diverse matters contained in this work, right little or nothing have I set of my own. But I have followed truth and accuracy, and followed the words, meaning, and beliefs, and comments of holy saints and of philosophers, that the simple, that may not, because there are so many books, seek and find all the properties of things that Holy writ makes mention and record, may here find something of what he desires.39

Bartholomaeus is clear that this is an educational text, but it also serves as a reference text. It is designed to give the reader access to the collected statements of the authorities and

Bartholomaeus is intentionally compiling rather than explicitly evaluating or commenting. He is very concerned to stress this because the credibility of the information derives from his authorities, not from himself. While we will see various acts intended to construct the credibility of the author in other works—most notably The Book of John Mandeville—here Bartholomaeus seeks to establish the reliability of his text by distancing it from himself. He is compiling the information provided by the credible authorities without altering it, as he claims, and therefore the credibility lies in the authorities not in Bartholomaeus, who needs only to be a reliable transmitter. Noemi Barrera-Gómez, in a careful exploration of source use in book 1, also argues that Bartholomaeus manipulates the order of book 1 to ensure that the work can open by quoting

38. “þilke þinges of propretees of kyndeliche þinges, that beþ digeste and ytreted in nynetene parcelles, schal suffice to fynde som resoun [of] likkenesse, by what cause holy writte vseth so redy likenesses and figures of kynde natural þinges [and] of þe propretees þerof.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1395. 39. “And I make protestacioun in the ende of þis werk, as I dede in the bygynnynge, þat in all þat is in dyuerse matieres conteyned in this werk, right litel or nought haue I sette of myn owne. But I haue ysewed soþenesse and trouþe, and yfolowed þe wordes, menynge, and sawes, and commentes of holy seyntes and of philosopheres, that the symple, that may nought, for endeles many bookes, seche and fynde alle þe propretees of þinges of þe [which] holy writte makith mencioun and mynde, may here fynde somdele what he desireth.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1395. 91 from the Papal Bull of Innocent III. While questionable from a point of doctrinal organization, this move primes the reader to expect a text of theological orthodoxy, while also coopting the authority of the political and theological figure of the pope.40 Barrera-Gómez’s study highlights the ways that Bartholomaeus is able to juxtapose and organize the excerpts from authority to serve his own narrative while maintaining his apparent distance as compiler rather than author.

While this work shares an educational goal and touches on many of the topics dealt with in De animalibus, it is a very different text. Where Albertus sets out to provide a text book on the science of animals for Dominican friars, Bartholomaeus is providing an introduction to all of natural philosophy for the purpose of studying Scripture and preaching about it.41 Where

Albertus sometimes shows the reader conflicts between previous authors and demonstrates how to resolve these debates with reason, Bartholomaeus’ foremost goal is compilation of authoritative views on realities. The realities he is presenting are intended to set the reader up for producing the proper theological interpretations of nature but he chooses not to overtly include those interpretations. Even when he is citing the Hexameron of Ambrose or the Physiologus he makes the active choice to cut the moral interpretation from the original material.42 Rather, he seems to perceive himself as presenting the realities of nature while the gloss that accompanied the early Latin versions of the text carried the moral interpretation.43

The text is strongly marked by its nature as a compilatio. It is clear that it is a work of authority and that epistemic structures for choosing between sources are largely not used in the way we have talked about them in the previous chapter. If Albertus Magnus performs a careful

40. Noemi Barrera-Gómez, “Bartholomaeus Anglicus como Compilador. fuentes y autoridades en el Liber de Deo del De proprietàtibus rerum,” in La compilacion del saber en la Edad Media/La compilation du savoir au Moyen Âge/The compilation of knowledge in the Middle Ages, eds. Maria José Muñoz, Patricia Cañizares, and Cristina Martin (Porto: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales, 2013), 85-90. 41. Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century,” 396-400. 42. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 136-137. 43. Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie, 281-296. 92 balancing act between authority, reason, and experience, Bartholomaeus has placed all the weight on the side of authority. In her work on encyclopedias, Mary Franklin-Brown sees scholastic scientific investigation as built almost entirely through forms of textual practice and argues that the principal measure of a claim’s validity was the authority of the individual who made it. In this way, scientific writing derived its authority from practices of citation.44 As we have seen in the previous chapter, citation was an incredibly important part of the scholastic intellectual practice, but the process of choosing between citations was also a complex one drawing on the epistemic structures of reason and experience. As we will continue to track through this study, credibility could be built from far more than just references to auctores. In examining Bartholomaeus we should be prepared to expect a much greater reliance on authority

(because the needs of the genre he writes in are different) compared to what we saw in the previous chapter while examining the works of Albertus. Franklin-Brown reminds us that accuracy was by no means the only way of judging the value of information: encyclopedias demonstrate the medieval negotiation between the Aristotelian description of natural properties and the symbolic meanings of nature embedded in natural investigation. At the same time, this is a genre marked by shared goals but a heterogeneous approach to the actual communication of information.45 It is important to remember, therefore, that a large part of Bartholomaeus’ work is focused on outlining the literal meaning of nature and represents, what Franklin-Brown would call the horizontal encyclopedia.46 By understanding the properties and literal meaning of nature,

44. Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, 14-16, 45-54. 45. Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, 8-11, 53-54. 46. These are the encyclopedias that address the literal meaning of the world foremost without necessarily elaborating on the underlying symbolism that is written into the objects under discussion. Franklin-Brown bases her study of this type of encyclopedia on the Speculum maius of Vincent de Beauvais, seeing its problems as the problems of the medieval intellectual programme in general. She sees the Speculum maius as the premier encyclopedia of its age primarily because of its length and comprehensiveness, despite the general consensus that De proprietatibus rerum was copied more frequently and probably had a greater impact. While her study raises some interesting points, I think it is worth investigating the comparatively more popular and 93 the student—and the preacher—is then able to move on to address its symbolic meaning. This symbolic meaning is often not directly addressed in Bartholomaeus’ text, although it is frequently supplied by the gloss that accompanies many of the earlier manuscripts. While accuracy is certainly not the only method of evaluating information, we should also not assume that Bartholomaeus is unconcerned with presenting a coherent picture of the world. His expressed goal is to explain the properties of nature as an aid to the contemplation of their symbolic meaning, and it is done through a genre whose structures are built primarily around the use and juxtaposition of authorities.47 As we will discuss near the end of this chapter, experience as a way of knowing does not appear to play a significant role in the text. Its organization is clearly a complex work of reason, but again not in the manner of explicating the reasons for choosing between sources but in their compilation and organization. It is a work so thoroughly enmeshed in authority that the author protests multiple times that there is “little or nothing”48 of himself present. With that in mind, I want to look at what this work of authority gives us. As we will see, Bartholomaeus does not see it as his task to explain his choices between sources; that is an expected aspect of the genre. In his selected sources, however, he has clearly decided to include authorities that appear to disagree with each other. This seemingly contradictory practice,

focused De proprietatibus rerum as a route to understanding evidence use in encyclopedias. If the Speculum maius is the most comprehensive of encyclopedias, it is also worth pointing out that most encyclopedias aim to be comprehensive only in much more limited ways. De proprietatibus rerum, aims to be comprehensive only within the defined parameters of its project. Additionally, Franklin-Brown appears to take at face value the compiler’s assertions that they are simply a passive transmitter of information. As we have addressed earlier in this chapter, we have reason to doubt this claim. See Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, 94-97. For discussions that highlight useful points of comparison and difference between the two texts, see Michael W. Twomey, “Towards a Reception History of Western Medieval Encyclopedias in England before 1500,” in Pre- Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 329-362; Christel Meier-Staubach, “La matérialité et l’immatérialité des couleurs. A propos du traité ‘De coloribus’ d’Avranches 235,” in Science antique, science médiévale: Actes du colloque international (Mont-Saint-Michel, 4-7 septembre 1998), eds. Louis Callebat and Olivier Desbordes (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000), 451-469; Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 43-99. 47. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 41-43, 1395-1397. 48. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 41-43, 1395-1396. 94 selecting sources yet still choosing to present authorities that appear to contradict each other, is common to compilatio.49 In this text I think we can see Bartholomaeus creating a coherent picture of nature according to the rules of the compilatio genre: through the ordering and juxtaposition of authorities.

It is through the text’s ordering principles—the ordo of the work—that the information is shaped to the purpose of salvation. Some encyclopedias were mirrors intended to reflect nature and allow the reader to understand how the visible world could be used to consider the invisible.50 Bartholomaeus’ ordering of information provides a picture of the world distilled from the chaos and particularity of nature in order to highlight God’s divine ordering of the world. The overarching structure of his work breaks the natural world into nineteen books, beginning with those on God and the angels (books 1 and 2); then moving to man and his properties both immaterial and material (3-7); cosmology and time (8-9); and finally to the four elements which further break down into particular discussions of geography, stones, plants, and animals (11-19).

This overarching structure moves consistently from the immaterial to the material and from the substance to the properties. Within each book the tendency is to move from the general to the specific, with most books opening with a discussion of the general properties of the category or element under discussion before moving on to breaking down the subject into its parts. This focus on the properties of nature is an important characteristic of the Franciscan approach to both nature and devotion. The properties of things are the aspects of the created world that allow the mind to begin the process of contemplating aspects of the creator. For Bartholomaeus these

49. For a discussion of the genre of compilatio and its ability to tolerate dissonance see Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, 63-72; Silvi, Science Médiévale et Vérité, 80-85, 90-98. 50. See Christel Meier, “On the Connection between Epistemology and Ordo in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period” in Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, eds. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 93-113. 95 properties include quality, substance, content, and beauty.51 This is a core aspect of Franciscan natural philosophy and we are frequently reminded that understanding the properties of visible nature is intended to allow our mind to move toward the contemplation of the divine.52

The properties, therefore are an important starting point for the Franciscan project of the contemplation of the invisible by means of the visible, but they also offer Bartholomaeus a means of exploring the complex and changing world while focusing on the divine balance that he sees in nature. Through understanding the properties we can see that some things are harmful, some are remedial, and some are designed to bring us closer to the divine. Bartholomaeus creates a network of connected spiritual meanings through articulating the properties of diverse physical things that consistently returns to a sense of divine balance and order expressed through nature’s diversity.53 Much has been written about this general ordo but I want to look at the picture of nature presented by the text below this level.54 Within his notices on animals, and indeed elsewhere, Bartholomaeus seems willing to reproduce statements from authority that provide

51. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 679. 52. Writing shortly after De proprietatibus rerum, in 1259, Bonaventure provides the most coherent articulation of this approach in his Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Bonaventure identifies seven aspects of the created world— origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, plentitude, operation, and order—that testify to a particular aspect of God. While Bartholomaeus never outlines his rubric as coherently, his model is clearly similar. French and Cunningham, Before Science, 209-215. For a few examples of Bartholomaeus’ call to use the visible as a means of contemplating the invisible, see Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 41, 441, 1395-1396. 53. Elizabeth Keen points to the ways the properties of things are capable of carrying a multiplicity of meanings with De proprietatibus rerum, particularly through the support of the associated glosses. She offers a good exploration of the many different ways Bartholomaeus uses the properties of things to articulate the ways nature provides balance between growth and decay, harm and remedy, diversity and harmony. They also help convey the important preaching mission of the friars and lead the reader to understand how nature and the senses can lead us through the properties of things to the contemplation of the divine. She uses this interpretation to provide an explanation within Bartholomaeus’s ordo for Book 19, frequently seen as a jumbled afterthought rather than an intentional and well-organized part of the encyclopedia. See Elizabeth Keen, The Journey of a Book: Bartholomew the Englishman and the Properties of Things (Canberra A.C.T.: ANU E Press, 2007), Chapter 3, especially 37-49. 54. For some relevant discussions of ordo, see Christel Meier, “Über den Zusammenhang von Erkenntnistheorie und enzyklopädischem Ordo in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 36.1 (2002): 171-199; Christel Meier, “On the Connection between Epistemology and Ordo,”; Christel Meier, “Organization of Knowledge and Encyclopaedic Ordo”; John North, “Encyclopaedias and the Art of Knowing Everything,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 183-199. 96 conflicting accounts. By exploring this I think we can gain insight into the coherence of nature presented in this text below the level of the overarching ordo Christel Meier has so comprehensively discussed.

Mariateresa Fumagalli and Massimo Parodi have laid the groundwork for this study with their discussion and comparison of the approach to nature in the encyclopedias of Bartholomaeus and Alexander Neckam in 1985. They point to a unifying voice that emerges out of

Bartholomaeus’ discordant sources that attempts to bring together into a coherent picture the sources he is compiling. In their discussion they identify a greater interest on the part of

Bartholomaeus than is found in Neckham to reconcile conflicting views on cosmology compared to physics.55 I believe that it is worth revisiting this point, and it is my desire to start from the basis their work has provided while focusing particularly on the role that diversity of nature and the marvelous plays both in producing this coherence and in making palatable the conflicts that remain.

As I have shown in the previous chapter, the diversity of nature inclines Albertus Magnus toward accepting reasonable reports concerning creatures he has no access to. The wide variety of nature and the marvels he is familiar with create a space where it is more appropriate to accept those things he has not been given reason to doubt. If the creatures fit into the structures of nature there is no reason to reject them. Bartholomaeus participates in this acceptance to an even greater degree. Where authorities conflict Albertus seeks to produce a single account based on his understanding, and the most reasonable interpretation, of nature.56 In the case of

Bartholomaeus, the structures of the genre and his own stated purpose incline him to avoid

55. Mariateresa Fumagalli and Massimo Parodi, “Due enciclopedie dell’Occidente medievale: Alessandro Neckam e Bartolomeo Anglico” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 40.1: Momenti e modelli nella storia dell'enciclopedia: Il mondo musulmano, ebraico e latino a confronto sul tema dell'organizzazione del sapere (1985): 51-90. 56. See chapter 2 of this work. 97 choosing between authorities. He seeks to remove himself from the text, even though the selection and ordering process of the material he includes necessarily imprints his character on the work.

Ribémont has provided a typology of the marvelous in the encyclopedia that supports this general conclusion with the category he refers to as the natural marvelous. The presence of marvel in the world as a natural aspect is marvelous because it is unfamiliar, surprising, or particularly demonstrative, but it is not marvelous in its existence. He also, however, points to the complexity of marvel existing as a confluence of a collection of concepts rather than one clear category.57 As such we must remember that the appearance of the marvelous in a text can carry a multiplicity of meanings. As D. C. Greetham and Ribémont have each pointed out in earlier articles, marvelousness in De proprietatibus rerum can point to God’s order in the world and nature’s diversity justifies the curious investigation of natural particulars.58 As we will see later in this chapter, I want to suggest that we can further expand our understanding of the role of marvelousness, and the diversity of nature that goes hand in hand with it, to see it as underwriting the text’s approach to nature as a whole. It creates a space in which disagreement between authorities on the particulars of nature can be tolerated without preventing the construction of a coherent picture of nature.

The question of conflict within the notices themselves has not recently been revisited in this context. Since a large part of my argument is that epistemic practices were shaped by the genre and context of a given text, I want to agree that we should consider the compiling impulse

57. Bernard Ribémont, “L’autre et la merveille dans les encyclopédies du Moyen Âge,” in Littérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Orléans: Paradigme, 2002), 155-169. 58. D. C. Greetham, “The Concept of Nature in Bartholomaeus Anglicus (FL. 1230),” Journal of the History of Ideas 41.4 (1980): 663-677; Bernard Ribémont, “Une «botanique» encyclopédique confrontée à la merveille: l’exemple du De proprietatibus rerum” in De natura rerum: Études sur les encyclopédies médiévales (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), 187-215. 98 extremely important in this process, but we can also point to an attempt to create a coherent picture of the world that finds itself in tension with the compiler’s task. As much as

Bartholomaeus asserts that he has put little or nothing of himself in the text, by looking at specific points of tension we can see both attempts to create agreement and an acceptance of disagreement between authorities that is underwritten by a sense of the diversity of nature. As we will see, Bartholomaeus works to find concordance between authorities, especially when considering cosmological statements but seems much more tolerant of disagreement in discussion of particular creatures.

I would suggest Bartholomaeus and Albertus have a shared sense of the diversity of nature that I think connects the two texts in important ways. Despite the striking differences in the epistemic approach of the two texts, it is important to remember that Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Albertus Magnus are both products of the scholastic intellectual environment and their educational trajectories are, in some ways, similar. They were both initially trained at universities, participated in the Parisian educational system, and even both joined mendicant orders and helped to establish German studia. There are many important differences that affect their intellectual contexts—the fact that one is Dominican and the other Franciscan stands out59—but I do not think we should be surprised to find a common understanding of the diversity

59. As Caroline Walker Bynum has argued fourteenth- and fifteenth-century debates on the sanguis Christi, blood relics, and eucharistic visions point to the very important differences in concepts of human nature, physiology, and change in Dominican and Franciscan philosophy. Philip Lyndon Reynolds, in his study of thirteenth- century debates concerning food and veritas humanae naturae, shows that these earlier debates were no less bound up with concepts of identity and change but points to an early thirteenth-century Parisian consensus on these issues that begins to diverge in the works of subsequent authors. The theology and natural philosophy of these two orders of friars supported and informed each other in ways that gradually created significantly different natural philosophical programs. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, chapters 4 and 5, particularly 127-130; Bynum, Metamorphoses and Identity, 22-30; Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology (Leiden: Brill, 1999), particularly chapter 6; for a specific discussion of the Dominican and Franciscan positions on change in eucharistic visions see Peter Browe, “Die scholastiche Theorie der eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder,” in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, eds. Hubertus Lutterbach and Thomas Flammer (Münster: 99 of nature running through their works. While Roger French and Andrew Cunningham have advanced the argument that the differing theological and political interests of the Franciscans and

Dominicans determined their divergent approaches to nature, I think we should be careful, as

David C. Lindberg has stressed, not to over-interpret the existence of debates between primarily

Dominican and Franciscan schools of thought.60 Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau have pointed out that the diverging optical research of the Franciscans and Dominicans, while almost certainly driven by differing understandings of the acquisition of knowledge, can also be understood as a story of diverging intellectual debates between the universities of Paris and Oxford.61 French and

Cunningham make an excellent point concerning the Dominican and Franciscan orders in general, but in the case of Albertus Magnus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus it is important to note that these two scholars share an educational, specifically a Parisian, milieu that informed their intellectual development. With Bartholomaeus and Albertus we are dealing with figures who are near the beginning of their order’s educational program, and who were educated outside of the friar’s studia. Both of these scholars are products of the university system—Albertus studied at the University of Padua and Bartholomaeus may have studied briefly at the University of Oxford before moving to Paris—and both taught at the University of Paris, although they were not

Lit Verlag, 2003), 251-264. Somewhat similarly, Russell L. Friedman has discussed the theological function of concepts and concept theory in trinitarian debates in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He argues that distinct Franciscan and Dominican theologies developed based on differing visions of the role of concept theory as a description of the Son and his generation. Russell L. Friedman, Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans (Leiden: Brill, 2013). For a brief and general overview of the relationship between theological and natural philosophical interests of the Dominicans and Franciscans, see French and Cunningham, Before Science. 60. Lindberg, Optical theories from Alkindi to Kepler, 107-116. 61. For a general overview of this perspective see, Lindberg and Tachau, “The Science of Light and Color,” 497- 511. For a detailed discussion that also explores the insular and continental dichotomy in the development of theories of light and cognition see Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics 1250-1345 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988). 100 contemporaries there.62 Bartholomaeus had almost certainly left for Magdeburg before Albertus arrived in Paris, but they share this important educational connection, a connection that left a profound mark upon De proprietatibus rerum particularly. As Seymour has pointed out, one of the foremost characteristics of the contemporary authors Bartholomaeus cites is that they were almost all students or masters in the schools of Paris.63 It is also important to remember that

Bartholomaeus may have composed a large part of De proprietatibus rerum while he was still in

Paris.64 Bartholomaeus and Albertus share an influential educational connection through the

University of Paris that many friars did not. We must be very aware of the differences between education at the friar's studia and the medieval universities. Although the intention was for the studia to broadly imitate the curriculum of the universities, the focus and teaching could be significantly different. For instance, students in the friar’s studia generally studied the works of

Aristotle after studying theology, where in the universities Aristotle was studied first. Such differences could make the courses on the arts significantly different in the studia from those in the universities.65 Bartholomaeus and Albertus share a scholastic education that provided the foundation for both Dominican and Franciscan studia programs. We should therefore not be terribly surprised that they might share significant commonalities in their approach to nature, even if their orders developed very different approaches in their studium based educational programs. While it is clear that the natural investigations of the friars were shaped by the theological, political, and social concerns of each order, I would suggest that for these two

62. Resnick, “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction,” 1-9; Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 1-10; Van den Abeele “Introduction générale,” 3-10. 63. Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 25-26. 64. Van Den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” 8-10. 65. The goals, practices, and particularly the order of the education program were significantly different between the two types of institution. See the collection of essays in Emery Kent Jr., William J. Courtenay, and Stephen M. Metzger, eds., Philosophy and Theology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal Courts: Acts of the XVth Annual Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale University of Notre Dame, 8-10 October 2008 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 101 scholars their shared educational context might be just as important to the formation of their natural views as the influences of their orders.

3 Cosmology

Bartholomaeus relies on the authority of his sources rather than the construction of his own authority. This leaves him with the same problem Albertus faces, the discordance of sources providing significantly different information about the world and its particulars. In this section we will more closely examine Bartholomaeus’ attempt to create a coherent picture of the world from his compilations by focusing on moments of tension between the authors he is compiling.

Bartholomaeus’ choices concerning the arrangement of sources is extremely important to his presentation of the world, but I have also attempted to highlight moments when we have reason to believe that Bartholomaeus is navigating this complexity by speaking for himself rather than quoting from an authority.

It is important to note that there is no clear hierarchy of sources in Bartholomaeus’ compilation. We might reasonably expect that the categories of patres and doctores would be given primacy, as indeed they are in Vincent de Beauvais,66 but we really only see a contrast between the word of Scripture and the works of man. Michael Twomey has pointed out, based on his work producing a “best text” edition of book 14, that there does seem to be a sense of hierarchy between the Bible itself and other sources.67 He points out that when speaking of the

66. Draelants, “Sources chez Barthélemy,” 48-52. 67. Michael W. Twomey, “Editing De proprietatibus rerum, Book XIV, from the sources,” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 221-244. Twomey acknowledges that as yet there is no Latin critical edition and even the “best text” version he is participating in is not available in its completeness. This makes any coherent analysis of language extremely problematic. He therefore confines his conclusions explicitly to Book 14. That said, I have seen no evidence that his conclusion does not hold true throughout the book. 102

Bible, Bartholomaeus always employs the passive forms of the verb dico, -ere or the intransitive verb pateo, -ere that has a passive sense. All other authorities, both patristic and secular, are referred to using active verb forms, most commonly dico, -ere. He suggests that this indicates a variety of hierarchy that privileges the Bible by presenting scripture as a text made manifest or opened for the reader to see while the other authors are presented as speaking for themselves.68

As much as Scripture itself is privileged, however, Bartholomaeus does not allow the theological view to occlude pagan and contemporary philosophy, even when the two appear to conflict. If we take a brief look at the early chapters in book 8 on the world and the celestial bodies, we can see

Bartholomaeus arranging his sources in a way that seems to attempt to convey coherence in a complex set of views concerning cosmology.

Chapter 1 of book 8 opens with a discussion of the three ways that we speak of the world drawn from Hermetic tradition:

As Mercurius says, we speak of the world in three manners. For the understanding of God is called the world, and is called mundus archetipus, and is bodiless, unseen, and everlasting.…In the second manner the world is called all things that are contained in the roundness of heaven…In the third manner man is called the lesser world, for he shows in himself the likeness of all the world.69

This concept of multiple ways to speak of the world using figurative and literal language is fairly commonplace in medieval exegesis. Here it also serves to prime the reader to think about the multiple ways of speaking about the world that will be used not just for exegesis but, I think, also to create a sense of agreement, or space for agreement, between authorities in the ensuing discussion of the structure of the world.

68. Michael Twomey, “Editing Book XIV,” 223-28. 69. “As Mercurius seiþ, of þe worlde we spekeþ in þre maners. For þe vnderstondinge of God is iclepid worlde, and is iclepid mundus archetipus, and is bodiles, vnseye, and euerelastinge.…In þe seconde maner þe world is iclepid alle þinges þat beþ conteyned in þe roundenes of heuene…In þe þridde maner man is iclepid þe lasse worlde, for he schewiþ in himself liknesse of al þe worlde.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 441. 103

Bartholomaeus opens chapter 2 with a Christianized vision of world as possessing three terrestrial heavens and four celestial heavens.70 This system is presented as a response to the biblical and exegetical references to the heavens above and heavens below:

For heaven is the place and dwelling for Angels and good men, as Bede says. And as holy men say, one heaven is seen and another heaven is unseen. And heaven that is seen is in many varieties, as the gloss says super Deuteronomio x.ff.ibi: Lo heaven is the lord God’s and heaven of heavens. There are seven heavens, arranged in this manner: aereum, ethereum, olimp[i]um, igneum, firmamentum, aqueum, empireum celum ‘heuen of aungelis’…71

These heavens, and their supporting references including Gregory glossing Job and Macrobius, are explained briefly and arrayed with proper theological support. Alexander of Hales is then brought in to illuminate the system and offer what appears to be a reconciliation with Aristotle.

He provides an explanation that offers a route to mapping these seven heavens onto the

Aristotelian philosophical schema of the universe. He runs through the list giving slightly more information on each heaven this time before finishing with the statement:

And it seems that they call olymphium ‘the space of the roundness of planets’ for that space is always light and shining. And the firmament they call the first heaven and the last, as philosophers say, in the outermost part thereof are the bodies of stars. For philosophers set only one heaven. But as Basil says in Hexameron, philosophers would rather bite off and devour their own tongues than they would assent that there are many heavens. Aristotle in libro de causis elementorum describes that heaven that is called firmamentum in this manner: heaven, he says, is the fifth element reserved from the lower elements and distinguished by properties of nature.72

70. Seymour points out that Bartholomaeus’s listing of seven heavens is unusual and has not been traced to a specific text. The contemporary De Sphera of Sacrebosco has a model with nine celestial heavens, to incorporate the planets and Moon, but Bartholomaeus does not reference this well-known work here. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 100. 71. “For heuen is þe place and wonynge of aungels and of good men, as Beda seiþ. And as holy men telleþ, on heuen is iseie and anoþir heuen is vnseie. And heuene þat is iseie is iseye in many maner wise, as þe glose seiþ super Deuteronomio x. ff. ibi: Lo, heuen is þi lorde Goddes, and heuen of heuenes. Heuenes beþ seuene, inempnede in þis manere: aereum, ethereum, olimp[i]um, igneum, firmamentum, aqueum, empireum celum ‘heuen of angelis’.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 446-447. 72. “And so it semeþ þat þey clepiþ olymphium ‘þe space of þe roundenesse of planetis’ for þat space is alwey liȝt and schinynge. And þe firmament þey clepiþ þe firste heuen and þe last, as philosophrz meeneþ, in þe ouermest partye þerof beþ þe bodyes of sterres. For philosophrz settiþ but onliche on heuen. But as Basilius seiþ in Exameron, philosophres wolde raþere gnawe and frete here owne tongis þanne þey wolde assente þat þere beþ many heuenes. 104

The two schemas of the heavens are thus presented more as different ways of describing the world than as conflicting approaches to nature. When philosophers speak of heaven they appear to mean something different than theologians. Bartholomaeus then proceeds to arrange an explanation, over the next two pages, both of how Pseudo-Aristotle “describes the heaven called firmamentum”73 and how it is called heaven for its incorruptibility and unchangeability.74 He provides a basic introduction to the layout of the Aristotelian universe and to the importance of the circular motion of the unchanging heaven. He then draws on Rabanus Maurus, Aristotle, and

Alhazen, among others, to provide a discussion of the astrological rays of the heavenly bodies and the effects of the heavenly motion, citing the circular motions of the heavens as the source of all generation on earth.75 Bartholomaeus’ compilation deploys these authors in a sequence that provides the appearance of many voices explaining a single point. It is an interesting and instructive introduction to both the Aristotelian universe and the natural principles of astrological causation. Finally, Bartholomaeus concludes the chapter with a statement that demonstrates that the philosophical cosmology can be read figuratively just as effectively as the theological visions of the heavens:

Also one takes heed of the nobility of heaven in simplicity of its substance, in pureness and everlastingness…in might, for it rules, governs, and orders, and measures all that is under it. And, what is more wonderful, heaven orders and measures and amends and changes all the nether things, and is never changed by things that are lower than itself; nor can things that are dissimilar to it in nature be themselves in any virtue like the heavenly body.76

Aristotel in libro de causis elementorum descriueþ þat heuen þat hatte firmamentum in þis manere: heuen, he seiþ, is þe fifte element, reseuered fro þe neþire elementis, and distingwid by propirte of kynde.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 448. 73. “descriueþ þat heuene þat hatte firmamentum…” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 448. While Bartholomaeus cites this as the work of Aristotle, he is actually referring to an Arabic work of unknown authorship, De proprietatibus elementorum. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 100. 74. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 448-449. 75. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 100-101. 76. “Also me takeþ hede of þe nobilte of heuen in simplicite of his substaunce, in purenes and euerlastingnes…in miȝt, for it ruleþ, gouerneþ, and ordeyneþ, and mesureth al þat is þervndir. And, what is more wondirful, heuen ordeyneþ and mesureþ and amendiþ and chaungiþ al neþir þingez, and takeþ neuer chaunginge of þing þat is 105

The overall picture of the world we are left with is complex, but leaves the impression that the Aristotelian universe can be brought into line with the authority of the Bible.

Bartholomaeus continues to refer to the multiple heavens of his theological model in later chapters, but in the chapter on aether Bartholomaeus deploys Isidore, Macrobius, and Aristotle together to create an image of the aether as an unchanging independent element, even reproducing Aristotle’s critique of Anaxagoras who claims that aether is air set afire and capable of intermingling with other elements. The chapter concludes with the position that aether is an eternal unchanging element that is not changed by the lower things, implying some degree of agreement between the admittedly different discussions of aether presented.77 Fumagalli and

Parodi have pointed out that we can see this attempt to create concordance again clearly in chapter 40 where Bartholomaeus attempts to present some degree of unification between conflicting theories of light.78

Interestingly, the concept of the multiple ways to speak about nature pops up in the context of another apparent attempt to navigate the tension between authority and the vision of the world drawn in De proprietatibus rerum. In the entry on Paradise in book 15, chapter 61,

Bartholomaeus opens his discussion of the earthly Paradise with reference to the meaning of the word paradise as an orchard in Latin and pleasing in Hebrew, thus making Paradise a pleasing orchard.79 He then moves to discussions of its location and cites the gloss of Peter Comestor on

neþir þan hitsilf; noþir þinge þat is vnliche þerto in kynde conformiþ hitsilf in eny vertu to þe heuenliche body.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 452-453; Bernard Ribémont, “L’animal comme exemple,” 123. Here he mentions, in creating his typology of exemplum, that the term ‘noble’ specifically is used by Bartholomaeus as a marker that indicates our need to imitate. 77. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 455-456; For a more in-depth discussion of Bartholomaeus’s attempt to produce a coherent voice from his sources in the context of cosmology, see Fumagalli and Parodi, “Due Enciclopedie dell’Occidente Medievale,” 73-90. 78. Fumagalli and Parodi, “Due Enciclopedie dell’Occidente Medievale,” 77-80. 79. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 788-789. 106

Genesis, chapter 2, to state that Paradise is set high, so high that it remained above the level of the flood waters and that it “reaches to the sphere of the moon.”80 Bede and Isidore are quoted shortly after making the same point, that Paradise is so high as to touch the sphere of the moon.

This places it up in the purest of air where it is above the troubled air and exhalations of the rest of the world. Its height places Paradise above the corrupting influence of the world.81 He repeats this point multiple times in different ways and attributes it to different authorities, as is a fairly common practice in De proprietatibus rerum, but he adds an unusual statement toward the end.

Having just cited Alexander of Hales as indicating that the exhalations and vapours of the earth rise to the body of the moon, Bartholomaeus switches track and says “but it is said that it touches the circle of the moon by a manner of figurative speech that is called hyperbolico locutio, that it might be known that the highness of Paradise surpasses the lower earth without comparison.”82

No source is given for this interjected statement and it appears to belong to Bartholomaeus himself.83 Greetham sees this as a conflicted passage that Bartholomaeus fails to reconcile or even acknowledge.84 Barrera-Gómez’s study of source use in book 1, however, demonstrates that

Bartholomaeus is a capable compiler and quite adept at deploying his sources, or hiding them, as a means of evading conflicts, negative implications, and complexities of his theological positions.85 We should be aware of Bartholomaeus’ ability to shape his narrative from the

80. “And is so hiʒe þat [yt recheþ to þe spere of þe mone.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 789.

81. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 790-91. 82. “but it is yseyde þat he toucheþ þe cercle of þe mone by a manere of figuratyf spekynge þat is yclepede yperbolica locucio, þat it myȝt be knowe þat þe moste hiȝnesse of Paradys passeth þe neþer erþe withoute comparisoun.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 791. 83. It is possible that Bartholomaeus is here quoting an, as yet unidentified, source but Seymour does not list any reference for this passage, or for the following passage concerning Ireland. Greetham points out that the ultimate source of this hyperbolico locutio argument is Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, but the use to which the argument is put seems to be from Bartholomaeus. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 166; Greetham, “The Concept of Nature,” 674-676, particularly n.76. 84. Greetham, “The Concept of Nature,” 74-76. 85. Barrera-Gómez, “Como Compilador,” 90-104. 107 material he compiles. I would suggest that this contradiction makes more sense when it is seen in the light of Bartholomaeus’ overall commitment to the idea of divine balance in nature.

While the diversity of nature is a core concern to Bartholomaeus—as we will discuss in the next section—unity and balance are also at the centre of his view of both cosmology and geography. As he articulates in the first chapter of book 8, the diversity of nature is fundamentally unified and balanced through the divine order:

Also the world is made of many things compounded and contrary, and yet in itself it is one… Thus the world of which we speak at this time is not diverse in itself nor departed in substance, though variation is found in parts thereof, in regard to conflict of the qualities. For the world has most needful harmony in all itself, and as it were harmony of music, though it seems that it has unlikeness in some of its parts on account of contrary qualities, as Augustine says clearly, super Genesis… Hereof it follows that the world is wonderful because of the changing thereof…Nothing in the shape of the world is so vile, nor so low, nor particular, in which the praising of God in matter, and in virtue, and shape does not shine. For in the matter and shape of the world is some difference, but that is in agreement with harmony and most peaceful.86

The world is balanced both at the cosmological level, as is expressed here, and in its geography, in which medical and astrological information are integrated into a classical geography drawn from Pliny and Isidore. In doing so Bartholomaeus stresses not only the connection between diversity and environment, but that the oppositions of marvelous diversity produce a harmonious balance between geographic places. Each geographic location has its equal and compliment in the world, and so do the wonders of nature.87 As Greetham points out, Bartholomaeus articulates

86. “Also þe world is made of many þingis compowned and contrariouse, an ȝit in itsilf it is one.… Þanne þe worlde of þe whiche we spekeþ at þis tyme is not diuers in itsilf noþir departid in substaunce, þouȝ contrariousnesse be founde in parties þerof, touching contrariousnesse of þe qualitees. For þe worlde haþ most nedeful acord in al itsilf, and as it were acorde in musik, þoȝ it seme þat he haþ vnliknes in some of hise parties for contrarie qualitiees, as Austyn seiþ opinliche super Genesis… Herof it folewiþ þat þe world is wondirful bicause of chaunginge þerof…Noþing in þe shappe of þe worlde is so vile noþir so lowe noþir partykel, in þe whiche schinyth noȝt praysinge of God in mater and in vertu and in schap. For in þe mater and schappe of þe worlde is some difference, but þat is wiþ acorde and most pees. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 443-444. 87. Suzanne Conklin Akbari offers an interesting comparison between the natural balance displayed in the geography of De proprietatibus rerum and the geography of The Book of John Mandeville. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville,” in Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1500, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 160-165. 108 consistently that every aspect of nature, from the most vile creature to the perfection of the heavens, has its natural balance. In the passage concerning the basilisk we are reminded that although the basilisk is the most poisonous of all creatures, it still has its equal in the weasel that can hunt and kill it easily.88 The world is a unit and contains within it a perfect harmony, but that harmony is provided through the properties of things, which bring balance to natural diversity.

Even the perfection of the heavens is balanced and equaled by the changeable world beneath them.89 In the first chapter of book 8, discussing the construction of the world, we are told that while the heavens are more perfect in matter “what it seems that the nether part of the world has lost in fairness and in light, it recovers in grace and virtue of plenteousness.”90 The diversity of nature balances the perfection of the heavens making them each equally wondrous in their own manner. Nature is ordered so that all things are balanced through their properties, but this means that uniqueness would offer a problem for the natural order Bartholomaeus has established.

If Paradise is placed at the boundary with the circle of the moon, it is made unique and placed above the exhalations and vapors that cause corruption on the earth, slightly outside the normal course of the changeable world.91 To attribute Paradise’s marvelous properties to its unique location on the border of the sphere of the moon would make it just that, unique. It becomes a place without equal in a natural order that repeatedly stresses divinely ordained balance and creates a potential tension between the words of the authorities and this balanced harmony that is part of Bartholomaeus’ ordering of nature. At this moment of tension the concept of different ways of speaking about nature surfaces again and offers a possible method

88. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1153. 89. Greetham, “The Concept of Nature,” 669-671; See also Keen, The Journey of a Book, 34-38. 90. “Also þing þat semeþ þat þe neþir partie of þe worlde haþ ilost in fairenes and in liȝt, þat þat partye recouereþ in grace and vertue of plenteuousnes.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 445. 91. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 790. 109 of creating space for a coherent vision of nature while preserving the appearance of concordance with previous authorities. By making use of the Augustinian tripartite system to read both nature and the authorities figuratively and anagogically, Bartholomaeus offers a way to make the statements on the height of Paradise comprehensible without challenging his own ordering scheme. Alexander of Hales—cited immediately before the divergence into the question of hyperbolico locutio—was previously encountered as the source of congruence between

Aristotelian and theological cosmologies. As discussed above, Bartholomaeus cites Alexander as offering an attempt to map the two cosmologies together so that the difference between the theological seven heavens and the Aristotelian singular heaven comes across almost as a matter of nomenclature.92 Where before both figurative language and the authority of Alexander of

Hales were deployed as a means of bringing Aristotelian and theological sources into alignment, here Bartholomaeus is using them in the service of emphasizing his own principle of balance in natural ordering.

By asserting that paradise does not touch the circle of the moon but rather is spoken of as figuratively that high, he is emphasizing that paradise is a place within the changeable sphere of the world and part of the normal course of nature. Bartholomaeus immediately follows this with a reference to Ireland, which is made into the mirror of Paradise. Paradise is far to the East and as far from the centre of the world vertically as it is possible to be. Ireland is in the West as far from the centre of the world horizontally as it is possible to be. Ireland thus provides a geographical balance, its location mirroring Paradise and producing a similar and harmonious marvel. Long life and incorruptibility “is no wonder in Paradise, for we know that in Ireland is a country in which dead bodies do not rot, and another in which men may not die but when they

92. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 446-448. 110 are ready to die they must be born out of the island.”93 Ireland is the place farthest from the centre of the world horizontally just as Paradise is the place farthest from the centre vertically, both are places where corruption and death is halted, both are marvelous but subject to the same natural principles and balancing each other at the extremities of the world.

I would suggest that this passage performs two functions; it both establishes the necessary opposition and balance between two geographic locations and highlights the familiar marvel to remind the reader that Paradise does not need to be unique to possess its marvelous properties. This second task seems reminiscent of Albertus’ reference to the marvels he has seen as a means of supporting the reality of marvels that are out of reach. Just as the two-headed goose suggests the diversity of nature and the possibility of similar marvels in the East, so the well-known marvels of Ireland remind the reader that Paradise does not need to be uniquely placed at the very margin of the changeable world to explain its incorruptibility. It can be a part of the normal course of nature, a part of the harmonious balance of the world, mirrored by, reinforced by and reinforcing, the marvels of Ireland.

By doing this, Bartholomaeus retains Paradise as a real and incorruptible place while also salvaging the appearance of concordance between the works of certain authorities and his own concept of natural ordering. This is not an unheeded contradiction, but a move that directs the reader to a figurative interpretation of authority that allows the authoritative statements to coexist with the coherent vision of nature Bartholomaeus is attempting to present. By emphasizing the figurative interpretation of Paradise’s height, the reader can both read the authorities who say that it touches the circle of the moon, and understand that it does not need to literally touch the

93. “And is no wondir of Paradys, for we knoweþ [þ]at in Irlond is an ilond in the whiche dede bodyes roten nouȝt, and another in þe whiche men may nouȝt dye but in þe laste eende he mote be bore oute of þe ilond.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 791. 111 circle of the moon. It is made in this way, more immediately a part of the regular course of nature and firmly brought into the balanced harmony of nature. The move to naturalize miracles by bringing them within the course of nature is one rooted in the school of Chartres and particularly present in the work of William of Conches, both strong influences on Bartholomaeus.94

Marvelousness, in this case the use of marvelousness to naturalize paradise, allows for the creation of a coherent vision of the world in a place where otherwise Bartholomaeus’ commitment to a divine balance in nature might conflict with the statements of his authorities.

Bartholomaeus’ arrangement of sources and material seems to suggest that there is room for concordance between the different authorities, backed up by the reminder that there are multiple ways of speaking about nature. This is not an exceptional perspective for his time. As

Seymour points out, Bartholomaeus was writing at a time when the construction of the heavens was of pressing interest for scholars and there was still a general belief that it would be possible to reconcile Aristotelian cosmology and Ptolemaic astronomy.95 Bartholomaeus is writing at a time of integration between a Christianized Platonic system and the newly available—and

Platonically influenced—Aristotelian works and commentaries. This belief in the possibility of reconciliation between Aristotle and Plato was also supported by Bartholomaeus’ Augustinian influences. De proprietatibus rerum is a strongly Augustinian work in its intention to put philosophical knowledge in the service of religion. Augustine also cautioned scholars not to dedicate themselves too strongly to a single explanation and to be always aware that multiple

94. Seymour, “Introduction,” His Encyclopedia, 19-20; Bruce S. Eastwood, “Early-Medieval Cosmology, Astronomy, and Mathematics,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2, Medieval Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 302-315; David C. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197-203; for a more in-depth discussion of the school of Chartres, see Peter Ellard, The Sacred Cosmos: Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Early Twelfth-Century School of Chartres (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007). 95. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 99-100. 112 scientific explanations might be possible. Thus Bartholomaeus presents his authorities with an eye to ensuring they do not contravene scripture and with room for the construction of agreement between them but he is also not above making use of these tools to ensure that the authorities can be read as in agreement with his own concepts of the ordering principles of nature.

4 Particulars

If Bartholomaeus seems to display a desire to present a concordance between his authorities on cosmological issues, the same cannot always be said of his presentation of the particulars of nature. In his books on particular birds, stones, plants, and most especially animals, he is quite willing to reproduce quite different authoritative reports with little or no comment. As

I will suggest in this section, I think this is connected to an understanding of the diversity of nature that—reinforced by the influence of Augustine to consider the possibility of multiple natural explanations and the structures of the compilatio he is making—creates a space where he is much less concerned about the unity of authorities when it comes to the particulars of nature.

In the first chapter of book 8 on the material and general properties of the world

Bartholomaeus stresses the wonderful diversity of the world:

Also what it seems that the nether part of the world has lost in fairness and in light, it recovers in grace and virtue of plenteousness. For no less wonder comes from virtuous plenteousness of the earth in bearing and bringing forth herbs, trees, and flours, and of fruit, and in diverse forming of metal and of pearls and of stones, than there is wonder from the splendour of heaven with diversity of circles and roundness and stars thereof.96

96. “Also þing þat semeþ þat þe neþir partie of þe worlde haþ ilost in fairenes and in liȝt, þat þat partye recouereþ in grace and vertue of plenteuousnes. For no lasse wondir is of vertuos plentevousnesse of þe erþe in beringe and bringinge forþ of herbes, treen, and floures, and of fruyt, and in diuers genderinge of bestis and of crepinge wormes, in diuers bredinge and gendringe of metal and of perlez and of stonez, þan hit is to wondringe of clerenes of heuene wiþ diuersite of cercles and roundenes and sterres þerof.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 445. 113

At the very introduction to the material world, therefore, we are told that it is a place of abundance: an abundance of plants, stones, and creatures. And we see this theme return in the books on the properties of specific plants and animals.

This theme is most abundantly present in book 18, on the particular animals.

Bartholomaeus seems to paint a picture of an abundant nature, filled with a variety and diversity of animals. This seems particularly noticeable in the Trevisa translation, where the words

‘diverse’ or ‘diversity’ are repeated constantly. Aristotle is quoted, for instance, indicating that:

Aristotle says…that beasts are diverse in manners. For some are extremely mild, as the cow and the sheep; and some are extremely wild and not tamed, as the tiger or and the wild boar…And this diversity comes of diversity of virtue that works diversely in diverse beasts.97

This leads to a discussion on the humours of animals and how this affects their different temperaments and the variety of humoural combinations that produce specific animal temperaments. Avicenna is called upon next to explain that “beasts are very diverse in nourishing and in feeding.”98 In explaining the different ways animals nourish themselves, we are treated again to a list: some beasts eat flesh, some creatures eat grass or fruit, some creatures like honey, some creatures hunt by night. Bartholomaeus moves on to other characteristics but maintains the same style, statements concerning the generality of animals followed by lists of examples where this is borne out in different manners.99 The pattern is interrupted by a brief discussion of the singularity of man, the only creature that walks upright and the only creature that has a mind obedient to reason.100 But we return to the theme shortly after as we are told that:

an unreasonable beast moves with four feet, and some beasts move with two hands and two feet, as it goes with mankind, and some with two wings and two feet, as it were birds

97. “Aristotil seiþ…þat beasts beþ dyuerse in maneres. For [som] beþ swiþe mylde, as þe cow and þe schiep; and some beþ swiþe wilde and nouȝt ytamed, as þe tigris and þe wilde bore…And þis dyuersite comeþ of dyuers[ite of] vertu þat worcheþ dyuersely in dyuerse bestes.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1093. 98. “bestis beþ ful dyuerse in norisshyng and in feedynge.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1094. 99. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1093-1096. 100. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1096. 114

and fowls. But many beasts are found with more feet than four, as it goes with crabs, caterpillars, and other such. And also some have more wings than two, as it goes in butterflies and in bees and in some long flies101

Diversity is stressed over and over, both through the use of forms of the word “dyuerse” and through this cataloguing sense of plenitude. Even though Bartholomaeus is setting out to provide the general principles of animals he breaks these down into repetitious statements of the diversity of options contained in these general statements and hammers home the idea that nature is diverse and filled with a plethora of creatures.102 Even when he sets out to provide a list of general statements he stops to provide the exceptions.

Also every beast that engenders another beast has eyes, except the mole…and every beast that has ears moves its ears, except man… And every four-footed beast that has horns is cloven hoofed with horns without, except the beast that is an ass of India that has but one horn on the forehead and one hoof on the foot like a horse. And every horned beast is four-footed with a material and hard horn, except a manner of serpent in Egypt that is found horned…103

He gives many general rules concerning animals, but he is also very concerned to point out the many particular exceptions to these rules. Throughout the prologue, he drives home two points: that the world of animals is diverse, and that it is ordered by nature. The diversity of these creatures is ordained according to the wisdom of nature and for the purpose of man. “All kinds of

101. “For an vnresonable beste moeueþ wiþ foure feet, and some bestes moeueþ wiþ tweyne handes and with tweye feet, as it fareþ in mankynde, and some wiþ tweye wynges and tweye feet, as it were briddes and foweles. But many bestes beþ yfounde wiþ mo feet þan foure, as it fareþ by crabbes and maleschragges and oþere suche. And also somme haueþ mo wynges þan tweyne, as it fareþ in boterflyes and in been and in some longe flyes.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1096. 102. Forms of the word “dyuerse” are used 26 times in the first chapter of book 18. Of these instances 16 of them occur from pages 1092-1098. Simply counting the occurrences of a term tells us a fairly limited amount. I include this simply to illustrate the consistent recurrence of this theme throughout the first chapter. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1092-1111; In the 1601 Latin edition not all of these instances are forms of word diversus, but also include forms of dissimilis, vario, and differo, although forms of diversus are more common. This definitely reduces the repetitiveness that is found in Trevisa’s continual use of “diverse.” The presence of the theme is no less marked. Bartholomaeus, De rerum proprietatibus: 1601, 968-986. 103. “Also eueriche beste þat gendreþ anoþer beste haþ yhen, outake þe wonte…And euerich beste þat haþ eeren moeueþ þe eeren, outake man.… And euerich beste þat haþ hornes is clouefooted wiþ hornes wiþout, outake oon beaste þat is an asse of Ynde þat haþ but oon horne in þe forheed and oon houe in þe foot as an hors. And euerich horned beste is fourefooted wiþ material and hard horn, outake a manere of serpent in Egipte þat is yfounde yhorned…” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1098–99. 115 beasts, wild and tame, walking and creeping, are made and ordained for the best use of mankind.”104 Some are for meat, some for toil, some for mirth, some are made to cause pain and teach man humility, and some are made to help treat the many infirmities of mankind. Among the wide variety of nature all are ordered to the use of mankind and all have medical use hidden in them.105 The animal world is marked by a mixture of diversity and order that is to be unveiled through the discussion of the particular animals. Usefulness and order is produced from the chaotic variety of nature, and I think it is important that we read the discussions of particulars with this sense of useful diversity in mind.

Nor do we only see this in the first chapter of the book on animals. In book 17, on plants, chapter 1 has the same pattern, though it does not have quite the sense of amplitude that book 18 demonstrates. Diversity is similarly stressed—indeed there is a similarly repetitive sense to the presentation—in talking about the generalities of plants. Plants are diverse on account of their substance, virtue, and working. They are diverse in multitude of parts. They are diverse in the manner of their fruit bearing, diverse in their quantity, diverse in their fairness or foulness, diverse in their locations, diverse in their leaves, diverse in the shape of their upper parts, diverse in colour, and diverse in the ripening of their fruit.106

This introductory chapter primes the reader to think of the particulars of nature in the context of natural diversity. The world described is full of variety. It is an ordered variety that clearly functions according to the natural humours and qualities. There are principles and

104. “Alle kynde of bestes, wilde and tame, goynge and crepynge, is ymade and y-ordeigned for þe beste vse of mankynde…” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1110. 105. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1110-1111. 106. In all forms of the term “dyuerse” are used 19 times in this chapter. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 883- 888; In Iolanda Ventura’s edition forms of diversus are used 10 times, differo 5 times and vario 4 times. It may also be worth noting that there are three glosses specifically tied to these words, on diversas “nota de confusa vita et inordinata secularium” (5.13), on glossing differunt “nota de diversitate tam bonorum quam malorum” (7.35) and on the word variuntur “Nota de diversis statibus religiosorum” (11.63). Bartholomaeus, De proprietatibus rerum, Liber XVII, 3-12. 116 generalities by which this variety can be grasped and understood, much as the alphabetical structure brings the chaotic abundance of the first chapter in animals into order, but the reader is left with the concept of a diverse and abundant nature fixed in his or her mind.107

For both Bartholomaeus and Albertus the marvelous diversity of nature plays an important role in the presentation of information about particular creatures. It functions in ways that are closely related but not identical in that the concept of diversity seems to be a key to dealing with accounts that are somewhat problematic. In De animalibus, the diversity of the world is an underlying principle that influences Albertus’ evaluation of sources and inclines him to accept the reports of creatures he cannot access and whose existence he has no logical reason to refute. In De proprietatibus rerum it serves two functions: first, it serves to highlight God’s ordering of nature. To this end we frequently see references to marvelous nature and the marvelous diversity of nature in references that point us to the ordering of nature.108 The basilisk, for instance, is wonderfully matched by the weasel, for nothing can be so poisonous as to be without match or remedy.109 The second purpose, I would suggest, is that it makes space for disagreements between authorities concerning the particulars of nature. In the case of Albertus, the medieval understanding of human fallibility concerning the particulars of nature created an

107. It is interesting to note that the books on places (15) and stones (16) do not have opening chapters that stress diverse abundance in quite the same way. That isn’t to say that the theme is absent, however. In book 15 the first chapter discusses the division of the world into three parts, Asia, Africa, and Europe, with Asia containing half the world that men live in and Africa and Europe containing the other half between them. Chapter 2 addresses Asia and here we see something of the reference to diversity with the entry stating that Asia “has many provinces and regions and diverse nations that are wonderful in life, manners, figure, and shape of body, and are wonderfully diverse in will, heart, and thought. Here names and places shall shortly be set following the order of ABC.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 726; The prologue of the book on stones, on the other hand, asserts that having finished discussing the earth and its parts in general he will move on to “the adornment and ornament thereof in particular. Of things that adorn the earth, some are unmixed, without soul and without feeling, as all things that grow under the ground and are generated in veins in the earth, as quarry stones, colours, and mettle, thereof is treated first in order: and some with life and soul, as roots, herbs, and trees; and some with soul and feeling, as men and other beasts, which will be treated last.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 825. 108. Greetham, “The Concept of Nature,” 663-677. 109. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1153-1154. 117 intellectual space where experience became the most useful means of knowing the world and inclined Albertus to believe reports of creatures unless he had reason not to.110 It is important to remember that while De proprietatibus rerum enjoyed much wider and more diverse circulation and readership than De animalibus both works are the product of similar intellectual milieux.

While Bartholomaeus does not make use of experience in evaluating sources, I think that we can suggest that the diversity of nature underlies Bartholomaeus’ acceptance of conflicting information from authorities in entries on particular creatures and phenomena. The diversity of nature thus works to support the cataloguing task of the compilatio. Bartholomaeus looks to the cosmological level and to God’s ordering of the world to find coherence in his presentation of the world but at the level of the particulars of nature, diversity and human fallibility make space for disagreement between authorities. Nature’s diverse particulars and the difficulties of knowing nature through individual experience means that it is unnecessary, and probably impossible, to choose between authorities when it comes to conflicting accounts of particular phenomena.

As I have suggested above, Bartholomaeus is concerned to create concordance, or at least the appearance of concordance, on issues of cosmology. He straddles theological and Aristotelian cosmologies and works to present them as having room for agreement. In the case of particular places or creatures he seems much more willing to reproduce a catalogue of authorities’ statements that may or may not directly conflict. In the notice on the beaver, for instance,

Bartholomaeus is presented with a problem, Isidore, Pliny and Cicero all recount that the beaver will castrate itself when pursued by hunters, in order to rid itself of the musk that the hunters are after:

The beaver is a wonderful beast and lives and goes on land among four-footed beasts and swims underwater and dwells with fish…their gendering stones [testicles] can be used in medicine and because of these stones they geld themselves when they are aware of

110. See chapter 2 of this work. 118

hunters and bite off their gendering stones, as he [Isidore] says. Cicero speaks of them and says that they ransom themselves with the part of their body for which they are most pursued. And Juvenal says that they geld themselves and lose their stones because they desire to escape.111

Shortly after we are again told:

And the beaver has two gendering stones that are large in comparison to their little body, and we call these stones castorea. And of these stones Pliny speaks libra xxxiiº, capitulo iiiº, and says that the beaver bites off his gendering stones that we call castorea, so that he is not taken by hunters.112

On the other hand, he has medical authorities who categorically deny this claim and explains that it is not only false, but also impossible:

For Sextus, most diligent investigator of medicine, denies this and says no, but he says that these gendering stones cling so close and tight to the spine that they may not be removed by the beast but his life is also removed. Also Platearius says and Dias[corides] also that that beast is not so sly nor so witty that he could help himself in that manner. And that is well known in beavers that are found in diverse places, and so this that Isidore and Physiologus tell of their gelding shall not be so understood of the common beaver but of some other beasts that are like beavers in gendering stones, and in this way it is understandable.113

Bartholomaeus presents these two contradictory accounts without choosing between them but does so in a manner that provides space for both to be true. He suggests that both authors can be correct; they are just talking about different types of beaver. Bartholomaeus frequently refers to

111. “Castor is a wonder beste and lyueþ and goþ in londe among fourfootede bestes and swymmeþ vnder water and woneþ wiþ fysshe…here gendryng stones acordeþ to medicyne and bycause of þe same stones þey geldeþ hemsilf whan þay beþ war of þe hunter and byteþ of here gendryng stones, as he seiþ. Cithero spekeþ of hem and seiþ þat þay raunsomeþ hemself with þe party of þe body for þe whiche þey beth most poursued. And Iuuenal seiþ þat he geldeþ hemself and leseþ here stones for he desyreþ to schape.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1172-1173. 112. “And castor haþ tweye gendryng stones þat beþ grete in comparisoun to his litel body, and we clepeþ þese stones castorea. And of þese stones Plinius spekeþ libro xxxiiº. capitulo iiiº. and seiþ þat þe castor byteþ of his gendrynge stones þat we clepe castorea, and þat lest he be take of hunters.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1173-1174. 113. “For Sexitus, most diligent serchere of medicyne, denyþ þis and seiþ nay but he seiþ þat þilke gendryng stones cleueþ so nygh and so fast to þe ruggebone þat þay mowe nought be bynome þe beste but his lyf be bynome also. Also Platearius seiþ and Dias also þat þat beste is nouȝt [so] sligh nouþer so witty þat he couþe helpe himself in þat manere. And þat is yknowe alday in castores þat beþ yfound in dyuerse place, and so þis þat Ysider and Phisiologus telleþ of here geldynge schal nought so be vnderstonde of þe comyn castoris but of some oþer bestes þat beþ liche castors in gendrynge stones, and on cas of such it is vnderstonde.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1174. 119 the diversity of nature and the diversity of animals within a group.114 The natural diversity

Bartholomaeus has repeatedly referred to in the first chapter of book 18 underwrites the act of compilation, allowing him to sidestep conflicts between authorities in the particulars of nature.

He can include medical information and behavioural information taken from a collection of authorities without having to choose between them on conflicting issues.

This is markedly different from the approach Albertus takes to the beaver. He, unsurprisingly, picks a side and argues for it. Albertus asserts that the tales of the beaver castrating itself are false because hunters of the beavers all say that this does not happen.115 As is

Albertus’ practice, he is willing to accept the experience of those who have an extensive knowledge of the animal in question when it comes to individual behaviours. This does not indicate credulousness on the part of Bartholomaeus but rather shows the differing goals of the two texts. Bartholomaeus is not interested in choosing between his authorities; he is interested in presenting his readers with a resource that compiles the information written by authorities for easy access. The credibility of his sources is already established by the status of his sources.

In the case of the beaver, the diversity of nature allows for multiple types of beaver; in other cases the conflicting information from authorities is simply reported. I suggest that this too can be seen as a product of the compilator’s task, underwritten and supported by the diversity of nature which makes choosing between authorities on the particulars of nature unnecessary, because conflict on the particulars does not threaten the coherence of the text. This seems to be particularly visible in the entries on the siren and the onocentaur, two creatures with many different descriptions.

114. For example see the four chapters on elephants (1191-1196), or the reference to 12 kinds of carbuncle (839), Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things. 115. Albertus, De animalibus, 1467-69. 120

The entry on the siren lists it variously as part fish part woman, part bird part woman, and prostitutes who act as ship wreckers. There does not seem to be any interest in reconciling these very different accounts.116 The Gloss on Isaiah 13:22 states that the sirens are serpents with crests and wings; other men say that they are fish in the likeness of women. Isidore states, in book 20, that some men claim they are part maiden and part bird, but the truth is that they are prostitutes who lured sailors to drown and wrecked ships. In book 13, however, Isidore says that in Arabia there are serpents with wings called ‘sirens.’ Finally the Physiologus tells us that sirens are “beasts of the sea wonderfully shaped as a maid from the navel upwards and as a fish from the navel downwards.”117 Bartholomaeus is here collecting highly conflicting accounts and presenting them one after the other. Along side this, however, he stresses their wondrousness.

Like the beaver, these creatures are referred to as wonderfully shaped. This is firstly a reference to the fact that these creatures, as well as the onocentaur, are described as composite creatures.

The emphasis on wondrousness also, however, points us to the wonder of nature and its diversity.

Wonder in De proprietatibus rerum frequently points to the ordering of nature, the divine ordering that brings chaotic diversity under some degree of control. At the same time diversity is necessarily complex and surprising. As Bartholomaeus also articulates, following Pliny, “wise and witty nature makes us gameful and wonderful things to show its might.”118 Nature can be

“playful,” producing wonderful and unexpected creatures and phenomena. Nature is thus seen to function within a broad framework of “rules,” provided by the divine order, but still pushes at the boundaries to produce its marvels.

116. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1247-1248 117. “And Phisiologus spekeþ of sirena and seiþ it is a beste of þe see wonderly schapen as a mayde fro þe nauel vppeward and as a fisshe fro þe nauel dounward.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1248. 118. “wyse and witty kynde makeþ to vs gameful þynges and wonderful to schewe his might…” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1231. 121

We can see this again in the entry on the onocentaur. This creature is mentioned in the

Gloss on Isaiah 34:14, where it is described as a creature that is part ass and part bull.119

Bartholomaeus immediately follows this, however, with the statement that the Physiologus describes the onocentaur differently, as part ass and part man, and Pliny is deployed in support:

It seems that Pliny agrees hereto libro viiº. capitulo iiiº. there he says that wise and witty nature makes to us gameful and wonderful things to show its might, and makes very wonderfully shaped beasts that are in India, such as fauns and satyrs and onocentaurus and of other such that he calls beasts and have somewhat the shape of mankind.120

Interestingly Pliny does not actually list the onocentaur in the original passage.121 Certainly the fauns and satyrs are of a similar kind, but Pliny does not reference the onocentaur as he is being shown to do. Bartholomaeus is, however, invoking the wonderful power and diversity of nature to make many and varied creatures. He goes on to recount Isidore’s explanation that centaurs were the horsemen of Thessaly, who were such good riders that some thought the horse and rider were one body, and finally to remind us that etymologically the

onocentaurus is a man compounded of onos and centaurus. And so onocentaurus has that name for the half of it has the shape of a man and the half of an ass, as ypocentaurus is a beast wonderfully shaped in which is accounted the nature of a man and of a horse, as Isidore says.122

As with the entry on the siren, we can see Bartholomaeus’ desire to compile all the authorities’ statements on this creature, even though they conflict quite strongly. It also, however, demonstrates the way he stresses the marvelousness of nature in this context. Bartholomaeus does not simply list the statements, as he did in the case of the siren, but acknowledges that

119. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1231; Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 226. 120. “It semeþ þat Plinius accordeth hereto libro viiº. capitulo iiiº. þere he seiþ þat wyse and witty kynde makeþ to vs gameful þynges and wonderful to schewe his might, and makeþ ful wonder schape bestes þat ben in Ynde, as of faunus and satiris and onocentaurus and of oþer such þat he clepeþ bestes and feyneþ somedele þe schap of mannes kynde.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1231. 121. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 226. 122. “onocentaurus is a man componed of onos and centaurus. And so onocentaurus haþ þat name for þe half þerof haþ þe schap of a man and þe half of an asse, as ypocentaurus is a beste wonderfulliche yschape in þe weiche is acounted þe kynde of man and of an hors, as Isidorus seiþ.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1231. 122

Physiologus and other authorities provide a different description of the creature. He draws on

Isidore, Physiologus, and even draws in Pliny using a quote that does not originally mention the creature, but does stress the marvelous diversity of nature. Without openly choosing between authorities, he does seem to give the implication that the onocentaur should be better understood to be part ass and part man than part ass and part bull. He arrays these authorities against the statement of the Gloss specifically stressing the marvelousness of nature as he does so. It is also worth noting that these two entries show some of the most radically divergent accounts from authorities. While in other entries authorities frequently provide statements that are not entirely in agreement, few notices on particular creatures or plants have quite the same degree of conflict we see presented in the siren and onocentaur. As he most openly suggests in the case of the beaver, the marvelous diversity of nature provides not only a space for such unusual composite creatures to exist, but a diversity of creatures and possibilities that makes it easier for

Bartholomaeus to present such radically conflicting accounts without choosing between them.

Presenting these conflicting accounts does not necessarily mean a lack of concern with the coherence of his account of nature, but stems from an acknowledgement of the diversity of creatures and the flawed nature of human observation.

Franklin-Brown argues, in her analysis of Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum maius, that contradictions like these are the result of conflicting epistemic discourses that the compiler leaves the reader to evaluate independently. The compiler merely lists possible discourses without privileging one over another, leaving the encyclopedic reader with the responsibility to navigate and select the different discourses with the knowledge that no information can be considered authoritative by virtue of its inclusion in the encyclopedia.123 Where Franklin-Brown

123. Franklin-Brown’s example of the frog from Speculum maius, focuses on a difference in description of the frog deriving from the epistemic discourse of Isidorian etymology and Plinian natural history. She argues that the 123 sees this as a pervasive aspect of encyclopedias, however, in our examination of Bartholomaeus I would suggest it is only applicable to discussions of the particulars of nature. Franklin-Brown does not consider the importance of natural diversity or the space it provides for articulating difference without necessarily presenting contradiction. Compilation is Bartholomaeus’ primary task, but I would suggest that we can also see a coherence in the picture he presents, a coherence facilitated by, if not based in, the diversity of nature. By appealing to the diversity of nature in the context of particular creatures, Bartholomaeus reminds the reader of humanity’s limited access to all the varied particulars of nature. In the case of the beaver he is quite clear that both sets of authorities should be considered correct, since they are just talking about different types of beaver. He is not as direct about this in the entries on the sirens or the onocentaur, but we still see this stressing of the wonderfulness of these creatures and the wonderful powers of nature, supporting both the shape and the variety of these creatures. Bartholomaeus is writing a work of reference for exegetes and preachers (who might, depending on the circumstances choose one version or another), as opposed to the work of science (whose aim is to establish knowledge which is certain) Albertus produces, but the concept of the diversity of nature influences both of them in their approach to nature. It is possible here to see this explanation as unnecessary. The same practices on the part of Bartholomaeus could be explained by a lack of concern for any degree of coherence in his picture of nature and an interest only in reproducing the statements of the authorities. We could assume that it is only the needs of the genre that drive him. I think,

compiler makes no attempt to resolve conflict between these epistemic discourses, rather leaving it to the reader to address. In the examples I explore from De proprietatibus rerum however, it is less clear that what is at stake is different epistemic discourses. This model might have some bearing on the discussion of the beaver, although here you have the Isidorian etymological discourse and the Plinian natural history discourse placed against the medical discourse of Sextus and Dioscorides. At the same time, however, there is a clear attempt to reconcile the information and make it understandable. Conversely, in the accounts of the siren and the onocentaur, the differing descriptions do not clearly derive from differing epistemic discourses, and Bartholomaeus is very clear in stressing their wonderful diversity. See Franklin-Brown, Reading the world, 222-232. 124 however, that in light of what we have seen in the previous chapter on Albertus Magnus, the works of Fumagalli and Ribémont,124 and what I believe we will continue to see in the subsequent chapters of this thesis, it is reasonable to posit that the needs of the genre were supported by an understanding of the diversity of nature.

5 Active Contradictions

If we are discussing Bartholomaeus’ attempt to construct coherence and concordance among authorities, we must also address the points where Bartholomaeus chooses to reproduce an authority’s critique or rejection of either another authority or the common man. As Ribémont has pointed out, the reproduction of an authority’s rejection or critique of a matter may reflect the position of the compilator.125 I hesitate to address this path because to truly make an effective analysis would require a more extensive knowledge of Bartholomaeus’ sources to identify not only what critiques he does reproduce but, more importantly, those critiques he does not. Indeed it strikes me that an entire thesis could be written on this alone. It is possible that such a discussion will be more effectively built on the basis of the Abeele-Meyer Latin edition that is in production and the scholarship surrounding it once it is finished. For now I only want to gesture at a few instances that, I think, might be suggestive while leaving this avenue for potential future study.

As I mentioned above, Bartholomaeus reproduces Aristotle’s critique of Anaxagoras in the entry on aether.126 Bartholomaeus also chooses to provide a critique of Bede’s position on the aqueous heavens in book 8, chapter 3. Bartholomaeus returns to the theological ordering of the

124. Fumagalli and Parodi, “Due enciclopedie dell’Occidente medievale,” 51-90; Ribémont, “L’autre et la merveille,” 155-169. 125. Ribémont, “L’autre et la merveille,” 155-157. 126. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 455-456. 125 heavens and discusses the watery or crystalline heavens that were made by the might of God and set above the firmament “for authority of Scripture tells us that waters set above the heavens are so light and subtle that they become heavenly in nature, and therefor [remain] placed there.”127

But Bede is of a contrary opinion. Bede asserts that the waters, placed there by the might of God of course, are there to temper and cool the fiery nature of the heavens so that “the lower world should not take damage from the burning of heaven.”128 But Bartholomaeus here reproduces his source’s rejection of this position:

How this might be reasonably done is not clearly known to those who use reason. For since that watery substance, because of both its qualities, of moisture and coldness, is entirely contrary to fiery substance, it is not fully clear how between bodies that be so diverse and contrary there might be unity and harmony found in any way. And since it is written Job 38º capitulo: He makes harmony in his high things; therefore our philosophers, that search and inquire, as I believe, the deeper points of philosophy more clearly and profoundly, have another opinion and say otherwise.129

Bartholomaeus then proceeds to draw from Alexander of Hales, whom we have repeatedly seen deployed to elide conflicting systems, to explicate how these waters are placed there by God’s own action and possess none of the qualities of water we know but are almost heavenly in nature and in accordance with the celum empireum that they separate from the firmamentum.130 I think it is worth noticing that there are two instances of conflict here. The conflict is not just with the words of another authority, as between Aristotle and Anaxagoras, but also with the word of

127. “For auctorite of holi writte telliþ vs þat watris beþ iset aboue heuenes þat beþ so liȝt and sotile þat þey beþ iturned into heuenliche kynde, and þerfore [abydeþ] ipiȝt þere.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 453. 128. “þe neþir worlde schulde nouȝt take damage of þe brennynge of heuen.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 453. 129. “But how þis myȝt be resonabliche ido hit is not clerliche iknowe to ham þat vsiþ resoun. For seþ þat watiri substaunce, bycause of his eiþer qualite, moisture and cooldnes, is contrarye at alle to firy substaunce, hit is noȝt ful clere how bytwene bodyes þat beþ so diuers and contrarye myȝte vnyte and acorde be ifounde in eny wise. And seþ hit is iwrite Iob 38º capitulo: He makeþ acord in hise heiȝe þinges; þerfore our philosophris, þat serchiþ and inqueriþ, as I trowe, þe inner point[es] of philosophie more clergialliche and inner to þe ground, haueþ anoþir opunyoun and meneþ oþirwise.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 453. Seymour does not indicate a source for the specific lines criticizing Bede, but suspects that “our philosophris” here refers to Franciscan contributors to the summa of Alexander of Hales. William of Conches, however, was the first to challenge Bede on this particular point. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 101. 130. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 453-454. 126

Scripture. The authority of Scripture is specifically referenced as telling us that there are waters above the heavens. But it is also invoked in confidently rejecting Bede’s assertion that the waters are similar in kind to the waters of Earth. A middle ground is found, once more with the aid of

Alexander of Hales, where the nature of those waters can be such that they share none of the qualities or the behaviour of material waters and thus they can exist as a barrier between the firmamentum, the established outside of Aristotle’s system, and the heaven of angels that is the exterior of the Christian universe. It is further worth noting that God’s direct action is invoked four separate times throughout this discussion in relation to the formation of these waters and in placing them in their location.

I think that we can see in this chapter the attempt to resolve conflicts of cosmology, but possibly the system is straining at the seams slightly. Scripture is clearly the ultimate authority, but in this chapter it serves two purposes. It creates the requirement that the watery heavens exist, but it is also deployed to assert that Bede, who proposes a theory thoroughly inconsistent with the attempted unity of cosmologies, is categorically wrong. It is impossible to see with reason how Bede’s assertion can be brought into line with Aristotelian physics and an interpretation of Scripture is deployed to support the contradiction of Bede instead.131 Without wishing to build on a single turn of phrase I will simply suggest that, given the ways we have seen reason deployed in the previous chapter, it is interesting to see a reference to reason in the context of rejecting an authority’s statements, even if Bartholomaeus is reproducing a critique drawn from previous authors.

It does not seem particularly common for Bartholomaeus to reproduce a critique of his actual authorities. It is more common for him to reproduce an authority’s criticism of the

131. “Sed qualiter istud posset fieri rationabiliter, non est perspicue ratione vtentibus manifestum.” Bartholomaeus, De rerum proprietatibus: 1601, 378. 127 common people’s beliefs. In the entry on Paradise—after pointing out that to say that Paradise is as high as the circle of the moon is to understand the world figuratively— Bartholomaeus switches to correcting the mistaken belief that Paradise is an island among the Fortunate

Islands.132 In this passage he refers to the belief of “the gentiles,” i.e. the pagans, that the islands referred to as the Fortunate Isles are in fact Paradise:

Of Paradise and its location it was the opinion among gentiles, as Pliny says where he speaks of the islands of fortune, of which Isidore speaks also in libro xvº. Among these islands is one that bears all good, there the ground bears all manner of fruit without tilling…Therefore the error of gentiles and the fault of secular poets, because of the goodness of the ground, say that this island is Paradise; and that is an error. For the aforesaid islands are in the West before Mauritania in the ocean, as Isidore says in libro xvº, and Paradise is in the East in the highest mountain.133

Bartholomaeus is here correcting the mistake of poets and pagans who believe that these islands could be Paradise. While he mentions Pliny, who does discuss the wonderful qualities of these islands, Pliny does not actually refer to anyone mistaking these islands for Paradise.

Bartholomaeus takes that from Isidore, who specifically says that the quality of the crops and the abundance of honey and fruit cause pagans and secular poets to mistake them for Paradise.134

Bartholomaeus adds the justification, however, that these islands cannot be Paradise because

Paradise must be in the East and high in the mountains, with giant waterfalls flowing down so loud as to deafen the men of the surrounding country. These rivers are specifically mentioned by

Basil, Ambrose, and in Genesis. On the one hand, as this is a reference to a particular place, we

132. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 791. 133. “Of Paradys and of place þerof was opinioun amonge naciouns, as Plinius seith þere he speketh of þe ilondes of fortune, of þe whiche Isider spekeþ also libro xvº. Amonge þe whiche ilondes is oon þat bereþ alle gode, þere þe grounde bereþ alle manere of fruyt withoute tilynge.…Þerefore erroure of naciouns and dyte of seculer poetes, for godenesse of þe grounde mened þat þis ilondes ben Paradys; and þat is errour. For þe forsaide ilondes ben in þe weste afore Mauratania in Occean, as Isider seith libro xvº., and Paradys is in þe eeste in þe hiȝeste mounte.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 791; cf. the specific entry on the Fortunate Islands. He writes largely the same information. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 762. 134. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, eds. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, and Muriel Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), XIV.vi.8; Pliny, Natural History, 2:VI.xxxvii, 488-491. 128 might expect him to shrug and accept the plurality of particulars. On the other hand, this place has theological importance. The mistake being made is not a simple matter of the multiplicity of nature but threatens the coherence of the world picture he has drawn.

In the case of cinnamon, conversely, Bartholomaeus repeats Pliny’s statement that some men claim that cinnamon can only be found in the nests of birds, especially the phoenix, and cinnamologus, and must be knocked down with lead arrows. This, however, is a story men tell to make it seem more expensive, but the truth is that it grows among the troglodytes in Ethiopia.

Bartholomaeus then goes on to explain the various properties and virtues of cinnamon.135 As with the instance of the Fortunate Islands, Bartholomaeus is here reproducing the critiques of his authorities rather than adding his own.136 Isidore does not mention the stories of cinnamon collectors in his entry on cinnamon, but he does have a passage on the cinnamologus where he states that the cinnamon of its nest is highly prized so men knock it down and sell it for a high price. Bartholomaeus does not critique Isidore’s reproduction of this statement, or comment that elsewhere in Pliny’s natural histories he too reproduces the story of the cinamologus, though

Pliny confines himself to stating that men knock down the nests and use them for trade.137

Whether Bartholomaeus reproduces this statement simply because Pliny states it, or if he is particularly concerned that his readers know not to be swindled by spice dealers trying to push up the price of cinnamon, we can’t tell.138

135. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 923-24. 136. Pliny states that “In regard to cinnamomum and casia a fabulous story has been related by antiquity, and first of all by Herodotus…These tales have been invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities.” Pliny, Natural History, vol. 4, Books 12-16, rev. ed., trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 370 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 4:XII.xlii, 62-69. 137. Interestingly both Pliny and Isidore reproduce the story of the cinnamologus that makes nests out of cinnamon and men who collect the nests without comment. See Isidore, Etymologies, XII.vii.23 and Pliny, Natural History, vol. 3, Books 8-11, 2nd ed., trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 353 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3:X.l, 352-355. 138. For another interesting, and slightly divergent, example see the entry on the stone the Enidro. Here Bartholomaeus reproduces the doubts of his source, the Lapidary of Marbod, concerning the properties of the stone. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 847; Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 177. 129

Bartholomaeus’ reproduction of rejections as mapped here seems to largely fit the pattern

I have drawn in this chapter but, without a much more extensive study, it is impossible to draw any strong conclusions. I have not compiled a comprehensive list of every instance where

Bartholomaeus reproduces a critique either of authority or the common man. Equally importantly, I do not currently have the ability to point to locations where Bartholomaeus has chosen not to reproduce a critique or rejection. While promising, this avenue of investigation must be left for another time and fresh tools.

6 Experience and Experiment

6.1 Experience and Everyday Life

As we draw this chapter to a close we should briefly turn to the question of experience.

The epistemic structures of De proprietatibus rerum are founded entirely on authority and very intentionally so. Experience is not deployed as a means of evaluating information because that is not the purpose of the text. As a compiler, Bartholomaeus—as his general prologue and epilogue stress—uses the authority of his sources, not himself. We see none of the building of the author as credible witness, which we will talk about more extensively in later chapters, rather the opposite. Bartholomaeus attempts to retreat from his text, asserting that there is little of himself in it so that the credibility at issue becomes that of his sources. In this manner, the information he presents is “pre-authorized” and it is his job to order it in a useful and coherent manner rather than to evaluate it. What we do see is experience creeping in to expand familiar topics and the type of medical information that will feature extensively in the following chapter on the Pseudo-

Albertus experimentum. The purpose of this section is therefore to look at possible lines of 130 connection with the other texts in this thesis by highlighting ways experience does occur in De proprietatibus rerum.

Experience is used as an example in discussing the humour of melancholy and its potentially negative effects. Having discussed its formation in the body and natural properties

Bartholomaeus turns to the outcomes of imbalanced or corrupted black choler. This humour can lead to the illness of passio melancolya or mania. He describes various delusions that the melancholy individual can suffer from and finishes with both a reference to authority and an example that seems to reference contemporary experience:

Melancholy men fall into these and many other wonderful passions, as say Galen and Alexander, and many other authors. These passions are too many to list. And this we see often with our eyes, as it happened recently to a nobleman that fell into such a madness of melancholy that he in all ways believed that he was a cat, and therefore he would not rest anywhere but under beds where cats waited for mice.139

This example of a particular instantiation of melancholy may refer to a story reported by Cicero, but his immediate source is unknown,140 and it is presented to the reader as common knowledge based on experience. It is interesting to see it without a reference to an authority to back it up. It is, however, very much the exception in terms of references to experience. Direct reference to experience is extremely rare in the text.

As Thorndike points out the most common place we find Bartholomaeus speaking, probably, from experience is in his discussion of day-to-day life, such as his entry on servants or how to serve dinner, or his discussion of dogs.141 In his notices on both dogs and puppies

Bartholomaeus includes a sizeable section of information that cannot be tracked to a source and

139. “Melencolik men falliþ into þise and many oþir wondirful passiouns, as Galien seiþ and Alisaundir and many oþir auctours, þe which passiouns it were to longe to rekene al on rowe. And þis we seeþ alday wiþ oure eiȝen, as it fel late of a nobleman þat fel into suche a madnes of melancolye þat he in alle wise trowed þat he himself was a catte, and þerfore he wolde nowher reste but vndir beddes þere cattis waitid aftir myse.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 162. 140. Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 58. 141. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:409-412; Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 305-306, 329-330, 1164-1172. 131 is presumed to be his own experience, but he provides it without citation. There are no specific protestations of experience nor even a general citation indicating where this information comes from. It is simply included among the information drawn from authorities such as Solinus and

Aristotle.142 Much like Albertus’ collection of information on horses and hunting birds,143 this is the kind of behavioural information that suggests a strong familiarity with the animals.

Bartholomaeus tells the reader how to judge the quality and nobility of a hound. He describes the qualities of a good hunting dog: broadness of chest, smallness around the kidneys, long legs, a straight tail, and smooth fur so that it is swift in coursing and running. He should not be fat and shaggy because then he will be too slow, or will overheat, and a crooked tail might reduce the speed of his running.144 Similarly under the section on puppies (catulis) Bartholomaeus finishes the notice with information about the behaviour of puppies and the health of hunting dogs that appears to be from his experience. Meat should be given to young hunting hounds in moderation or they might grow fat and become too slow to run down prey. Even though they are naturally of a melancholy quality the young hounds are swift and merry and playful because of their age.145

It is possible that he reflects aspects of experience we will see return in later chapters.

The notices he expands with experience have two commonalities: as with Albertus, they are discussions of the particulars of nature, in this case the particular nature of dogs or diseases.

They are also extremely commonplace events that he, and many others, would have constant experience with. It is possible that this may carry some relationship to the category of common knowledge statements. Common knowledge was an aspect of the legal system that could give

142. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1164-1172, specifically 1168 and 1172; Seymour, His Encyclopedia, 218. 143. Albertus, On Animals, 1477-1505, 1572-1622. 144. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1168.

145. Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 1172. 132 legal force to information that was generally known and believed by the community.146 We will return to this idea of common knowledge in greater depth, particularly in the context of the Book of John Mandeville, but for the moment it is worth noting that Bartholomaeus expands with experience in notices on common animals and social relations that the reader might be assumed to have some familiarity with.

6.2 Medical Recipes

The presence of experience is scanty, yet the presence of medical recipes and the information we shall see presented as the product of experience in later chapters is extensive. In the book on human ailments, book 7, and extensively in the notices on particular birds, stones, plants, and animals, we see the presence of information and recipes that look very much like experiments, the product of medical experience. But there are none of the confirmations by contemporary experience, or specific appeals to the authority’s experience, that we will see in the next chapter when discussing the Pseudo-Albertus Liber de virtutibus herbarium, lapidum et animalium. Rather, the most common practice is to refer to authorities who “say”, “speak,” or

“describe” with frequent references to the specific texts where the information can be found.147

This is the same practice we have seen in treating information throughout the text. While not every passage is specifically cited, the names of medical authorities are present everywhere in his discussion and references. At the end of a long passage on the treatment of stupor,

Bartholomaeus is careful to add “all this I have drawn from Plataerius and Constantinus.”148

146. On common knowledge see Chris Wickham, “Fama and the Law in Twelfth-Century Tuscany,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. eds. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 15-26; Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Ithaca, NY: Manchester University Press, 2003). 147. For example, see the notices on frenzy, amencia; Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 348-351. 148. “Al þis I haue drawe of Platearius and of Constantinus.” Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 351. 133

Wherever the medical knowledge comes from originally, Bartholomaeus is careful to present his information as that of the written authorities.

He is very insistent on the medical properties of nature. All plants and animals have been ordained to the benefit of man and every part of the animal has its medical use, as he mentions in the opening chapter of book 18. The information Bartholomaeus reproduces frequently focuses on pharmacopeia but contains references to many of the same occult properties, particularly of stones and animals, that we will see in De virtutibus and books of secrets, but with none of that genre’s insistence on knowledge through experience.149 As we will see in the next chapter, this forms an interesting contrast with the medical experimentum texts, which are works of practice.

While Bartholomaeus presents medically useful information and even discusses many of the same objects and properties we will see in lists of experimenta, he has none of the claims to modern experience that so starkly mark those texts. Experimenta are practical texts in a way that

De proprietatibus rerum is not. Even though the material reproduced is the same, the literary context is quite starkly different and thus the epistemic structures surrounding the material are different. It is important to remember that the medico-magical and medicinal traditions in the

Middle Ages cannot be separated. The mixture of pharmacological and medico-magical material in this text points to the ongoing negotiation of boundaries between ritual and therapy in

149. See, Uppua, Adamant, Celidonio and Magnes, Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 644, 833-834, 841, 857; Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman, eds. The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, also a Book of the Marvels of the World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 26, 31, 37-38, 56. Book 17 on herbs shares the fewest similarities. This is partly because they simply do not appear to list many of the same plants, and partly because book 17 focuses on medicinal uses and compounds more in line with the pharmacopeia than the medico-magical experiments listed by De virtutibus. For examples see Eliotropum, and Henbane, Bartholomaeus, Properties of Things, 946, 977. While the entries share some information with De virtutibus, they also vary quite widely. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 4-5, 11. 134 medieval medicine that produces both the pharmacopeia and the popular magical culture we shall see embodied in De virtutibus.150

Experience is thus present in various forms, but rarely acknowledged and never actively presented as stemming from Bartholomaeus himself. There is no attempt to create himself as a credible witness, as we will see in the context of Mandeville or Pseudo-Albertus; instead, he hides his use of experience among the statements of the authorities, borrowing their status and credibility for his statements. Experience does not serve an epistemic purpose in this text, nor would there be a reason for it to do so. What we do see are lines of connection between the material in De proprietatibus rerum and the material that will be presented as the product of experience in related texts that serve other purposes and are structured according to different genres.

7 Conclusion

The world Bartholomaeus describes is recognizably the world Albertus is studying but significantly more ample. While Bartholomaeus hardly catalogues the whole world, his desire to create coherence without choosing between authorities, and his more wide-ranging goal, produce a far more expansive text than Albertus’ more focused “encyclopedic” texts. At the heart, however, they share similarities of approach. In both cases, the diversity of nature underwrites the approach to phenomena, but where in Albertus this forms the basis for evaluating sources, in

Bartholomaeus it allows him to avoid evaluating sources. The goal of compilation marks the text

150. Iolanda Ventura, “The Curae ex animalibus in the Medical Literature of the Middle Ages: The Example of the Illustrated Herbals,” in Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles: communications présentées au XVe Colloque de la Société Internationale Renardienne (Louvain-la- Neuve, 19-22.8.2003), ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 2005), 213-248. 135 and places authority as its epistemic core. Natural diversity serves as a means of producing a coherent view of the world out of the widely varying reports of authorities. Conflicts of cosmology are smoothed away, while marvel and diversity create a space where conflicts on the particulars of nature can be tolerated.

The world he describes encompasses all the texts discussed in this thesis. The careful natural history of Albertus is visible in discussions of generation and corruption while the practice-oriented medico-magical information of the experimenta is visible in the individual properties of animals or diseases. The world he describes is also recognizably the world of

Mandeville and the mappae mundi. The reader is capable of engaging with these different texts equally because each establishes its epistemic structures according to the genre and context of the work. Chapter Four: Experimenta and Books of Secrets

1 Introduction

This chapter will begin to explore the expansion of natural knowledge toward an extra- scholastic or popular context. We will look at a point of crossover between the medical and natural philosophical literatures, the experimentum text. These texts were lists of medical, technical, or magical recipes that could only be known to work through experience but not understood through reason. They are a complicated and diverse collection of works ranging from straightforward medical recipes to works entirely based in hermetic magic, and almost all of them purporting to be written by a famous authority.1 The tradition of esotericism and hermetic magic passed down from the Hellenistic works was altered and expanded upon by Arabic authors before being transmitted to the Latin West alongside the tradition of philosophical scientia.

Many of these experimenta texts, referred to as books of secrets, promised to give the reader access to the secret and marvelous properties of nature and allow the knowledgeable philosopher to control the material world through a mastery of the forces of nature. The Arabic authors thus presented the Latin West with what appeared to be two intertwined types of knowledge; a philosophical knowledge of causes and phenomena and an operational knowledge by which nature could be controlled and made to serve human ends.2

1. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:751-808, particularly 751-752. 2. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 38-45. It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages magic was not fundamentally dissimilar in nature from other crafts. Whether technical, magical, or medical, the knowledge contained in experimenta would have been considered ars: the skills and techniques of material and technical production. Ars could imitate nature (the created world and its inbuilt forces of change or motion), and could even improve upon the products of nature, but it could not operate outside the bounds of nature. Magic, even demonic magic, fell under the heading of human ars and was limited in its effects by the constraints of nature.

136 137

Experimenta and books of secrets formed the textual tradition of this practice-oriented approach to natural knowledge. In his work exploring the tradition of books of secrets, William

Eamon suggests that these texts can be treated as a distinct scientific literature parallel to the scholastic natural philosophy of the universities, but appealing to a much more diverse audience.3 These texts were hugely popular among the growing population of liberal arts students, they circulated widely among the members of the court as the burgeoning political apparatus called for literate and educated clerics to fill its bureaucratic roles, they can be found in the collections of physicians, and in monastic libraries as well.4 These texts have such a wide appeal partly because they are interesting, partly because they promise a degree of control over the natural world, but also because they stress the value of natural philosophy.5

For all that these are magical texts, many of the most popular texts, like the Secreta secretorum attributed to Aristotle, contain an introduction that stresses the importance of natural philosophical knowledge as the foundation of practical knowledge. The text asserts that only those knowledgeable in natural philosophy will be able to correctly divine the natural forces and connections at work.6 As we will see in our discussion of the two texts that traveled under the title Experimenta Alberti, the Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium and De mirabilibus mundi, these introductions range considerably in length but offer a simplified view of natural causes and a strong orientation toward practice. They present themselves as

For a more detailed discussion of magical and craft knowledge, see Long, Openness Secrecy, Authorship, 46- 51, 61-63, 78-96. For A discussion of the status of magical and alchemical knowledge in the division between art and nature, see Newman, “Art, Nature, Alchemy,” particularly 119-126. 3. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 45-53 4. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 45-53; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 106-127; Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 55-69. For a slightly longer discussion of this diverse audience, see section 3 of this chapter. 5. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 49-50. For a general discussion of the appeal of natural magic and experimenta and their gradual association with natural philosophy, see Boudet, Science et nigromance, chapters 4 and 7. 6. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 45-53. 138 instructions for putting philosophical knowledge of nature to a practical purpose and promise to give the reader the power to perform marvels in the material world. This would not be likely to be the only encounter with Aristotelian natural philosophy for its readers, but these were popular texts that circulated within an educated but not necessarily scholastic readership and represent a particular perspective on natural philosophy.

I am particularly interested in drawing links to the work done on medical writing by

Katherine Park and Michael McVaugh. The development of medicine as a university discipline led to the need to produce a rational literature for it, but medicine could not turn itself into a science of rational demonstration as completely as the ideals of rational philosophy desired. The developing scholastic medical literature existed alongside an educated and rational medical tradition that was required to incorporate practice, experience, and the particulars of nature.

Katherine Park has shown how this need to understand particular phenomena led to the development of a sustained tradition of inquiry and a coherent body of literature devoted to the analysis of individual healing springs. She points to a practical branch of medical education, developing alongside the rational philosophical medicine, that produced an elaborate and philosophically informed epistemology of experience based on the study of natural particulars.7

Michael McVaugh has illustrated the role experimenta and experience played in the burgeoning theoretical and rational pharmacopeia taught at the medical school of Montpellier. Mcvaugh’s work suggests that, within medical writing experience was considered valuable, particularly as a means of knowing the effects of individual drugs.8 Experience had to be filtered through reason

7. Katherine Park, “Natural Particulars.” 8. McVaugh, “Experience Based Medicine,” 110-117; McVaugh, “Arnold of Villanova and Bradwardine’s Law,” Isis 58.1 (1967): 56-64; McVaugh, “The Nature and Limits of Medical Certitude at Early Fourteenth-Century Montpellier,” Osiris 6, Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition (1990): 62-84; Mcvaugh, “The Experimenta of Arnau de Villanova,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1971): 107-118. 139 in order to be useful, but the particulars of cases and drugs could only be known fully through experience. This seems to map on to the system of knowledge construction I have illustrated in previous chapters, where experience functions as a valuable way of knowing the particulars of nature, in this case the effects of individual compounds and simples.

During this discussion I hope to highlight three points. First, I point to a shared understanding of the epistemic role experience plays in understanding the particulars of nature between medicine and natural philosophy. Medical practice, like the discussion of specific plants and animals in encyclopedias, must delve into the complex world of the particulars of nature, the properties of specific ingredients and even their connection to the complex forces of nature and astrology. As such the readers and authors show a shared understanding of the importance of experience as a means of knowing despite the theoretical structures that exist to explain nature.

We will examine the epistemic structures of the experimenta texts attributed to Albertus Magnus as an example of these popular experimenta and a work with strong links of context and genre to both the medical and philosophical worlds. It is a text that focuses upon the marvelous properties of nature while also explicitly naturalizing these properties. It shares links to the medical, magical, and philosophical traditions both in its structure and its sources.9

Second, the obsession of these texts with practica––the know-how of manipulating the world rather than knowledge of understanding its causes––and condensed character of the natural philosophy it does present (limited, of course, because experimenta often were not explicable by natural philosophy), meant that the reader is being presented with a somewhat simplified version of the epistemic principles we can see active in the "more theoretical” works. The nuance of the relationship between reason, authority, and experience that we can see in the production of a

9. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 17-26. 140 rational medical practice and in the encyclopedia’s exploration of natural particulars is washed away. We are presented with an epistemic view that not only prizes experience fairly uncritically, but even appears to present experience and reason as opposed epistemic tools.

Experimenta texts, with their medical and/or technical or magical information about the attributes of plants and animals, were extremely popular among a large portion of the reading public.10 As such experimenta, like the Pseudo-Albertus text discussed here, constitute an interesting window into the view of nature experienced outside the realm of formal university disputation. The texts offer a bridge between those written in a specifically educational context–– such as the texts by Albertus and Bartholomeus previously discussed––and the most popular of the works I intend to discuss, The Book of John Mandeville. These experimenta show us texts that are focused on interesting and engaging the reader but provide a simplified natural philosophical structure with a strong focus on the epistemic importance of experience. They insist that the causes of these marvelous phenomena are natural, but in their justification of experience, rather than rational demonstration as a means of gaining knowledge, they drive a much firmer wedge between reason and experience than seen in the writings of Albertus or the medical theory of Montpellier.

Finally I will briefly explore the possible connections opened up by these texts of practice and the work that has been done on the importance of artisans and the knowledge of practice in the development of early modern science. While such connections can only be tentative, it is worth thinking about these works in connection to the concepts of trading zones and virtual witness that have been so productive in exploring the increasing value of empirical knowledge in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.11

10. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 38-90; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 24-26. 11. See, Long, Artisan/Practitioners; Harkness, Jewel House; Smith, Body of the Artisan. 141

In the subsequent pages we shall look first at the literature of medical practice developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth century and follow that with a discussion of the two pseudo-

Albertus experimenta. Although these texts are often closely associated in modern discussions because they were consistently bound together beginning in the fifteenth century, at the time of their composition they circulated separately. As will be discussed, the two texts had their roots, and potentially their authorship, in the educated context of a Dominican studium and share genre and source links with the medical experimenta. Despite their shared context, dealing with the two texts as a unit presents significant difficulties. For this reason I shall briefly discuss their context and differentiation before treating the texts independently.

2 Theory and Practice in Medicine

Park and McVaugh have shed light on two different but closely related coherent bodies of literature that show communities of educated individuals struggling with the epistemic structures of their discipline. They have shown the ways experience-based literature existed alongside and intertwined with the rational academic literature of medicine. Medicine and surgery in the thirteenth and fourteenth century existed in a complex position, trying to incorporate the body of literature translated from Arabic and use it to establish themselves as a science but also conscious that their focus on practice and particulars made it impossible to achieve the degree of abstract demonstration that was the goal of scientia. As I have suggested in previous chapters, natural philosophers also struggled with the desire to explore the particulars of nature, but the requirements of practice and the realities of treating individual diseases made medical writers particularly aware of the issue. The role of practice in rational medicine is a complex one. The universals of the physician are the same as those of the philosopher, but for the sake of practice, 142 medicine’s knowledge must be put to sensible particulars while natural philosophy explains the true nature of things. Medical authors understood philosophical truth but considered it primarily as it applies to practice. Thus medicine is an art founded upon science. The foundation is certain knowledge built on experience with experiment referring to a collective knowledge of experience by reliable witnesses.12

We can see this in the struggle of masters at the medical school of Montpellier––one of the most important centres for medical education by the end of the thirteenth century––to incorporate a powerful new theory of compound medicine into their teaching and practice. The explanatory value of this theory conflicted with their own concern over applying these medicines to specific cases. New medical texts coming from the Arabic world included refined views on the creation of compound medicines. These new medical texts provided a theory of compounding medicines based on the qualities of the ingredients, ascribing degrees of hotness or coldness to an ingredient, and a method for computing how to achieve a mixture with the desired qualities for the individual patient. Theoretically, the physician could calculate the necessary dosage and ingredients to create the appropriate medicine for any illness; in practice, Western physicians seem to have been quite wary of this. The Montpellier scholars respond to this with caution.

While they fully accept the principle of a science of pharmacy and acknowledge the value of the

12. Michael McVaugh, “Nature and Limits,” 69-81; McVaugh, “Treatment of Hernia in the Later Middle Ages: Surgical Correction and Social Construction,” in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, eds. Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham and Luis García-Ballester (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 137-143; McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Late Middle Ages (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), 23-35; Danielle Jacquart “Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory” in Cambridge History of Science: Medieval Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael Shank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 606-610. For further discussion of experience, theory, and practice in medieval medicine see: Crisciani, “Experientia e opus”; Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “The Science and Practice of Medicine in the Thirteenth Century According to Guglielmo da Saliceto, Italian Surgeon,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, eds. Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60-87; Luke Demaitre, “Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 30 (1975): 103-123; Demaitre, Medieval Medicine, especially 4-26. 143 authoritative texts acquired from Arabic sources, they remain conscious that their own experiences might contradict those of authority and that their experience has value because of the complexity of nature. Bernard of Gordon, who taught and wrote at Montpellier from 1283-1308, expressed deep skepticism that any human could know all the necessary properties and causes well enough to use this system reliably.13 Much as we saw in the discussion of Albertus Magnus’ approach to nature, physicians are well aware of the complexity of natural causes. There are a huge number of influences and occult forces that could potentially affect the outcome of mixing a medicine. Medical scholars disagreed on exactly how a given medicine might interact with individual physiology, even if the primary qualities of a medicine were usually agreed upon.

The medical faculty of Montpellier was able to incorporate the diversity of nature into the regularity of a pharmacological practice through principles found in Avicenna’s De viribus cordis, translated in 1280 by Arnau de Villanova, who studied medicine at Montpellier in 1260 and returned to teach from 1291-1301. Avicenna acknowledges that often the effects of medicines are not reducible to the primary qualities, hot and cold, of the component medicines.

He proposes that, if substances are truly mixed together into a new substance, the complexion of the substance will be a product of its component’s primary qualities, but it can also take on new qualities specific to that substance from the astrological, or divine, forces acting upon it during the mixture. While this new property is very much a natural quality, it cannot be deduced from the original materials and so must be known to work through experience.14

13. Mcvaugh, “Experience Based Medicine,” 107-113. 14. McVaugh, “Experience Based Medicine,” 115-117. It is particularly interesting to note that the magnet was often used as an example of this principle. The introduction to De mirabilibus mundi also uses it as an example in attempt to explain the generation of properties that cannot be deduced by recourse to the primary properties of the object. Antonella Sannino, ed., Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale, Micrologus’ Library 41 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 105-106; Best and Brightman, Book of Secrets, 82-83. 144

As McVaugh has shown, Arnau de Villanova’s commentary on the Hippocratic aphorisms shows a teacher consciously attempting to explain the necessity of judicious application of this new science of medicine. He offers warnings to his students that authorities may offer conflicting information and lists of information so they have to begin by looking at the rational foundations of a given medicine.15 This seems quite similar to what we see with

Albertus. The first method of evaluating a claim about the world must be the test of reason. If the medicine presented by a text does not have a plausible explanation then it is not to be used.

Following that a physician must ask whether the effect of the medicine described seems consistent with their own experience and then decide what local causes might affect the application of the medicine to the particular case. Like Albertus, Arnau is even interested in listening to the common people. Their claims about the natural world, while not in the same class as those of a medical authority, should also be evaluated. If their claims are consistent with reason, then a closer examination of the context might eventually uncover a consistent property.16 Arnau is skeptical of many reports, but he is clear that it is possible for new properties and new remedies to be uncovered through experience. In the work of Arnau de

Villanova, as much as he supported the use of experience it was to be tempered by the application of reason. Arnau instructs his students to be attentive to the possibility of unexpected and unexplained properties reported by the common folk. These reports, however, were to be analyzed by theory and reason, if the property seemed plausible then the physician could begin to look at the factors that could cause an ingredient to behave that way in that specific location.17

15. McVaugh, “Experience Based Medicine,” 118-122. It is also worth noting that in the actual experimenta Arnau de Villanova writes he tends to stay away from complex medicines and instead provide remedies based on only one or two simples. McVaugh, “Experimenta of Arnau.” 16. Ibid., 118-122. 17. Ibid., 118-123 145

At what might be considered the other end of the spectrum of medical writing, Katherine

Park has discussed the medical works surrounding the Italian healing springs. These springs were said to have marvelous and unexpected healing properties that, like the compound medicines, could not be deduced simply from their known properties. These springs inspired the appearance of a sustained tradition of inquiry and coherent body of literature dedicated to the causal analysis of individual phenomena based on causal experience. Park focuses on treaties on healing springs produced by practicing physicians between 1350 and 1450. Unlike the texts examined by

McVaugh, these texts represent a literature primarily outside the university context and an attempt by philosophically trained writers to develop a method of natural enquiry of specific natural phenomena.18

These healing spring texts set themselves apart by their focus on experience as the epistemic grounds for their investigation. By founding themselves in the same theoretic principles of astrology and matter that we see in the Avicennian explanation for the powers of mixtures, they carve out a space where experience is the only valid knowledge claim. Each spring’s properties are a necessarily unique product of location, and topography. The heat properties and mineral content of the spring might be easily enough ascertained, but the location determined the astrological influences.19 In Albertus’ De mineralibus he dedicates several chapters to the importance of location and the role astrological forces play in the generation of stones. The planetary rays provided both the initial impetus to stone formation and the variety of special properties that stones possessed. In this way, minute differences in location, altering the

18. Park, “Natural Particulars,” 348. 19. Ibid., 350-352. 146 angle of the rays, would translate into substantial differences in astrological influence.20

Certainly the properties of the spring were produced by natural causes, but the particulars of place meant that those causes could not be known with any certainty. By establishing this radical uniqueness, the authors of texts on healing springs created a space where experience was the only possible way of knowing their properties, but even here all experience was not equal. As

Park points out, lay observation was emphasized as a means of identifying new springs but certainly not sufficient for determining their properties. That required the experience of a philosophically trained physician. The authors lost no opportunity to cite their wealthy patrons as well to establish their own authority.21 It is worth noting that this is also a feature of medical experimenta like Arnau’s: he consistently names the, high ranking, patient to whom he administered the drug, thereby enrolling him as a witness to its efficacy.22 In the context of the particulars of nature, the experience of a credible knower becomes essential for producing reliable information.

Both of these examples reveal communities attempting to balance the epistemic value of reason, authority, and experience in the face of the diversity of nature, and a developing medical marketplace. While they are quite different, we can see elements of the epistemic structures discussed in previous chapters. When the rational medicine of Montpellier and treatises on the healing springs attempt to make room for experience they do so in the same way the encyclopedists do: by pointing to the diversity of natural causes and the need for experience when dealing with the particulars of nature. It is in some ways unsurprising that these works

20. The role of place in the formation of stones plays a significant role in Albertus’ discussion. The entirety of Book I and Book II tractate I deal with the effects of place and the occult mineralizing force. For the most specific discussions of place and astrology however see Albertus, Book of Minerals, 21-23,32-35, 55-67. 21. Park, “Natural Particulars,” 353-357. 22. McVaugh, “The Experimenta of Arnau”, 107-109. 147 should all find a base in the same epistemic structures. The authors all participate in the university education of natural philosophy and define their disciplines in relation to it. Still, as much as medical writers clearly forged new pathways in the incorporation of experience into medieval natural investigation, it is interesting to see that they did so using the same principles of a contextually sensitive epistemic practice established in the natural history of encyclopedists.

The Pseudo-Albertus text we are addressing here was referred to within the manuscript tradition almost interchangeably as Experimenta Alberti or Secreta Alberti.23 This suggests that at least some copyists saw the two genres as closely linked. While both experimenta and books of secrets are, fundamentally, lists of recipes and practice, books of secrets also promise to open the secrets of nature, giving the reader access to unknown and unexpected properties of natural objects through the recipes contained within. Books of secrets present themselves specifically as the practica of natural philosophy. They promise the reader that, through the application of their philosophical knowledge, they will be able to affect the material world. While it is difficult to know exactly how seriously these texts were taken by their readers, the wide circulation of these texts does suggest that they have some interest and influence to a large reading population.24 This forms a bridge between the examples we have seen above between the works of medical practice negotiating their space within the learned medicine and the pseudo-Albertus texts discussed below that may reflect a similar attempt to carve out space for practice within the edifice of natural philosophy.

23. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 26-30. The oldest manuscript versions we have of De virtutibus are titled Experimentum or Secreta roughly equally. William Eamon chooses to refer to this work as the Secrets of Albert while Thorndike refers to it as the Experiments of Albert. I shall follow Draelants in splitting the difference and referring to it as De virtutibus in order to avoid confusion with the printed editions that combine both De virtutibus and De mirabilibus mundi under the title Liber aggregationis or The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus. 24. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 10-12, 23-26; Eamon, “Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science,” Sudhoffs Archiv 69.1 (1985): 26-49; Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 5, 39-55. 148

3 Pseudo-Albertus

As discussed above, these issues have been explored extensively in connection with the works of medical writers and practitioners. In this chapter, I intend to follow the lead presented by historians of medicine in a slightly different direction. I hope to help show that the attitude

McVaugh and Park have traced in the context of medicine seems to extend to other works on the particulars of nature. By looking at the Pseudo-Albertus experimenta we can gain a sense of what was compelling to a generally educated audience that extended beyond the bounds of the university. These experimenta were quite popular works written to record the marvelous properties of certain plants, stones, and minerals or to provide recipes to produce certain marvelous effects. Like the healing spring texts Park discusses, the text has a distinct focus on experience as a means of knowing the effectiveness of the recipes it presents. It mixes this with references to ancient authorities, but experience definitely stands out.

I will deal here with works described variously as experimenta and books of secrets.

While it might be going too far to say that these terms are interchangeable, they refer to genres of literature that are so closely related that creating a hard distinction between these two categories is both difficult and appears at least somewhat ahistorical. Both genres are composed of texts that present recipes, along with a greater or lesser degree of explanation. Lynn Thorndike finds it most effective to group them into works of experiments and secrets concerning medical/biological recipes or chemical/magical recipes rather than based on their descriptions as experiments or secrets.25 William Eamon points to books of secrets being differentiated by a specific promise to give the reader access to the occult secrets of nature. Whether the recipes are

25. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:751-808. 149 based in craft knowledge or in natural philosophy, books of secrets are grounded in the promise of revealing the secrets––usually ascribed to a famous philosopher, magician, or physician––that will give the dedicated student access to the occult powers of nature.26 The genre of experimenta simply refers to texts that offer lists of recipes for creating effects (be they chemical, medical, or magical) that are known to work by experience. These might be lists of compounds for treating certain ailments, such as the experimenta of Arnau de Villanova,27 or expositions of the ways to draw out the magical properties of nature, as our pseudo-Albertus texts are. Often these two types of recipe occur together in the same text, illustrating just how porous the boundary between these two genres was in medieval thought.28 Under either title these are works of operatory literature; specifically concerned with providing instructions for performing certain tasks.

Experimenta, or the texts they were compiled from, largely came into the Latin West alongside works of learned magic. They were translated, compiled, and copied primarily by the clerics that made up the growing bureaucratic apparatus of both the secular and papal courts.

Despite political tensions, the secular and papal courts existed within a shared cultural world populated by individuals with similar educational backgrounds and interests, tied together by social and political relationships. Information, individuals, and probably texts passed back and forth easily between the courts. The patronage, dedications, and ownership patterns point to a strong interest in magic and marvelous experiments among both secular courtiers and religious officials. Interest in magic and experimenta within the secular courts was relatively open and widespread, with Frederic II himself being identified as the patron in some texts, but within the

26. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 25-30, 50-60. 27. McVaugh, “Experimenta of Arnau.” 28. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 26-29. 150 papal courts it was a more secret and individual affair. Still, the papal court was no less a source for the consumption and dissemination of experimenta and magical texts.29

At the root of the interest in texts of experimenta was a desire for the control over the vicissitude of life that these texts offered. Experiments prolonging life or increasing personal influence appealed to individuals within complex and shifting power structures of court life, but they also appealed to many outside the courts. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experimenta appealed to physicians, students at universities, and monks as well, primarily works detailing the occult natural properties of nature and their uses (as opposed to works of necromantic experiments that relied on summoning demons or angels). This is partly because of the same desire for control but also because of a growing association between these texts and natural philosophy. In the thirteenth-century library of the Benedictine Abbey of St Augustine in

Canterbury, we find experimenta and other works of natural magic, including the Experimenta

Alberti, collected alongside works of cosmology and natural philosophy. The library records suggest readers studied experimenta with an interest both in controlling nature through theologically licit means, and as a part of understanding nature.30 In the Experimenta Alberti’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century spread through the Germanic lands, the text is often found associated with the authentic works of Albertus, hinting again at a keen interest in, and

29. Boudet identifies three primary loci of translation and transmission for texts of educated magic and experimenta: the Imperial Court of Frederic II, the court of Alfonso X of Castile, and the Papal Court under Honorius III and Gregory IX. He also notes that, while the clerics of the courts made up the largest body of translators and compilers, physicians probably made up a significant secondary group. Boudet, Science et nigromance, 164-168, 174-203. Steven Williams looks at the early dissemination of the Secreta secretorum through what he refers to as the shared cultural world of the papal and imperial courts. The Secreta secretorum was an extremely popular work that compiled philosophical, medical, and astrological advice, supposedly written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great, and contains several recipes concerning the virtues of herbs and stones similar to those found in books of secrets. Steven J. Williams, “The Early Circulation of Pseudo- Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the West: The Papal and Imperial Courts,” Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali 2, Le scienze alla corte di Frederico II (1994): 127-144. 30. Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 9-30, 34-45; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 106-118. 151 association between, experimenta and natural philosophy.31 Translation into vernacular languages brought these texts to an even wider audience. Indeed, there are few medieval texts that circulated as widely as the Experimenta Alberti and Secretum secretorum. Experimenta offered a mixture of practical knowledge and the trappings of natural philosophy that appealed to an extremely diverse audience with an interest in both the control they offered over nature and understanding the complex and hidden forces of nature.32

Before we can dive into the origins of the Experimenta Alberti we must first disambiguate this title. There were at least two texts that are experimenta and are pseudonymously ascribed to Albertus: Liber de virtutibus herbarium, lapidum et animalium and

De mirabilibus mundi, both of which were most likely composed in the second half of the thirteenth century. Beginning in the fifteenth century these two texts were consistently bound together under the title Liber Aggregationis, consistently ascribed to Albertus Magnus, and enjoyed a printed circulation into the seventeenth century.33 Between their inception in the thirteenth century and their association in the fifteenth, these two texts appear to have circulated separately. For the sake of brevity, from this point on, I will adopt the short titles used to differentiate the texts by the most recent critical editions of these two works De virtutibus and De mirabilibus. Of these two texts the slightly longer De virtutibus is most consistently ascribed to

Albertus Magnus and has varying titles but is most commonly identified as either an experimenta or book of secrets in the titles of its various manuscripts.34 De mirabilibus, conversely, seems to

31. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 118-127. 32. Boudet, Science et nigromance, 390-393, 417-422, Láng, Unlocked Books, 55-69; Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 45-53. 33. Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman, “Introduction.” In The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, also a Book of the Marvels of the World, eds. Michael R. and Frank H. Brightman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), xi; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 10-12. 34. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 26-29. 152 have had a more stable title as De mirabilibus mundi but a less consistent ascription.35 While the texts are closely related, both in their content and manuscript tradition, they are also distinct in the thirteenth and fourteenth century so I shall attempt to deal with them separately rather than as the unit they become as Liber aggregationis. I will touch first on De virtutibus and follow it with a few points concerning De mirabilibus.

Although these texts were quite popular, De virtutibus and De mirabilibus have not formed a major part of the investigation of medieval science.36 After the assertion by Lynn

Thorndike that the texts were not authentic works of Albertus Magnus, and given the notably magical nature of their content, most historians of science appear to have largely ignored them.

Brightman and Best produced an edition of the English translation of Liber aggregationis in

1973 exploring the sources and context.37 William Eamon has actually taken books of secrets seriously as a genre of scientific literature and discusses both the De virtutibus (which he refers to as Secrets of Albert) and De mirabilibus. The focus of his study, however, is the early modern period and his discussion of the works is thus relatively brief, though informative.38 Jean-Patrice

Boudet provides a somewhat more substantial discussion of three apocryphal texts ascribed to

Albertus—De virtutibus, De mirabilibus, and De secretis mulierum—in his work Entre science et nigromance, placing them in the broader context of works of natural magic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.39 More recently, Isabella Draelants and Antonella Sannino have,

35. Sannino, “Il testo,” 5-13. We will discuss the specifics De mirabilibus at greater length in the section dedicated to that text. 36. Draelants notes that, for her critical edition of De virtutibus, she found 80 Latin manuscripts or manuscript sections— slightly fewer than the conserved manuscript versions for Albertus’ De mineralibus—while there are at least a further 80 vernacular versions. Lynn Thorndike suggested that, taken together, the two works were “published in about as many editions as all Albert’s numerous other works put together.” Thorndike, History of Magic, 721; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 11-12. 37. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, xi-xlviii. 38. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 71-73. 39. Boudet, Science et nigromance, 409-417. 153 working in contact, produced two separate books providing critical Latin editions of De virtutibus and De mirabilibus respectively.40

In her critical edition, Draelants has done a masterful job of tracing the sources of the work. Her study has allowed her to shed additional light on the questionable authorship of the text and seems to reinforce the idea that the text is produced within a Dominican context, but she is not able to definitively identify an author.41 Draelants uses careful analysis of Albertus’ De mineralibus, which serves as one of the major sources for Book Two of De virtutibus to show that, while De mineralibus was definitely a source, the author of De virtutibus did not use the final version of De mineralibus but rather an earlier version.42 She also points out that the ascriptions to Albertus Magnus begin with the earliest manuscript we have and are peculiarly insistent that he himself composed the work.43 This––combined with the fact that the plant and animal sections of De virtutibus were clearly not inspired by the alphabetical lists in Albertus’

De vegetalibus or De animalibus––means that we can tentatively place the composition date around the same time Albertus was writing De mineralibus; between 1248 and 1263, probably, she argues, before the composition of De vegetalibus et plantis in 1267. While Draelants seems to hint that she believes the text really is authentic to Albertus, she refrains from making a strong statement in that direction. Rather, she contents herself with demonstrating that there is no reason

Albertus could not have written it, and if he did not we can be certain that De virtutibus

40. Isabelle Draelants, ed. and trans., Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium (Liber Aggregationis): Un texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, Micrologus’ Library 22 (Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007); Sannino, De mirabilibus. 41. Thorndike proposed this in his study of the text for History of Magic and returned to the question in 1955 to demonstrate that a part of De virtutibus was definitely taken from Albertus’s De mineralibus. He remained undecided as to whether that indicated the manuscript’s ascription was authentic. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:721-726; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 32-56. Thorndike, “Further Considerations of the Experimenta, Speculum astronomiae, and De secretis mulierum Ascribed to Albertus Magnus,” Speculum 30.3 (1955): 413- 443. 42. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 43-45. 43. Ibid., 50-51. 154 originated in a Dominican context very close to Albertus and was written between 1248 and

1290 (the date of the beginning of the composition of De mineralibus and that the of the earliest known manuscript edition).44

De virtutibus shares a common textual ancestry with a number of contemporary works of natural philosophy. As Draelants details extensively, it draws from the same group of texts that

Arnold of Saxony, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas de Cantimpré, and other authors used, as well as drawing from Albertus Magnus and Arnold of Saxony themselves.

Draelants suggests that all of these authors use, partially, a compilation of early lapidaries that combined excerpts from the Liber lapidum of Marbode de Rennes, a lapidary attributed to

Damigeron and Evax, the Materia medica of Dioscorides, and De physicis ligaturis of Qusta ibn

Luqa with multiple contaminations and confusions about the ascriptions of different passages.45

This text would account for the constant appearance of the authors Evax and Aaron as philosophical authorities, as well as the attribution of certain information to Qusta ibn Luqa that does not appear in any extant version of his De physicis ligaturis, but that does appear as consistent mistakes of attribution throughout the experimentum, lapidary, and encyclopedic works of the thirteenth century.46

De virtutibus therefore originates from the same academic context, and even to some extent the same textual basis, that produces the educated encyclopedias and lapidaries that flourished in the thirteenth century. Its character, however, is importantly different. This is a text that has clearly taken the opportunity to dive into the operatory focus of the experimenta literature. It is focused on the marvelous and the particular in a way, and with a directness, that

44. Ibid., 32-56, 102-103. 45. Ibid., 88-95. 46. Ibid., 75-103. 155 medieval encyclopedists and other academic works avoided. Its popular character is obvious from both its writing and its proliferation.47 As the Liber Aggregationis–– bound together with its sister text De mirabilibus mundi and still ascribed to Albertus Magnus––De virtutibus was consistently circulated into the seventeenth century.48 This text can, in some ways, be viewed as a “popularization” of the work of natural encyclopedists; a simplified text that wrapped itself in the trappings of scientific knowledge and authority while focusing on recording, or describing how to produce, marvels rather than explaining them. It possesses a distinctly natural approach, reminding the reader that magic was the product of natural forces, but its epistemic structures are quite different from those of the academically oriented texts we have discussed thus far. De virtutibus simplifies its epistemic approach and appeals far more strongly to experience and authority than to reason. This is at least partially because its focus on the particulars of nature makes experience the most appropriate method of gaining information of the marvelous effects it reports.49 Possibly, however, it may be that experience was also a more appealing epistemic tool to the readership outside the academic circles. As we will see in the discussion of Mandeville, experience––when located in the figure of a credible witness––seems to be a powerful epistemic tool for a popular audience.

4 De Virtutibus

From its inception in the thirteenth century, De virtutibus was most frequently presented under the title Experimenta Alberti or Secreta Alberti. Both of these titles serve to point us toward literature based on the articulation of the properties of nature known by experience.50

47. Ibid., 24-26. 48. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, ix. 49. Park, “Natural Particulars.” 50. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 18-23, 26-31. 156

Under either of these titles, we can see De virtutibus participating in what might be called the

“popularization” of natural knowledge in the Middle Ages.51 The genre of experimentum encapsulates a variety of texts, bound together by being an articulation of recipes known to work through experience rather than theoretic extrapolation, including a number of works used in medical practice and education. These are texts of know-how rather than knowledge. Texts such as these assure the reader that the recipes work, but their engagement with occult natural properties means that they fundamentally cannot explain why they work in a philosophically rigorous manner. On the less formal end of this spectrum, texts like De virtutibus and other books of secrets offer a list of recipes and marvelous properties of nature which interest and excite the reader tied up with the trappings of natural philosophy but lacking clear and nuanced explanation. The introduction of De virtutibus makes clear that all the marvels listed within are produced by natural forces, but this naturalization of the marvels does not stretch to providing a coherent explanation. Rather, these are marvelous properties of nature and can only be grasped through experience because of the human limitations regarding the knowledge of causes. It appears to have been written by a highly educated individual, certainly someone familiar with several of Albertus’ works of natural philosophy, aimed at a curious, but perhaps more practically focused, reading audience.52 Manuscript versions of De virtutibus are most often found bound with other works on sympathetic magic, but a significant number are found bound with medical works, usually pharmacopeia or recipe texts, or with texts of astrology and alchemy.53 Its thirteenth-century circulation shows an audience that crossed social and national

51. Ibid., 25-26 52. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:720-726; Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 43-45. 53. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 141-146; Láng’s survey of the Central European distribution of natural magic texts finds the Experimenta Alberti most often associated with medical and astrological works, Láng, Unlocked Books, 61-69. 157 boundaries, with copies of De virtutibus attested to in both secular courts and the libraries of monastic houses in France and England. By the middle of the fourteenth century its circulation had expanded to the Germanic lands where De virtutibus seems to have been often considered an authentic work of Albertus Magnus. Draelants suggests that its wide spread and lasting popularity in the Germanic lands particularly, testifies to a special interest in experimenta and a fascination with natural philosophy in that region.54

In some ways De virtutibus appears analogous to modern popularizations of science and, much like these modern works, in its focus on the interesting and exciting it loses a great deal of detail and nuance. By exploring the epistemic structures in De virtutibus and De mirabilibus as well as comparing them to Albertus’ De mineralibus55 and the research McVaugh has done on experimenta coming out of the rational medicine being developed in Montpellier at the end of the thirteenth century, we can see the way these texts have some similarities but lack the nuance and understanding demonstrated by texts aimed at the educated medical and philosophical community.

The most commonly used knowledge claim in De virtutibus focuses the reader on experience and locates that experience in the supposed author, Albertus Magnus. The authority of Albertus––a figure with well-known philosophical, natural, and theological knowledge— underwrites the experience claims frequently made within the text as the figure of the credible knower. While the vast majority of the early manuscript versions of De virtutibus are ascribed to

Albertus through their title, many manuscripts also stress the identity and role of the author with

54. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 116-118, 121-127. 55. While De virtutibus is attributed to Albertus Magnus most of its material is drawn from a collection of different texts, as Draelants and Thorndike have discussed. The section on stones, however, is predominantly drawn from the discussion of the individual properties of stones found in Albertus’s De mineralibus. Thorndike, “Further Considerations,” 419-423. 158 a statement at the end of the short prologue that reminds the reader that the information within is confirmed by the pseudonymous author. This takes the form of the statement “and I myself,

Albert, have found the truth in many things….”56 This then suggests that the most common experience claims “it has been proved in our time” or “this has been proved” might be taken as references to Albertus’ experience where they are not specifically ascribed to members of his order.57 In a sense he serves as witness to the experiments, attesting to the effectiveness not only of those he claims to have personally seen, but also to those he simply states have been proved.

Even when he is citing an experiment from another text, his own act of reproducing these experiments in connection with the others he directly attests tacitly adds his own authority to the claim.

A number of entries have specific references to a phenomenon being tested or proved by members of the Dominican order. For instance, in the notice on topaz we see the statement that

“It hath been proved, in our time, that if it be put in seething water it maketh it to run over, but if thou put thy hand in it, the water is drawn out anon, and one of our brethren did this at Paris.”58

This is a somewhat convoluted and corrupted version of Albertus’ statement that this stone,

56. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 3; cf. “Immo etiam egomet ut in pluribus veritatem inveni…” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 259. The text Draelants uses as the basis for her critical edition does not contain the direct reference to Albertus that Best and Brightman have. However, she points out that this reference to “egomet Albertus” is common among many of the manuscript traditions. Where the text does not specifically reference Albertus, the text is often authored by Albertus and the passage just has “egomet.” See Draelants, “Commentaire,” 50-51; Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 259 note d. 57. “et hoc expertum est a modernis” “Hoc enim tempore nostro expertum est”; Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 269, 273. For further examples, see also, ibid., 277, 279, 294, 308, 312-313, 320, 321, etc. 58. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 29; “expertum est autem in nostro tempore…Et hoc fecit unus de fratribus nostris Parisius.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 300. For other examples see also the entries on Aetites and Uppa, Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 46, 56; Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 336-338, 358-359. For the sake of the reader I will use the Best and Brightman edition of the English translation, translated and printed around 1550, rather than my own translation of the Latin edition. While the text of the two correspond in the passages I have chosen, the reader should be aware that the two texts are not identical. Both editors point out in their introductions that De virtutibus is highly variable in its manuscript tradition and Best and Brightman indicate that the English translator makes mistakes. It is unsurprising that there should be minor, but significant, differences in the wording of certain passages between the two editions. I am most interested here in the consistency of the knowledge claims used by both versions. 159 when placed into a pot of boiling water causes the water to stop bubbling so that a hand may be safely put in to remove the stone.59 These claims to experience tend to dominate but certainly do not exclude references to ancient authors. Here the references are often vague. While Evax and

Aaron are frequently mentioned, relatively few other authors are referenced by name. We see an oblique reference to Aristotle in the prologue with the allusion to “The Philosopher”60 and

Avicenna is referenced very occasionally, but to the extent that authority is invoked it is most often just as “ancient philosophers.”61 While these references to authority are deployed on their own, they are also deployed in support of experience claims. Thus the effects of certain stones are known by the experience of both modern men and also attested to by the ancients.62 The effects of the stone Echites, for instance, has its benefits for pregnant women confirmed by ancient philosophers and its power to fight certain maladies attested to both by the men of

Chaldea and by the sense experience of “one of our brothers.”63

There does not appear to be a specific pattern here between what effects are proved by experience and what effects were attested to by ancient authorities. Certain properties are specifically referred to as marvelous, but that does not correlate to a certain type of knowledge claim or even to any specific knowledge claim at all. I would be more inclined to view the knowledge claims as placed throughout the text for effect rather than to be systematically associated with varying types of phenomena. It is possible that this view might gain some

59. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 122-123. 60. “Sicut vult Philosophus in pluribus locis…” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 255 61. For examples see, ancient philosophers: 297-98, 301, 318, 318-319. Aaron and Evax: 311-312, 315, 344, 352, 356, 360. Hermes and Ptholomey, 351, 360. Isidore of Seville: 325. Avicenna: 334. All in Draelants, Liber de virtutibus. This is not an exhaustive list. Draelants has pointed out that, because of a tendency to abbreviation in the manuscript traditions, it is unclear whether these references are meant to be to ancient philosophers or ancient physicians. Ibid., 19. 62. Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 318-319, 336-337. 63. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 45-46; “Et hoc ultimum a quodam fratrum nostrorum sensibiliter examinari vidi.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 336-338, quote on 338. 160 strength by the fact that when comparing the lapidary section of De mineralibus––as stated above, a known source for the lapidary section of De virtutibus––to the lapidary section of De virtutibus the experience claims do not always seem to transfer. While the character of the knowledge claims are the same––for instance, Albertus does state that he or his brethren have proved the effects of certain stones at multiple locations in the text64––the author of De virtutibus does not always copy them in reference to the same stones. Even when the information for the stone and its effect are extremely similar, the knowledge claim is not always copied. What we see stemming from this, apart from a distinct tendency to add claims to experience and a questionable concern over the types of knowledge claims associated with phenomena, is a tendency to simplify.

Even if, as Draelants suggests, the author of De virtutibus used an early version of De mineralibus as their reference, the removal of detail and simplification of information seems quite marked. In the case of the stone smaragdus, Albertus records information about the multiple types of stone and particularly indicates that at least one story about its origin is probably not true:65

The best of all are those of Scythia. It is reported that they are taken from the nests of griffins, which guard this stone with great ferocity. And a traveller from Greece, a truthful man and a careful observer, has said that this stone occurs in submarine ledges of rock.…A reasonable explanation is that it occurs in veins of copper, and is transparent because it has not yet actually become copper; for the ‘rust’ of copper [i.e., verdigris] is green. It has been found by experience in our own time that this stone, if it is good and genuine, will not endure sexual intercourse: because the present king of Hungary wore this stone on his finger when he had intercourse with his wife, and as a result it was broken into three pieces.66

64. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 73, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 87-88, 93, 93, 103, 107, 115 118-119, 122, 124. 65. Wyckoff notes that smaragdus is used to refer to such a wide number of green stones in medieval works that it is not possible to identify a specific stone. The word comes down to the modern lexicon as ‘emerald’ but medieval authors did not use it with anything like the specificity of the modern word emerald. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 118-119. 66. Ibid., 119. 161

Albertus here articulates doubt concerning the origin of the stones in Scythia, based on the experience of a reliable traveler. He goes on to say that it has been “found by experience to strengthen the weak sight and to preserve the eyes.”67

While it is unsurprising that De virtutibus ignores Albertus’ explanation for the origin of the stone in favour of asserting that it does come from a griffin’s nest, the truncated text preserves the marvelous properties of the stone but removes any attempt by Albertus to provide an explanation or any sense of doubt concerning its properties.

Take the stone which is called Smaragdus…and is very clear, shining through and plain…It is taken out of the nests of Grypes or Griffons. It doth both comfort and save, and being borne, it maketh a man to understand well, and giveth to him a good memory, augmenteth the riches of him that beareth it, and if any man shall hold it under his tongue, he shall prophesy anon.68

Even though Albertus confirms by experience some of the same marvelous properties that are preserved in the De virtutibus’ notice, the author does not reproduce these experiential claims.

This seems odd given De virtutibus’ preference for experience.

Similarly in the notice on the stone lippares, De virtutibus erases almost all of the contextual material Albertus provides, even though his reference to astrological forces as the source of this stone’s powers would seem very much in line with the material of this text:

Lippares is said to be a stone that is frequently found in Libya. It is reported to have marvellous power: for all wild beasts, when harassed by hunters and dogs, run to it and regard it as a protector. And they say that dogs and hunters cannot [harm] a wild beast so long as it is in the presence of this stone. If this is true, it is very marvellous, and undoubtedly is to be ascribed to the power of the heavens: for, as Hermes says, there are

67. Ibid., 120. 68. As Best and Brighten point out, their appears to be an error here introduced by a scribe or translator rendering Pseudo-Albertus’s viridissimus ‘very green’ as mundissimus ‘very clear.’ Similarly the English text seems to have lost the term melior and references a yellow type of the stone that is not referred to in either Wyckoff’s or Draelants’ versions of the entry. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 43-44; “accipe lapidem qui SALARGDUS vocatur. Et est viridissimus translucens et ille qui planus est melior. Illi […]– ipsum lapidem - auferuntur de nidis GRIFONUM […] confortat et servat. Hic autem gestatus facit hominem bene intelligere et memoriam bonam confert auget opes deferentis. Et si sub lingua ponatur, statim prophetabit futura.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 331-332. 162

marvellous powers in stones and likewise in plants, by means of which natural magic could accomplish whatever it does, if their powers were well understood.69

Wyckoff notes that while Marbode de Rennes and Arnold of Saxony’s accounts of this stone reference it as attracting animals. Marbode states that it is used as a charm by hunters to attract animals. Albertus is the only one who identifies it as offering protection and Wyckoff does not know where his version of the story comes from.70 The notice in De virtutibus follows Albertus in the unusual assertion that the stone protects animals from hunters, which suggests that the notice is definitely based in Albertus’ information:

If thou would make, that neither dogs, nor hunters may hurt any beast, which they hunt. Put before them the stone which is called Liparae, and they will run soon to the stone. This stone is found Libya, and all beasts run to it, as to their defender. It letteth that neither dogs nor hunters may hurt them.71

Where Albertus’ notice suggests that he might not have been entirely convinced by the powers of this stone, De virtutibus has removed any sense of doubt. Interestingly it has also removed

Albertus’ reference to the astrological forces that he uses as support for the stone’s powers. If

Albertus’ notice suggests doubt he ends his statement with the literary equivalent of a shrug, indicating that it is at least possible based on our limited understanding of the astrological causes.

Given the interest the De virtutibus shows in the astrological forces in other entries, it is somewhat surprising that they would choose to leave Albertus’ statement out in this entry.72

We see the same occur in the notice on onix [onyx] where Albertus provides an explanation of the stone’s properties based on its ability to affect black bile:

69. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 102-103. Wyckoff suggests that the stone described might be bitumen or sulphur. 70. Ibid., 102. 71. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 42; “Si vis facere quod canes autem et venatores non possint alicui animali quod venantur nocere, pone coram ipso lapidem illum et statim illud animal ad illum lapidem curret. Hic autem lapis invenitur in Libia. Et omnis bestia currit ad illum lapidem tanquam ad suum defensorem et ille lapis prohibet ne canes vel venatores noceant animali.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 329-330. 72. For examples see selenites (Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 295; Albertus, Book of Minerals, 108-109; Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 27-28), chelonites (Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 311; Albertus, Book of Minerals, 80; Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 34), celidonis (Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 321-322; Albertus, Book of Minerals, 80; Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 37-38). 163

They say that worn around the neck or on the finger, it induces sorrow and fear and terrible dreams in sleep; and it is reported to increase sorrows and dissensions.…If [onyx] really has all these [properties], surely this is because it has the power of affecting black bile, especially in the head; for all these disorders come from the motion and vapour [of black bile].73

De virtutibus reproduces these properties but removes Albertus’ explanation that this comes from the stone’s ability to affect black bile in the body.74 As much as the author has definitely drawn on De mineralibus, there is also a definite tendency to simplify and reduce the information received. As mentioned above, experimenta texts are focused on recording ways of controlling natural powers rather than providing explanations. The text provides a much less nuanced view of the world. Where Albertus sometimes seems to imply a degree of skepticism about some of the reported properties––even if he is clearly willing to accept the possibility that they are real––

De virtutibus presents confident statements that these things exist. It does not universally strip away explanations. In the notices of the stones elyotropia [heliotrope] and galasie, as well as in various places in the plant and animal sections, the De virtutibus author does offer a degree of explanation for the marvelous effects. In the case of galasie, a stone that is “never made hot” we are told that the cause of this is “for it hath the holes so straight together, that the heat may not enter in the body of the stone.”75 When it comes to the elyotripia’s ability to cause the sun to appear the colour of blood as if there was an eclipse when placed in water, both Albertus and the author of De virtutibus provide an explanation that “the cause for this is for it maketh all the water to bubble up into a little cloud, which, making the air thick, letteth the Sun to be seen, but

73. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 109. 74. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 27; Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 294. 75. See chalazia in, Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 44; “Et hoc ratio est quod habet poros ita constrictos quod illi pori non permittunt calorem ingredi corpus lapidis.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 333-334, quote on 334. This is the same explanation provided by Albertus as to why stone cannot be made hot “the reason for this is that its pores are so contracted that they do not permit the fire to enter.” See gelosia in, Albertus, Book of Minerals, 94. It is unclear what stone galasie might be but Wyckoff suggests it might be a reference to a small piece of a transparent, colorless, and highly refractory stone such as diamond or corundum. See her introductory comment on the stone, Albertus, Book of Minerals, 94. 164 as it were red, in a thick colour.”76 De virtutibus is definitely more focused on presenting phenomena than it is on providing explanations, but there is clearly room within the text for some context and explanation of the phenomena. I think the simplifications we see reflect both the restrictions of the genre and a tendency by the author to focus on those things interesting and accessible to the audience he writes for.

The notice on gagatem [jet] encapsulates this simplification along with the tendency of

De virtutibus to change the knowledge claims Albertus uses. Once more the author appears to choose not to reproduce the experience claim Albertus inserts.77 The De virtutibus author follows

Albertus in mistakenly associating gagatem with the stone kakabre [amber].78 Albertus asserts that:

it is known from experience that water in which it has been washed, or its fumes applied from beneath, will provoke menstruation in women.…They say, too, that experience shows that if water in which it has been washed is strained and given with some scrapings [of the stone] to a virgin, after drinking it she retains it and does not urinate; but if she is not a virgin, she urinates at once.79

De virtutibus omits Albertus’ experience that it provokes menstruation in women and cites

Avicenna, and not experience, for the information about the stone’s ability to test virginity.80 The reproduced mistake suggests that this notice was influenced by De mineralibus but the

76. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 36; “cuius causa est quia totam aquam ebullire facit in nebulam que inspissando aerem impedit solem videri, nisi quasi in rubea et spissa nube.” Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 316. cf. “And the reason for this is that it makes all the water boil up into a mist, which thickens the air so that the sun cannot be seen except as a red glow in the condensing cloud.” Albertus, Book of Minerals, 89. 77. While as a whole experience is the primary knowledge claim in De virtutibus, it is worth noting that the lapidary section definitely cites more authorities and cites them more often than in the animal or vegetable sections. 78. Wyckoff points out that Albertus frequently confuses the stones jet and amber (gagates and kacabre in Book of Minerals). She indicates that his sources reference two kinds of gagates, black and grey, that both amber and jet are generally found on the sea shore, and that the two stones have other similarities creating significant confusion in Albertus’ notices. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 93. 79. Albertus, Book of Minerals, 93. 80. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 45; gagatem in Dralants, Liber de virtutibus, 334-335. 165 information is simplified, truncated, and the knowledge claims are changed.81 While much of this could be explained by supposing gaps or alterations in the early version of the De mineralibus manuscript the author used, taken together it suggests the possibility of a practice of simplification and a certain lack of concern about the specific location of knowledge claims. In examining previous works, I have suggested that certain patterns of the use of knowledge claims can be taken to indicate views on the epistemic value of those knowledge claims––or the veracity of the information being presented. In the case of De virtutibus, however, I think the epistemic approach sweeps away the nuance of the balancing act between experience, authority, and reason. The text is founded upon the author’s experience, drawing credibility from the natural knowledge of its pseudonymous author and the educated society he represents. Pseudo-Albertus stands as witness, attesting to the veracity and effectiveness of the collected recipes within.

There does not seem to be a clear epistemic program differentiating between what needs to be attested to by experience and what needs to be attested to by authority. The epistemic basis of the text is rooted in the authority of the author and his credibility as a witness to natural phenomena. The text is rooted in experience because of its genre and subject matter. The authorities cited support the experience of the author but they can hardly be said to supplant it and reason is seldom trotted out. It is a text reporting the particulars and marvels of the world but only rarely attempting to explain them. This is interesting in some ways because it is such a popular text, so heavily focused on experience and providing an epistemic approach so lacking in nuance. While we should definitely assume that this is related to its construction in the practical genre of experimenta texts, we have also seen in our discussion of medical experimenta and

81. We can see a similar exclusion or change of experiential knowledge claims also in the notices on berillus, gerachidem, nichomar, urites, iacincti, and saphiri. Dralants, Liber de virtutibus, 310, 326-327, 327, 330, 338- 339, 340; see berillus, gerachidem, nicomar, virites, hyacinthus, and saphirus, Albertus, Book of Minerals, 76, 95, 97-98, 107, 115, 124. 166 rational surgery of the thirteenth century––as well as previous chapters––that intellectual literature had room for interplay between experience and reason. If the particulars could only be known first by experience, the texts we have looked at also believed that they could best be understood by applying reason. Yet De virtutibus, and as we will see De mirabilibus, assert this idea but focus on experience to the exclusion of reason and present them almost as opposed epistemic tools.

For all that there is a clear and heavy dependence on experience as the basis for the information in De virtutibus, it is always in reference to the experience of a philosophically trained authority. Where both Albertus and Arnau de Villanova express in their works the ability to take experience from the commoner and filter it through reason to produce reliable natural information, De virtutibus and De mirabilibus focus on the experience of educated authorities.

The authors serve as an attester, authorizing and witnessing the effectiveness of the material they transmit.82 I think that this indicates, as we will see in the discussion of The Book of John

Mandeville, that while experience is important it must be experience in the form of reliable testimony from a credible witness, not simply the sense experience of any individual. This certainly falls in line with what we have suggested about the educated context of Albertus, but I think we also see a lack of nuance in the way that the credibility of the experiencer takes over in these experimenta. In the works of Albertus and the medical authors that we have discussed, experience is to be reviewed and evaluated by the use of reason. This allows the experience of the uneducated to be used effectively once filtered through an educated writer. If the uneducated

82. As I will discuss at the end of this chapter, this bears some similarities to the concept of virtual witness, a literary technology designed to allow the reader to act as additional witness and attester to an experiment, as articulated by Shapin and Schaffer in the context of the seventeenth-century scientific practice. I am hesitant to draw to direct a connection, however, because it does not perfectly match the literary technology they identify. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, chapter 2, especially 60-65. 167 experiencer has close knowledge of the phenomenon their experience can be evaluated and made use of by an educated writer. While the experiencer may not be a credible witness, the use of reason to examine their information allows the credibility of the educated writer to come into play. The nuances of this approach are completely absent from De virtutibus and De mirabilibus.

Instead what we seem to see is the credibility of the author as witness taking over entirely. Thus in this “popularization” of scholastic knowledge we see the bones of the scholastic epistemic structures, but without the nuance we see in the actual practice.

5 De Mirabilibus

The epistemic power of experience is emphasized by De mirabilibus mundi. Like De virtutibus, De mirabilibus proclaims itself a book of secrets often circulating under the title De secretis naturae or Liber secretorum and is in form quite similar to De virtutibus; that is, a list of experimenta promising to allow the reader to access the occult forces of nature.83 It seems likely that De mirabilibus was not generally ascribed to Albertus and circulated largely anonymously before its association with De virtutibus in the fifteenth-century. On the other hand, William

Eamon and Gundof Kiel point out, in their study of the Antypocras of Nicholas of Poland, that

Nicholas invokes the authority of “Master Albert” in the work De mirabilibus mundi to support his radical empiricist doctrine and medical experiments. This suggests that, even if De mirabilibus largely circulated anonymously, at least one version of the text was ascribed to

Albertus and available at Montpellier in the thirttenth century.84

83. Sannino, “Il testo,” 10-11. 84. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 15-17; Sannino, “Il testo,” 55-57; William Eamon and Gundolf Keil, “‘Plebs Amat Empirica’: Nicholas of Poland and His Critique of the Mediæval Medical Establishment,” Sudhoffs Archiv 71.2 (1987): 190-192. 168

Scholars have disagreed over the possibility that Albertus composed the text. Thorndike, for instance, suggested that its character was similar to Albertus’ undisputed works, though definitely inferior. Like De virtutibus it is unlikely to be an authentic text, though possibly may be a product of the same Dominican context.85 Sannino, the creator of a Latin critical edition of the text, argues that the elusive author was clearly familiar with the corpus of magical works–– particularly the Liber vaccae of Pseudo-Plato––circulating around Paris in the thirteenth-century and had a strong familiarity with the literature of experiments. She is only able, however, to point to the fact that there are certain similarities between De mirabilibus and the mature works of Albertus composed around 1260 and pin down the composition date to a period post 1223 and ante 1276.86

I do not intend to engage deeply with this text at this time but a brief look at its prologue can help to reinforce some of the conclusions drawn from our discussion of De virtutibus. De mirabilibus presents a more robust philosophical prologue. It attempts to lay out the philosophical principles that underlie the marvelous experiments the book will present.

Compared to contemporary academic natural philosophy it is simplified and somewhat confusing, but it delves more deeply into the epistemic structures surrounding the work’s topic.

The prologue quotes Aristotle to indicate that it is the job of the scholar to make marvels cease by understanding the natural principles of the world. The author asserts strongly that all of nature is marvelous, and it is only the lack of understanding or rarity of certain phenomena that cause us to consider them marvelous. Following Avicenna, the author ascribes the effects of magical incantations and inscriptions to the individual’s ability to make use of natural forces, particularly

85. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:725-726. For a complete discussion of the modern authorial debate, see Sannino, “Il testo,” 55-57. 86. Sannino, “Il testo,” 15-24, 55-57. 169 astrological influences. The prologue espouses a notion of sympathetic magic that asserts that by knowledge of the primary, secondary, and tertiary properties of animals, vegetables, and minerals, the philosopher can understand and utilize the natural forces of attraction and repulsion of kinds to perform certain actions. And these properties of natural objects must be proved by philosophers through reason and experience.87 As much as it provides a basic introduction to the causal systems of nature it also provides a simplified one. For instance, the prologue lays out the importance of understanding the hot and cold properties of natural objects in order to understand their powers but never mentions the qualities of wetness and dryness, also important for a proper understanding of the Aristotelian causal system.88 The prologue’s simplified explanation of natural causes is productive both as a defense of the study of magic and marvels and a

“popularization” of academic natural philosophy. Even if its attempt to explain the underlying principles is somewhat simplified, the text makes very clear that marvelous properties are the result of natural qualities and interactions combined with humanity’s limited ability to comprehend the totality of causes and qualities in nature:89

Plato saith in Libri Regimenti that he that is not an expert in Logic, of which the understanding is made ready, lifted up, nimble or light and speedy; and he that is [not] cunning in Natural Science, in which are declared marvellous things, both hot and cold, and in which the properties of everything in itself be showed: and [he] which is not cunning in the science of Astrology and in the aspects and figures of stars, of which every one of them which be high hath a virtue and property; can not understand nor verify all things which Philosophers have written, nor can certify all things which shall appear to man’s senses, and he shall go with heaviness of mind, for in those things is marvellousness of all things which are seen.90

87. Sannino, De mirabilibus, 85-107. 88. Ibid., 88-92. For comparison, the thirteenth-century wonder drug treatises discussed by Francis B. Brévart are also texts discussing ways to extract the occult properties of a plants and animals for use in medicine. These texts often begin with a description of the substance in terms of its properties, hot/cold and moist/dry, with information concerning their intensity. While not falling into the category of books of secrets as Eamon defines them, these texts appear to be equally practice focused and often magical in the instructions they give for preparing medicines. Brévart, “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion: Wonder Drugs in German Medico-Pharmaceutical Treatises of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries,” Speculum 83 (2008): 1-6. 89. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 74-77; Sannino, De mirabilibus, 92-97. 90. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 78; “Plato vero dixit in Libro Tegimenti [sic], quod qui non fuerit opifex dialecticae ex qua fit pronus et elevatus intellectus agilis et expeditus, et qui non est eruditus in scientia 170

The text makes clear––as we have seen in both the works of Albertus and De virtutibus––that only the educated witness is reliable in understanding nature: “Therefore Plato said for a good cause, that he which is not very cunning in Logic, and wise in the virtues of natural things, likewise the aspects of the stars, shall not see the causes of marvellous things, nor know them, nor participate of the treasure of Philosophers.”91 We should also note that, unlike De virtutibus, the experience referred to in this text is presented mostly as the experience of ancient authorities rather than the author of the text.92 Thorndike reminds us that this passage warns against attempting to distinguish too sharply between experience and authority in medieval experimental tendencies. In experimenta texts the experience being cited is generally the experience of authorities transmitted through written text.93 Experience, as in direct experience of the world, is not necessarily intrinsically valuable but must be mediated by a knowledge of natural philosophy in order to properly understand what is being witnessed.

naturali in qua declarantur mirabilia calidi et frigidi et in qua aperientur proprietates cuiuslibet entis in se, et qui non fuerit doctus in scientia astrologiae et in aspectibus et figuris stellarum ex quibus est unicuique eorum quae sunt sublimia virtus et proprietas, et qui non fuerit doctus in scientia nigromantiae qua manifestantur substantiae immortales, quae dispensant et administrant omne, quod est in rebus ex bono et malo, non poterit intelligere nec verificare omnia quae philosophi scripserunt, nec poterit certificare omnia quae apparebunt sensibus hominum, et invadet eum tristitia animi, quoniam in illis rebus est mirabilitas omnium quae videntur.” Sannino, Il De mirabilibus, 97-98. Sannino’s text consistently refers to the Libri Tegimenti, however she notes in some places that some of the manuscript traditions contain the correct reference to Libri Regimenti. For an example, see Sannino, De mirabilibus, 104 n.441. As Best and Brightman point out, the translator of the English version of the De mirabilibus had a tendency to remove references to necromancy. As with De virtutibus, we should be aware of possible differences between manuscripts and possible mistakes by the English translator in De mirabilibus. Best and Brightman, “Introduction,” xix-xx. 91. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 79; “Merito ergo Plato dixit, quod qui non fuerit valde solers in dialectica et doctus in virtutibus rerum naturalium, similiter in signis stellarum et nigromanticarum virtutum, non videbit rationabilitatem, mirabilium nec ipse sciet ea, et non communicabit thesaurum philosophorum.” Sannino, De mirabilibus, 99-100. Note that the translator has again removed the reference to necromancy. 92. “et secundum hoc verificantur experimenta multa auctorum, quae cum audiuntur, reputantur incredibilia omnino, cum tamen scientia sit certissima…” Sannino, De mirabilibus, 91. 93. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2:732; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 22-23. 171

The text unrelentingly, and rather repetitively, makes the point that marvelous phenomena are generated through the mixture of natural properties but also that knowing the world requires multiple epistemic approaches.

The author [of] Libri Regimenti saith that there be certain things manifest to the senses in which we know no reason. And certain be manifest by reason, in which we perceive nullum sensum nec sensationem. And in the first kind of things we must believe no man, but experience; and reason is to be proved by experience not to be denied. And in the second kind of things feeling is not to be looked for, because it may not be felt. Therefore certain things must be believed by only experience, without reason, for they be hid from men; certain [things] are to be believed by only reason, because they lack senses.94

This assertion that some things can be known only be reason or only by experience both expresses an important epistemological commitment and goes to bolster the credibility of the text, as it will be dealing exclusively with those marvelous things that can only be known by experience. The point made is a valid one in the context of natural philosophy, but one without nuance. As we have discussed before medieval natural philosophers were quite aware of the limitations of human experience and human knowledge. The category of the marvelous was partially defined by its lack of known explanation.95 As much as the text makes the point of naturalizing marvels, its epistemic statement rides roughshod over the nuance of the category of marvel, the multiplicity of ways phenomena could be marvelous and the ability to gradually draw them into the realm of the explicable. The very next passage shows this lack of nuance:

For although we know not a manifest reason wherefore the Loadstone draweth to it Iron, notwithstanding experience doth manifest it so, that no man may deny it. And like this is marvellous, which only experience doth certify, so should a man suppose in other things. And he should not deny any marvellous thing although he hath no reason, but he ought to

94. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 82; “Dixit auctor Libri Tegimenti [sic] quod quaedam sunt manifesta sensibus in quibus nullam scimus assignare rationem, et quaedam sunt manifesta ratione, in quibus nullum sensum nec sensationem precipimus. Et in primo genere entium nulli credendum est, nisi experientiae, et non est experientia ratio, nec neganda experientia. Et in secundo genere entium non est expectandum sensum, quia sentiri non potest. Quaedam igitur sola experientia sunt credenda sine ratione, cum lateant homines. Quaedam sola ratione, cum careant sensibus.” Sannino, De mirabilibus, 104-105. While Sannino’s text does refer to the author of the Libri Tegimenti, she notes that several manuscript traditions carry the correct reference of Libri Regimenti. Sannino, De mirabilibus, 104 n.441. 95. Daston and Park, Wonders, 111-120; Bynum, "Miracles and Marvels,” particularly 806-810; Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, chapter 1. 172

prove by experience; for the cause of marvellous things are hid, and of so diverse causes going before, that man’s understanding, after Plato, may not apprehend them.96

The similarity between this and Albertus’ passage concerning monsters in De animalibus is clear. Both passages use reference to known experience of a marvel to illustrate the diversity of nature and suggest that the reader should be receptive to the possibility of other marvels. In

Albertus’ work, however, we see that many marvelous things can be denied through reason.

While this statement does not necessarily contradict the idea that reason can potentially be used to disprove a marvel without direct experience, it certainly does not convey the nuances of the position we have seen Albertus take. As we saw in Park’s exploration of the literature of healing springs the author is using the focus on the particulars of nature, and particularly occult properties, to create a context in which experience is the most epistemically valuable way of knowing. It acts effectively to convey credibility to the subsequent text, which asserts based on the experience of authorities that the recipes will produce the promised marvels, but it hardly seems to convey the complexity of epistemological structures surrounding marvel in scholastic medical or natural thought. De mirabilibus emphasizes the collision of the practical and the theoretical in these texts. Its philosophical introduction is tacked on to a work of practice, associating the two in ways that implicitly makes claims for the value of empirical information.

It walks the line between know-how and knowledge in ways that are evocative of the broader culture of empirical values that scholars have pointed to as an important part of the fifteenth and sixteenth century development of science.

96. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 82; “nam quamvis manifestam rationem nesciamus, quod magnes trahit ferrum, ita tamen manifestat illud experientia, quod nullus denegare debet, et quemadmodum istud est mirabile, quod sola experientia certificat, ita in aliis debet homo aestimare, nec debet negare quicquam mirabilum quamvis rationem non habeat, sed debet experiri, quia causae mirabilium sunt latentes et extant diversis praecedentibus quod humanus intellectus secundum Platonem non potest eas imitari.” Sannino, De mirabilibus, 105. 173

6 Texts of Practice

In considering the nature of these experimenta as texts of practice, it is worth drawing attention to some tentative parallels with the scholarship on late medieval works of practice and the development of empirical science. Recent research has explored the exchange of information between artisans, practitioners, and university educated individuals as an important aspect of creating a space of experience and experiment as a way of constructing knowledge of the natural world. To a greater or lesser extent the world of natural investigation and the world of craft knowledge were separate during the middle ages. Pamela Long, Pamela Smith, and Deborah

Harkness have each explored the late medieval and early modern contact between the worlds of craft and theory and argue, in different ways, that the contact between these groups led to the exposure of the intellectual elite to the empirical craft values of the artisans and the value they placed on this knowledge of skill and practice led to a rise in the value and eventual adoption of these empirical craft values.97 We must be careful drawing connections to this work as these studies are all rooted in social, cultural, and technical developments, of the mid-fifteenth century or later. While Long argues that developing humanist intellectual attitudes played an important role, and she stresses that humanism has its roots in the fourteenth century, she still draws all of her examples from the fifteenth century.98 In articulating some similarities between De virtutibus, De mirabilibus, and the research on the role of the artisan in early modern science, I

97. Long and Smith articulate a fairly similar argument in this context. While closely related, Harkness’s thesis focuses specifically on the importance of urban cultural values being transmitted through these channels not simply empirical craft values. Long, Artisan/Practitioners, 1-9, 127-131; Smith, Body of the Artisan, 17-20; Harkness, Jewel House, xvii, 7-10. 98. Pamela O. Long, "Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age,” Isis 88.1 (1997): 1-41; Long, "Trading Zones: Arenas of Exchange during the Late-Medieval/Early Modern Transition in the New Empirical Sciences,” History of Technology 31 (2012): 5-25; Long, Artisan/Practitioner, 5-7. 174 am not attempting to draw their arguments unchanged further into the past. Rather I think the concepts they use, particularly virtual witness and trading zones, can help us understand these experimenta as participating in the very earliest stages of the development of a broader culture of empirical values.

Deborah Harkness has explored the way scientific notebooks are used in Elizabethan

London as a means of mulling over experiments and information, contemplating them, collating them, and gradually turning them into scientific knowledge. In the process, and particularly in the movement from notebook to published text, frequently the connection to the original experience of the artisan or practitioner they were drawn from was lost and the credibility of the educated writer was substituted. Harkness also points to an elision in these texts between experiments witnessed, experiments performed, and experiments known through reports form others. She sees this as both the result of and propagation of virtual witness: a literary technology designed to invoke in the reader a feeling of presence, to allow them to envision the experiment in their mind’s eye and thus act as a witness as if they had been present themselves.99 On

Harkness’ view the mixture of intense attention to sources of information in notebooks and yet tendency to blur the lines between direct and mediated witness, especially in published works, can be best understood by seeing it as an aspect of the success of virtual witness. While virtual witness is aimed at permitting the reader to act as an additional witness, through participating in virtual witness, the writer gradually becomes the witness himself blurring the line between experiments he has directly observed and those he has read or been told about.100

99. Harkness, Jewel House, Chapter 5, particularly 197-200 and 236-241. On virtual witness, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, chapter 2, especially 60-65. 100. Harkness, Jewel House, 197-200. 175

It is in this sense that the concept can be useful to us. We see an analogous elision in De virtutibus between the experiments specifically attested to by Pseudo-Albertus and those experiments passively referred to as “having been proved.” The educated figure of Pseudo-

Albertus takes over as the credible knower and witness to the experiments collected in this text.

The experiments are collected from both authorities and unnamed experiencers but the presence of the compiler as a figure of experience, witnessing that these experiments work expands the compiler’s status as witness. The credibility of the author or compiler, which is built on their possession of educated natural knowledge as well as experience, supports or even supplants the credibility of the original source. Whether he is claiming direct knowledge or not, the fact of inclusion in this text, and the continual self-insertion, leads the figure of the author to stand in as witness. From virtual witness Pseudo-Albertus becomes witness. Whether the relatively bare descriptions of the experiments would constitute the propagation of the technology of virtual witness—allowing the reader to also participate—is another matter.

It is important to note here that the early modern virtual witness is marked by the abundance of circumstantial detail while circumstantial detail is largely lacking from Pseudo-

Albertus’ knowledge claims.101 As we saw in the note on topaz previously, Pseudo-Albertus does occasionally provide some circumstantial details such as the experiment being observed at Paris, or proved by contemporary brethren, but this is nothing compared to the prolixity of the early modern natural investigators.102 We cannot expect the form of this technology to be identical to the early modern period. If Pseudo-Albertus employs a literary technology that allows for the propagation of virtual witness, it probably resides in the deployment of citations more so than

101. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 60-65; Richard Cunningham, “Virtual Witnessing and the Role of the Reader in a New Natural Philosophy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001): 207-224. 102. Best and Brightman, The Book of Secrets, 29; Draelants, Liber de virtutibus, 300. 176 detailed descriptions; but here the usefulness of the concept begins to break down. Without a study to establish a coherent characterization of how the propagation of virtual witness would function in medieval texts, it is difficult to say whether De virtutibus would have served to allow the reader to participate in the witnessing.

We can also usefully think of these texts in terms of the trading zones Pamela Long has discussed in the early modern period. Trading zones are arenas of contact, both symbolic and actual, between learned individuals and skilled practitioners where information and skills could be exchanged and the knowledge involved in each arena was valued by both individuals.103 The fifteenth century saw an abundance of these spaces with artisans writing educated texts and learned individuals actively learning skilled crafts. Long has argued that this contact led to the eventual breakdown of dichotomies between theory and practice, art and nature, scholar and artisan. More than just transmitting knowledge, however, trading zones helped transmit craft values as well. These spaces of exchange confronted learned individuals with a culture of empirical values that allowed for the development of a new empirical science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.104

De virtutibus and De mirabilibus are clearly not trading zones in the specific manner

Long articulates. One of Long’s key requirements for identifying a trading zone is that learned individuals valued practice and technical knowledge not just for what it could produce (jewelry, for instance) but as knowledge. It is not clear that De virtutibus and De mirabilibus make that crucial leap from, as she puts it, know-how to knowledge.105 Still, this offers us a useful point of

103. Long, “Trading Zones,” 7-8. She repurposes the concept of trading zones from the work of Peter Galison. 104. Long, Artisan/Practitioner, 37-61, 94-96, 127-131; Long, “Trading Zones,” 8-20; While her argument is not as fully articulated as in later works, Long points specifically to alchemical works as a possible site of the development of empirical values in, Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 144-154, 172-174. 105. Long, “Trading Zones,” 6-8. 177 origin for thinking about these experimenta texts in the context of the confrontation between learned culture and practical values. As I have argued in the previous section, De mirabilibus particularly mixes the theoretical trappings of its philosophical introduction with the know-how of its recipes in ways that implicitly and explicitly make claims for the value of experience. It presents itself as the practical application of natural philosophy but does not articulate a coherent leap to asserting that the know-how is producing knowledge, rather it describes separate spheres of knowledge that cannot be perfectly combined while at the same time indicating the value of the information gained by experience. The information in De virtutibus and De mirabilibus is valued always for its product, the potential control that it gives the practitioner over nature. But at the same time, it is the information itself, the possession of the recipes, that is valued. The product it provides is not as simple to possess as a piece of jewelry; to achieve the product the reader must have knowledge of the practice and the recipes. It thus sits at a boundary: it is not knowledge but the know-how itself that is valued as a means of obtaining the product.

These texts are not arenas of contact between artisans and learned individuals. Rather, they are texts of practice probably written by learned individuals that aggregated the authorized practical and experiential information mostly drawn from other learned individuals. At the same time, they are loci where practical information is made valuable to the learned and learned information is presented as being made practical. De mirabilibus particularly presents itself as the practical application of natural philosophy, and in doing so entwines, whether intentionally or not, the values of know-how and knowledge. They are texts of practice dressed in the trappings of the intellectual elite and were read by the educated members of the court who value them for the practical know-how they can impart. Pamela Smith has explored the naturalist paintings of the Flemish school, and other artisans and artists, as part of the creation of a broader culture of 178 empiricism because of the claims the artists make, implicitly and explicitly, to the importance of individual observation and experience as a means of creating knowledge.106 Similarly, I would suggest that even though the information here is seen as importantly not knowledge in the sense of natural philosophy, its value to the readers and its fundamental connection to experience— whether contemporary or transmitted from authority—both for its production and its attestation, is a small part of developing the broader cultural empirical values that Long and Smith have explored. The figure of Pseudo-Albertus stands as the witness, possessed of expertise and moral reliability to make him an acceptable attester to the know-how he imparts and grounds the information and its value in reference to his experience. Pseudo-Albertus here straddles a line between author and witness that foregrounds experience as a valuable means of gaining know- how, if not knowledge.

As Long, Smith, and Harkness have each argued, in slightly different terms, an important feature of the transmission of information between the community of artisans and the learned community is the transmission of values and standards. The contact between these groups led to the exposure of the intellectual elite to the empirical craft values of the artisans. The value that was placed on this knowledge of skill and practice led to a rise in the status of craft knowledge and the eventual absorption of some of these empirical values into the educated investigation of nature. These experimenta texts can, in some ways, be seen as participating in the very beginning of this process. In their championing of experience as a means of gaining valuable know-how and their juxtaposition of this information with the trappings of natural philosophy, they encourage the reader to think about the value of experience and its relationship to knowledge.

They encourage a receptiveness to the empirical values Long, Smith, and Harkness later see as

106. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 17-20, 37-51, 67-74, 80-93. 179 being adopted by the learned community from the community of artisans, practitioners, and vernacular science.

7 Conclusion

What we see in this chapter is a collection of works written by educated scholars and circulated among an educated reading audience that extended into what could be called the popular context. From the literate and educated individuals throughout the growing bureaucracy of the courts, to members of religious orders, to their translation into the vernacular, these texts appealed to a very wide audience. Experimenta promise to take the theoretic foundations of scholastic natural philosophy and apply them to the world in ways that offer the reader some degree of control over nature. Whether that control represents the ability to heal wounds or perform marvels, the audience is presented with texts that to some degree ground philosophy in what interests them, particular phenomena. The books of secrets like De virtutibus and De mirabilibus present themselves, like the medical experimenta of Arnau de Villanova, as part of an art founded upon science, but they lack the nuanced relationship of epistemic structures we see in educated medicine. Arnau shows us the struggle to incorporate a medical practice that can be responsive to experience and particularities with a science founded upon reason and regularity. As we have seen in previous chapters the consciousness of the diversity and particularity of nature creates space where experience becomes valuable for constructing, if not knowledge at least know-how.

At the same time, in their claim to be the practical application of natural philosophy, De virtutibus and De mirabilibus fail to incorporate the nuances of this position. The focus on the particulars creates a context where the relative value of reason, experience, and authority change, 180 while also substantially blurring the distinction between experience and authority. These works of practice create a context in which experience of a credible witness can be considered epistemically sufficient for the matter in hand. As we will see in the next chapter, in the discussion of the role of experience and witness in The Book of John Mandeville, the rise of experience as an epistemic tool seems to correlate with our movement into texts aimed at a broad and extra-scholastic audience. While these texts would be unlikely to be the sole encounter any reader had with natural philosophy, the emphasis they place on the value of experience might have an effect on the epistemic values of the reading population. It is even possible that we can see in these texts the early glimmers of contact between empirical values and educated natural investigation. Chapter Five: The Book of John Mandeville

1 Introduction

In this chapter we will conclude our investigation by exploring knowledge construction in what we might term the “public sphere” through an investigation of the Book of John

Mandeville.1 The Book is particularly interesting for this study because, while it is the least scholastic of the works considered, it still presents a coherent view of the world that seems to have been thought believable by a significant portion of its readership.2 The Mandeville author appealed to a wide and varied audience of readers and his methods of knowledge construction offer us some insight into the evidence practices of this more popular audience. In this chapter we will point to some distinct similarities to the evidence practices demonstrated in previous texts. I believe the author creates a context in which reported experience can be considered valid evidence for understanding the natural world. The Mandeville author constructs the narrator’s credibility as a witness both through establishing his social status and demonstrating

Mandeville’s knowledge of natural philosophy: that is, the principles of the natural world. The

Mandeville figure is thus presented as a credible knower and his report focuses on the particulars of nature, a context where experience is a valid means of gaining natural knowledge.

The contextually sensitive approach to evidence is highlighted dramatically because of this work’s structure as a travel narrative. While it remains closely related to encyclopedic texts in its

1. In this chapter I will follow the convention among some Mandeville scholars of shortening the title of The Book of John Mandeville to The Book. I will also refer to the anonymous author as the Mandeville author and the central character of the book as Mandeville. 2. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 118-119.

181 182 formation, it also shares formulae and tropes with pilgrimage and romance literature giving it a special structure that brings to the foreground many of the evidence structures discussed in previous chapters.3 The negotiation between depicting the literal and figurative meaning of geography and the natural world––characteristic of medieval travel narratives––highlights the contextually sensitive approach to evidence we have been developing during this study. In the context of the natural world, we see the Mandeville author relying on experience as a means of knowing the particulars of nature while other evidence structures, such as rational demonstration and authority, establish the universals. The author’s approach to the spiritual meanings of geography is no less rigorous, but he relies largely on the authority of scripture rather than experience or disputation as a means of establishing spiritual truths about the world. Where these systems overlap we can see their evidence practices interact, making use of multiple evidence structures to establish a ‘fact’ that exists in multiple contexts. In negotiating these spaces, the author highlights both the social and intellectual practices that seem important to constructing the epistemic value of the narrator’s claims. The natural philosophy and pilgrimage narrative structure of The Book provide a backdrop for the author’s primary interest, describing the particulars of the world: individual instantiations of the complex system of climatic and astrological natural causes. In medieval natural philosophy the particulars of the world occupy an interesting category in natural knowledge. Scholastic natural philosophy focuses on establishing causes and universals through rational demonstration but the particulars of nature were too diverse to be known demonstratively. As we have seen in previous chapters, even though not

3. ‘Travel narrative’ is a modern descriptor that focuses on one aspect of a very diverse collection of works. Contemporaries would probably have referred to most works as part of a specific genre such as pilgrimage narrative or missionary account. One of the most interesting aspects of late medieval travel narratives, like The Book of John Mandeville, is that it bridges a collection of contemporary genres to create something very new. This can be seen partly in the wide variety of ways the text was read as discussed by Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences. See also Zumthor and Peeble, “Medieval Travel Narrative.” 183 considered appropriate as the focus of natural philosophy, the knowledge of the diversity of the world was ever present in natural discussions. In these contexts experience, like that of the traveler, was considered the best method for gaining knowledge of the natural world.4

2 The Book of John Mandeville and its Context

The Book is a travel narrative claiming to be written by the English knight John

Mandeville, describing pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land and his own experiences as he travels beyond the Holy Land into the East. He travels through India and into the lands of Prester John describing the wonderful creatures and marvelous races he encounters along the way. The author builds an image of the world from books of marvels and ancient encyclopedic texts stitched together into a travel account supposedly written for the edification of its audience. There is very little concrete evidence relating to the identity of this author. While The Book claims to have been written by an English knight, there is little reason to assume this is the case. Christiane

Deluz has certainly argued that we should take the text’s biographical information seriously–– even if no historical trace of a Sir John Mandeville can be found––and that the author was an

Englishman who had traveled at least as far as Jerusalem. She particularly points to the importance of the quasi-juridical style of the introduction, with the author introduced using a formula we see used in fourteenth-century wills written in the vernacular.5 While Deluz believes this hypothesis would meet the existing facts, scholarship focusing on the sources of The Book paints a different picture.

4. Park, “Natural Particulars,” 347-67. 5. Christiane Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une ‘géographie’ au XIVe siècle (Louvain-LaNeuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988), 363-364; and in the introduction to her critical edition of the insular text: Christiane Deluz, “Introduction,” in Jean de Mandeville: Le Livre de merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane Deluz (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 7-14. 184

The works of Iain Macleod Higgins and M.C. Seymour have used the collection of texts the Mandeville author drew from in an attempt to gain insight into his identity. We can concretely say that the author must have had access to a large number of texts concerning both thirteenth-century travelers to the East and fabulous stories of the East. In particular, the author must have had access to Jan de Langhe’s French translations of these travel narratives, as they serve as a staple source of the work. These translated works include the books of many travelers who did visit the far East, including the Dominican friar William of Boldensele’s Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus, written in 1336; the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone’s

Descriptio orientalium partium written in 1330; and the Armenian prince Hayton’s Flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient, a history of the Tartars presented to Pope Clement V in 1307.6

Based on the sources used in The Book, M. C. Seymour has concluded that the author is most likely someone fluent in French with access to a large ecclesiastical library, probably compiling the book somewhere in Northern France.7 This seems a likely proposition, but John Larner has taken this one step further and proposed that The Book was in fact written by Jan de Langhe himself. Larner points out that de Langhe’s translation was only completed in 1351 and suggests that it is hard to imagine the text having traveled far before 1357. Since the translations do serve as such an important basis for the text, he argues that it is reasonable to conclude that the author at least had access to the library of the Abbey of Saint Bertin at Saint-Omer where de Langhe lived as a Benedictine Monk. While Larner’s identification of de Langhe creates an interesting story, it is not a generally accepted theory and the identity of the Mandeville author must remain a mystery.8

6. Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 8-9. 7. M.C. Seymour, Authors of the Middle Ages: Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 23. 8. John Larner, “Plucking Hairs,” 137-142; Iain Macleod Higgins, “Introduction,” xvi-xx. 185

The Book has an extremely complex and wide-ranging history. It exists in a plethora of variations and languages, having been read, translated, and interpolated throughout Europe from its inception c.1357 until the eighteenth century. The original archetype of the text is generally accepted to have been written between 1357, the date claimed by the text itself, and 1371, the date of the earliest extant manuscript.9 It rapidly became one of the most popular works in

Europe, being translated from its original Anglo-Norman French into English, German, Spanish, and Italian by the end of the fourteenth-century. The many versions and variations of The Book make it both thoroughly useful and complicated to work with. Examining changes in the text between versions and translations can give us insights into the various ways the reading public engaged with the text.10 It is difficult to identify a version of the book to work with. The original archetype of The Book has been lost and we are left to work from two primary manuscript traditions: the Continental and Insular. Both of these versions served as the basis for important traditions of reproduction and translation. The Continental version provides the earliest datable manuscript. It was produced beginning around 1371 in France––surviving in twenty-six manuscripts––and served as the basis for the majority of the Continental European versions and translations. The surviving manuscripts of the Insular version—roughly twenty-five manuscripts—cannot be as concretely dated. Deluz, however, suggests that careful analysis of the texts will point to the Insular version being prior to, and even serving as the source for, the

Continental version. The Insular version exists in manuscripts written in Anglo-Norman French and Continental French. In compiling her critical edition of the Insular version, Deluz identified errors in translation within the Insular tradition from the Anglo-Norman French into Continental

9. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, 5-7. 10. Rosemary Tzanaki has written an interesting examination of the different audiences for the book based partly on the text’s many variations and partly on the annotations and marginalia found in various manuscripts. Tzanaki, Mandeville's Audiences. 186

French that appear to be reproduced in the text of the Continental version. While this points to the Insular version as being closer to the authorial version, the matter cannot be completely settled without a critical edition of the Continental version to perform a comprehensive comparison. The Insular version served as the basis for the English variations including the

Middle English Defective version, produced around 1400. The Defective version––called defective because it has a gap of a quire of pages in the description of Egypt––was the most popular of the English versions and survives in roughly thirty-eight manuscripts as well as providing the base text for the printed editions.11

The Book’s wide-spread popularity led to many reproductions, alterations and translations. In this chapter we will focus on two of the earlier versions that are particularly illuminating, the Insular and Defective texts. The Insular version offers a look at one of the earliest redactions of the text while the Defective offers a useful contrast, showing how the text was altered in a translation that became extremely popular. I find the notable changes between the Insular and Defective versions are excellent for highlighting the evidence structures used by the Mandeville author. Defective has an interesting focus on natural geography. It removes or truncates many of the religious exhortations that parse marvels into spiritual terms. Defective seems interested in presenting marvels as aspects of nature, avoiding much of the moralization of natural marvels that the Insular version performs. By doing so, Defective navigates the literal and figurative representations of nature in ways that create an interestingly different depiction of the world. The literal and figurative approach to geography remain closely related and intertwined, both essential to creating a complete and coherent understanding of the world, but the marvels of

11. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 2-19; Deluz, “Introduction,” 28-36; Higgins, Writing East, 19-24; See Appendix A in Higgins, Insular, 187-199; M.C. Seymour, “Introduction,” in The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M.C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 187 the world are presented more clearly as part of the natural order of the world and the spiritual meaning of nature is only occasionally called upon to explain or justify the marvels. This distinction helps to highlight the methods of knowledge construction used in both versions. By untangling the relations between the two geographies, Defective helps to highlight the slightly different evidence practices that apply to the two geographies and can help us see the practices and devices that allow the author to construct the text as a believable source of natural knowledge. In this work I will make use of Iain Higgins’ recent translation of Deluz’s edition of the Insular version as well as the edited edition of the Defective version by M.C. Seymour.12 I have chosen the Higgins version as the base text because he includes notes describing any significant differences between the Continental version and the Insular version, as well as an extensive appendix highlighting many of the significant variations among other major versions.

2.1 Mandeville’s Picture of the World

In many ways The Book is a sort of textual mappae mundi. The world Mandeville describes traveling through is similar to that of the Hereford map, populated by fantastic creatures and monstrous races with Jerusalem set squarely in the centre of the Earth. When discussing medieval geography we have to think both of what the modern reader would consider geography (descriptions of terrain, locations, and distances) and a more encyclopedic approach to what is contained within the world, i.e. chorography. Medieval map makers produced multiple representations of the world, each designed to provide a range of cosmological, geographical, and spiritual information through its representation of the physical and human geography.

12. To avoid confusion in the footnotes I will refer to these as “Higgins, Insular” and “Seymour, Defective” respectively in short format. For references to the original Anglo-Norman French of the Insular version I will use the Deluz edition, Deluz, Merveilles du monde. 188

Mappae mundi were specifically intended to be encyclopedic texts providing an overview of the world with a greater focus on the human geography and the figurative meaning of nature.13

Mandeville is far more interested in the human and historical geography of the world than describing prosaic distances. His travels give some sense of how locations are supposed to relate to each other––he will refer to passing through one place en route to the next––but gives no sense of distance and few detailed descriptions of landscape. What he gives is an encyclopedic approach to geography, focused on what is contained within the world and where it is located.

He also provides discussions of important social, political, and historical events or divisions. In its own way, The Book offers a coherent and comprehensive view of the natural world to its readers.

The structure of the book is also strongly shaped by the genre of the pilgrimage account, a genre built on first-person narratives of an individual’s journey but focused primarily on

“bearing witness” to the locations and spiritual meanings of Christian history. Pilgrimage accounts create a spiritual geography where Christian history is present for the traveler to experience and “witness.” The act of pilgrimage was arduous and not everyone could undertake it, so the written accounts were at, least partially, designed to allow the reader to travel vicariously. Through the descriptions of the locations of Christian history the reader was supposed to be mentally and spiritually transported to these locations to allow them to experience a portion of the spiritual benefit pilgrimage bestowed.14

The Mandeville author shapes the early portion of The Book as a pilgrimage narrative and presents the narrator as a pilgrim. It is not purely a story of pilgrimage, however, the sites of

13. See Evelyn Edson, The World Map 1300-1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997). 14. Mary B. Campbell, Witness and the Other World, 17-19; Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 39-42. 189

Christian history and the spiritual responses of the narrator feature in the work, but he is also concerned with the diversity of human customs and the natural marvels. Literary accounts of pilgrimage changed over time, particularly in the fourteenth-century when lay pilgrims began to write their accounts in the vernacular, and gradually became more interested in the practicalities of travel and the curiosities of the natural world. Mandeville is therefore not unique among fourteenth-century pilgrims, but his focus on the natural marvels of the world is still more prominent than for other pilgrims. The Book is based in the familiar genre structures drawn from pilgrimage narratives, but Mandeville rapidly sheds the majority of his pilgrim’s concerns in favor of curiosity about cultural and natural diversity as he moves beyond Jerusalem into the

East.15

This leads to a specific set of complexities when viewing the geography of The Book.

While it offers a coherent picture of the world, it is not always offering––or expected to be offering––a perfectly literal picture of the natural world. Within the context of pilgrimage literature and mappae mundi, audiences accepted a degree of interpretive flexibility that allowed for showing spiritual truths about the world alongside its physicality. Pilgrimage accounts and mappae mundi were genres specifically focused on elucidating the figurative and spiritual meanings of the natural geography they described or depicted. Particularly when dealing with

Jerusalem, authors of pilgrimage literature traveled across a geography redolent with Christian history and anagogical meaning. Landscapes may be described or depicted in such a way as to enhance the presence of the Christian history rather than depict their current physical

15. For discussions of how the Mandeville author both uses and subverts the traditions of pilgrimage literature see Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 43-77; also Suzanne M. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111-134. For general discussions pilgrimage accounts changing over time see Campbell, Witness and the Other World, chapter 1; for the fourteenth-century accounts more specifically see Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, chapter 1. 190 relationship.16 One of the most prominent examples of this is the location of Jerusalem at the centre of mappae mundi. In the well-known Ebstorf and Hereford maps, we see the maps oriented with East at the top and Jerusalem at the centre of the world.17 While these maps work to provide some sense of physical relationships between places, distances and organization of the map seem to predominantly stem from a representation of the remoteness or marginality of a space in Christian history. This does not reflect a physical belief concerning the world so much as the specific purpose of this type of map for representing both figurative and literal geography.18 The educated writers did not believe Jerusalem to be physically in the centre of the world, but it was spiritually central to Christian history. It was the centre of salvation, where

Christ manifested himself, and where the Anti-Christ would eventually manifest himself to complete the arc of Christian history. This representation provided considerable information: it not only informs the viewer of the importance of Jerusalem, but also provides information about the rest of the world through its relationship to Jerusalem. In both the Hereford and Ebstorf maps, for instance, England and India are represented as marginal and opposed. They are at the very edges of the map, opposite edges, as far as it is possible to be from Jerusalem. Rome and continental Europe are much closer, though still removed from the centre of the map. This representational geography provides information about the conceptual world of the mapmaker.

16. Higgins, Writing East, 61-65.; Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 24-31. 17. There is little evidence to suggest a general practice of placing Jerusalem at the centre of world maps before the third quarter of the thirteenth century. This is a practice that seems to begin alongside the development of the mappea mundi and reflects an interest in representing the devotional value of these maps. Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Jerusalem on Medieval Mappaemundi: A Site both Historical and Eschatological,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 355-380. 18. For a discussion of the medieval practice of producing maps that reflect both the physical and spiritual ‘realities’ of the world, frequently intermingled to varying degrees, see Evelyn Edson, “Mapping the Middle Ages.” For a discussion of the relationship between The Book of John Mandeville and the mappae mundi tradition see Evelyn Edson, “Traveling on the Mappa Mundi: The World of John Mandeville,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 389-403; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, 111-118; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 27-34. 191

Britain and India are places far removed from the centre: they are marginal and strange places relegated to the edges. This same structure is repeated in The Book at multiple places, most obviously when Mandeville is discussing the roundness of the world and states that the people of

India stand directly below England foot against foot on the other side of the world.19

This leads to questions concerning exactly how seriously The Book was taken as a work of geography. As with most topics concerning Mandeville, how seriously The Book was taken by contemporaries is a matter of debate. John Larner has suggested that the Mandeville author was enjoyed for the fabulist he was, particularly citing Friedrich Amman, a Benedictine monk who transcribed a manuscript of geographical works between 1447 and 1455. Not only does Amman not include Mandeville’s text among his geographic authorities on the accompanying map: he explicitly states that the work of Johannes Mandeville was not used as a source.20 There is, however, some evidence to suggest the Mandeville author’s readers focused on the geographic information and took it somewhat seriously.

The vast majority of manuscripts show some marginalia interested in The Book’s geography. Most readers focus on the geography of the Holy Land but there is also a great deal of interest in the chapter on the size of the world. Many different manuscripts have annotations highlighting the measurements of the world and the manuscript Bibliothèque Nationale de

France MS. 10723 has twelve separate notes covering the entire chapter.21 The insistence on the circumnavigation of the world seems to have been much less interesting to the average reader, though the Danish cosmographer Classon Swart discusses Mandeville’s story of circumnavigation when providing an explanation for how the Inuit reached Greenland in his

19. Higgins, Insular, 113; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 335-336. 20. Larner, “Plucking Hairs”, 145-147; See also John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 213, n58. 21. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 123-126. 192 description of the Scandinavian and Arctic regions in 1427. It is even possible Christopher

Columbus was influenced by The Book. Certainly Bernáldez, a court chronicler who claimed to know Columbus well, asserted that Columbus conceived of his second route to the Americas using Mandeville as a guide.22 Christian de Pizan also makes liberal use of The Book’s geographic descriptions in her own literary journey across the Holy Land as part of her Le livre du chemin de long estude.23 Finally, The Book’s textual associations point toward an audience willing to see it as a work of geography. The Book was frequently bound with works describing travel or geography, including Jan de Langhe’s translations of Oderic, Boldensele, and Hayton. It was also occasionally bound with encyclopedic works like Sacrobosco’s Imago Mundi.24

It is impossible to suggest that The Book had only one reading. It is, and was, open to being read in a number of different ways.25 Given the large number of extant variations there are as many manuscripts that were bound or annotated with a focus on devotional material and pilgrimage journey as suggesting it was read as a serious picture of the world. At the same time, there clearly existed a significant audience willing to read The Book as a work of geography, whatever its faults.

3 The Evidence Structures of The Book

In this chapter we will be investigating the interaction between two important aspects of the construction of credibility, the construction of the author as knower, and the knowledge

22. Ibid., 117-121. 23. Ibid., 111-113. 24. Ibid., 83-129. 25. For an excellent discussion of the multiple possible readings of The Book and how this affected its reception, see Suzanne M. Yeager, “The World Translated: Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and Their Medieval Audiences,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 156-181. 193 claims themselves. The knowledge claims of the author gain credibility through the author’s ability to navigate and create a coherent picture of the world, one that satisfies the expectations of the genre and audience while establishing the figure of the narrator as one that can be considered credible, because of his connection to the ethical community of western Christianity and his demonstration of natural philosophical knowledge. Through this, his claims to personal experience gain epistemic value.26

Mandeville’s prologue provides an excellent place for us to start. It performs the acts of creating both the author and the audience,27 and in so doing it lays out the primary structures of knowledge construction that we will be investigating. It establishes the shape of The Book as a pilgrimage narrative, told from the perspective of an experienced traveler who has ventured to

Jerusalem and beyond. It establishes the basis for the many rhetorical tools that will be used throughout the book to create the narrator as a credible witness and firmly grounds the narrative in the claims of first-person experience.

Mandeville opens the book with a paean to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, reminding the reader that it is the best of all lands chosen by God as the location for the most important acts of

Christian history. Having reminded the reader of the glory of the Holy Land, he then also states that, as there has been no crusade to Jerusalem in recent years, men desire to hear of it:

And because it has been a long time since there was a general passage over the sea and many people delight in hearing the said Holy Land spoken about and take pleasure in it, I John Mandeville, knight—although I am not worthy, born and raised in England in the town of St Albans, who from there have crossed the sea in the year 1322 on Michaelmas Day and who have since been beyond the sea for a long time, and have seen and gone around many countries and many different provinces and many different regions and different islands and have passed through Turkey, Lesser and Greater Armenia, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Upper and Lower Egypt, Libya, Chaldea, a great part of Ethiopia, Amazonia, Lesser and Middle and a part of Greater India, and many different islands

26. For a discussion of the importance of ethical community to the credibility of witness, see Frisch, Invention of Eyewitness, chapter 2. For a brief discussion of the prevalence of eyewitness in travel literature, Daston and Park, Wonders, 60-65. 27. Higgins, Writing East, 20-24. 194

around India where there dwell many different peoples with diverse laws and diverse customs—of which lands and islands I will speak more fully and describe some part of the things that are there when there is room to speak of them according to what I can remember, especially for those who have the will and desire to visit the noble city of Jerusalem and the holy places that are around it; and I will describe for them what way they might take; for I have passed along many of them [the ways] and ridden with good company, thank God.28

This passage, along with the opening exhortation of the Holy Land, serves to identify the figure of the narrator, locating him within the context of a western Christian ethical community and establishing the shape of the narrative as a pilgrimage story. Iain Higgins calls attention to the similarity between this opening and that used by fourteenth-century French chroniclers and historians. The structure is itself adapted from the standard opening used in vernacular wills in order to provide a formal statement of the document’s veracity and locate the author in the social structure.29 These details provided by the opening—the social status of the author, where he comes from, his religious fervour—serve to authenticate the text first by locating the author within an ethical community and building the image of the author as a credible witness.30 For instance, his status as knight and his upbringing in St. Albans, associating him with a monastery town where he could learn Latin, might explain to the reader Mandeville’s knowledge of Latin and natural philosophy, which he displays throughout the text.31 This, in turn, helps to build the figure of Mandeville as a reliable witness. As someone with knowledge both of natural philosophy and knowledge gained through travel, his experience might be more reliable than others. This reflects the way we saw Albertus using experience as evidence in De animalibus.

Experience seemed to be treated as more reliable either when referring to an individual with extensive experience of a particular aspect of nature, knowledge of natural philosophy, or the

28. Higgins, Insular, 5; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 92-93; Seymour, Defective, 3-5. 29. Higgins, Writing East, 52-55; Christiane Marchello-Nizia, “Entre l'histoire et la poétique: le 'songe politique,'” Revue des Sciences Humaines 183 (1981): 39-53. 30. Higgins, Writing East, 52-53; Frisch, Invention of Eyewitness, 44-60. 31. Higgins, Writing East, 51-55. 195 collective experience of a community. In addition, we can see that these criteria seem to map onto aspects of the approach to witness testimony in law. As we will discuss throughout this chapter, in various ways the Mandeville author manages to address all of these criteria in the attempt to create the narrator as a credible witness.

As Anthony Musson has argued, it is quite possible that the educated reading audience of

Mandeville would have been conscious of the contemporary legal structures, at least in a general way.32 Trials and legal arguments were an important part of society and we have substantial evidence that laymen with some education were quite conscious of the principles of legal witness and the related concept of fama (a complicated term that could be used to mean both reputation and common knowledge).33 I would suggest that to understand the author’s construction of

Mandeville as a credible knower, we must take into account the legal structures of witness as part of our consideration of the author’s ability to construct an ethical community and deploy his natural knowledge.

Alexandra Frisch has also suggested that examination of legal structures can help us to understand Mandeville’s appeal. Frisch productively identifies the importance of the creation of

32. For a discussion of the varying ways that what Musson terms ‘legal consciousness’ could be a part of everyday life in the Middle Ages, see chapter 4 of Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasant’s Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264- 1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Smail discusses the importance of social relations in formulating both initial legal conflicts and establishing validity, or invalidity, of a witness. He points to the way participants in a legal suit clearly knew enough about the legal structures to use these structures to their advantage. See particularly chapters 1 and 2. For a discussion of the recent historiographic approaches to social discourses drawn from legal documents and the reconstruction of witness testimony into legal format, see also Tom Johnson, “The Preconstruction of Witness Testimony: Law and Social Discourse in England before the Reformation” in Law and History Review 32 (2014): 127-147. 33. Fama is a complex medieval term that could be most frequently used to mean reputation, defamation, or common knowledge. It had an important role in legal proceedings in all of its forms. On fama as common knowledge, see Chris Wickham, “Fama and the Law,”; for a discussion of fama as a tool for assessing the quality of proof, see Jeffery Bowman, “Infamy and Proof in Medieval Spain,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, eds. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 95-117. 196 ethical communities in medieval legal practice, but I believe she is mistaken in assuming that the legal practices of witness were focused entirely on the ethical standing of the individual.34 The current work on the use of fama as a legal structure and the ways that individuals manipulated witness laws in court cases shows that the role of the witness was understood as one that contained both the need for a shared ethical community and the interest in the epistemic value of the witness testimony itself.35 Frisch’s analysis makes many assumptions concerning both the readership and the medieval devaluing of epistemic eyewitness because the medieval category of eyewitness does not mesh with the early modern category she is attempting to articulate. Her focus on the early modern period leads her to misread the medieval evidence. While it is clear, as

Iain Higgins has also argued, that the creation of the character of Mandeville within the ethical community of western Christianity is important, I would suggest that it does not then render the claims to experience completely empty.36

I do not suggest that we should take for granted the idea that witness in the fourteenth century was congruent with the meaning of witness in the twentieth century, but if we look at the legal thought surrounding the role of the witness, it is clear that there is more to the witness than reputation alone. Witness, reputation, and common knowledge all play important roles in the way medieval law was reshaped after the gradual abandonment of the ordeal trial. As courts placed the weight of judgement in human hands, rather than looking to the divine through ordeal, the role of the witness became both more complex and more important. Witnesses could be asked to perform multiple roles: to speak to what they had personally witnessed (per visum), speak to what they had heard of a matter (per auditum), speak to the reputation of another, or

34. Frische, Invention of Eyewitness, 51-53. 35. For a general overview, see Smail, Consumption of Justice, chapters 2 and 4; Wickham, “Fama and the Law”, 15-26. 36. Higgins, Writing East, 51-52. 197 speak to what was commonly known about a matter. These last two are involved with the complicated legal category of fama. The fama, or infama––in this case best understood as reputation––of an individual could have legal ramifications, preventing them from acting as witness or even from bringing charges against others.37 Fama, however, could also apply to what was generally known about an individual or situation, the common knowledge of those in the community.38 Frische’s work seems to collapse these categories and draw out an assumption that applying value to the reputation of the witness indicates a disinterest in their experience.

Certainly reputation was important to being able to act as a witness in the first place. There were many reputational reasons that would bar an individual from acting as a witness no matter what they had seen, but there also seems to have been great concern over the competence of witnesses called to testify to their experience. Many witnesses were barred from giving testimony on the grounds of advanced age, because their poor memory or sight made them unreliable.

Additionally there seems to have been a distinct preference for witness per visum rather than per auditum, because the testimony of a witness per auditum was dismissed much more frequently than those per visum.39 To the extent that Mandeville is a witness, the majority of his claims are presented as per visum following his stress that these are things he has personally experienced.

The character and social relations of a witness were clearly important in medieval law, because they were well aware that people can lie. Looking at the lists of reasons why someone could be barred from giving testimony in a case, and the careful questions put to the witness looking for

37. Bowman, “Infamy and Proof,” 110-115; Richard Firth Green, Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), chapters 4 and 5; Smail, Consumption of Justice, 123-129; Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 58-61. 38. Wickham, “Fama and the Law”; Smail, Consumption of Justice, 213-227; Wickham, “Gossip and Resistance,” 4-6. See also the closely related concept of notoire in French customary law. Akehurst, “Good Name,” 82-85. 39. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence, 35-38; Akehurst, “Good Name,” 88-90; Bowman, “Infamy and Proof,” 112-113; Wickham, “Fama and the Law,” 16-17. For a more general discussion of the restrictions and structures of witness testimony see Smail, Consumption of Justice, 56-62, 96-113. 198 contradictions in testimony between witnesses, it is clear that the courts were attempting to establish some consistent version of events. Establishing the reputation of individuals and their social relations was the most effective method of guarding against lies and misstatements in a context where an individual’s personal experience could not be effectively proven or disproven by the court. Interestingly, some of Mandeville’s more outrageous claims tend to be followed by the statement that men say a thing or that it is known, a move that would push his information toward the category of per auditum, perhaps putting less pressure on his personal credibility.

While Frisch argues that the primary distinction between Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s accounts is the creation of the ethical community,40 I would argue that there are other important differences we can examine that could explain any difference in public opinion that might have existed. Marco Polo and his amanuensis Rustichello wrote the Divisement dou monde according to the tropes and structures of a chivalric romance. Although Polo repeatedly states that he witnessed events with his own eyes and repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his firsthand knowledge, Polo’s account becomes an ethnographic narrative placed within the structures, formulas, and rhetorical traditions of chivalric romance.41 Mandeville, on the other hand, exists in a liminal space between pilgrimage narrative and encyclopedic geography. This would definitely change the way the readers relate to the text, potentially helping to account for differences in reception between Mandeville and Polo’s accounts.42 Additionally, while the

40. Frisch, Invention of Eyewitness, 52-60. 41. Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, 47-52. 42. Suzanne M. Yeager has explored this specifically in the context of England where we can demonstrate that Mandeville was read much more widely and across a broader social spectrum than was Polo. She suggests that whether the two books were taken seriously or not had less to do with their audience’s belief in their narratives than their usefulness for inspiring moral reflection. Both books impart a Christian orientation to their visions of the East, but The Book is both more readable and more accessible to the general public in its framing being written at least partly as a pilgrimage narrative. The Divisament du monde (in Pipino’s Latin translation) is drier and makes use of biblical models to increase the importance of their account rather than being easily accessible to devotional reading. While the Divisament du monde is found bound with devotional literature it is less common. See, Yeager, “The World Translated,” 156-181; Higgins, Writing East, 52-54. 199 character of Mandeville is crafted to appeal to the ethical community of western Europe, this is part of creating a credible witness but does not supplant their need for experience. The author’s ability to navigate the structures of the genre of pilgrimage narrative sets the stage for

Mandeville’s acts of experience rather than taking their place. As we have already suggested, the introductory passage shows the ways the author develops the structures of the pilgrimage narrative and then makes room for the first-person discussion of marvels that will be the subject of the rest of the book. This prefigures his ability to navigate between pilgrimage narrative and natural marvels, which creates the author as a credible knower and witness.

4 Creating a Witness

The Mandeville author begins the creation of Mandeville the narrator with his introduction, locating him in the ethical community of western Christianity, but continues to shape him throughout the text particularly through the use of the narrator’s self-insertion. These self-insertions are used to establish Mandeville’s presence and direct experience of phenomena throughout the book, but we can also see them used to demonstrate his knowledge of natural philosophy. I suggest that what we see is the shaping of the narrator into a credible witness: that is, an individual who has direct experience of natural phenomena, the knowledge to understand it, and the fama to reliably report it.

The author continually reminds the reader that his narrative is supposed to be based upon experience throughout the work by inserting himself and his actions into the narrative. When he encounters what he is told is the well of youth he tells us that he drank from it, and feels somewhat better for it to this day; when he passes through Cathay he tells us that he served as a mercenary for the great Khan for sixteen months; and during his passage through India he tests 200 the reproduction of diamonds.43 We are told that diamonds grow on rocks fed by dew and that, if tended properly, they can be made to grow. Mandeville claims that “I have many times demonstrated that if they are kept with a little of the rock, and not separated from their root, and wet often with May dew, they grow visibly every year, and the small ones become quite big.”44

Mandeville here draws the reader’s attention to his own action in testing the growth of the diamonds, but the terms used by Insular and Defective here is assaié and assayed, respectively.45

These terms are specifically associated with experience and the testing of materials. Mandeville did not simply inquire if this was the case; rather, the claim appears to foreground both the narrator’s presence and his direct experience.46 This language of experience is frequently deployed to attest to marvels and phenomena in both the Insular and Defective version through self-insertion and verbs of seeing and doing, but particularly with forms of assaiér or assaien.

Interestingly, another term that is frequently deployed when discussing marvelous phenomena is prover or preven.47 This is particularly provocative because, while prover and preven can be used to mean test, they also encompass rational demonstration and are used in a legal context to refer to evidence and legal witness.48 These terms are not deployed in a sufficiently rigorous pattern to draw strong conclusions about their specific relation to knowledge claims. Not every

43. Higgins, Insular, 99, 106, 133; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 306, 321, 375-376; Seymour, Defective, 70-71, 74, 94. 44. Higgins, Insular, 99; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 306. c.f. “I haue many tymes assayed þat if a man kepe hem wiþ a litel of þe rochis and wete hem wiþ Mayes dewe ofte siþes, þei schal growe eche ʒere and þe smale schal wexe grete.” Seymour, Defective, 70. 45. Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 306; Seymour, Defective, 70. 46. See entry for assai in Anglo-Norman Dictionary 2 Online edition, Accessed Oct 2017, http://www.anglo- norman.net/D/assai; and assai in Electronic Middle English Dictionary, accessed Oct 2017, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED2546. 47. For examples see Deluz, Merveilles du monde, assaiér: 190-191, 206, 306, 308, 309, 333; prover: 226, 290, 316, 309, 333. This is not a comprehensive list. 48. See entries for prover and prové in A.N.D.2, accessed Oct 2017, http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/prove. The spelling most frequently used by Defective is proue. M.E.D. lists this as one of the variant spellings for preve. See preven and preve in M.E.D., accessed Oct 2017, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med- idx?type=id&id=MED34580. 201 use of these two words necessarily indicates Mandeville’s direct presence; sometimes he is reporting the test or witness of others rather than providing it himself.49 Their frequent presence, however, reinforces the creation of the narrator—already located within the ethical community of western Europe—as witness through both the emphasis of firsthand experience and the usage of language with connotations of legal witness. They remind the reader that Mandeville’s knowledge comes from experience, both his own and that attested to by reliable sources.

Presence is not the only aspect of a reliable witness, however, and as we will see below, the author makes use of other tools to illustrate both the presence of the narrator and his character, ensuring that he is seen to have the knowledge to understand and accurately report what he has witnessed.

We see Mandeville frequently reassert the experiential basis of his account by stating that he cannot talk about something properly because he has not seen it himself. As he says “They say that Hippocrates’ daughter is still on that island of Lango in the form of a large dragon that is a good one hundred fathoms long––as they say, for I have not seen it.”50 Having passed through the valley perilous, we are told Mandeville comes through to a land inhabited by giants that wear only the skins of beasts as clothing. At this point, Mandeville tells the reader, “we were told that on another island over there, there were considerably bigger giants, such as forty-five or fifty feet tall, and some said fifty cubits tall, but I never saw them…for no one goes to one island or another there who would not be devoured.”51 Mandeville has seen their giant sheep, and tells us that these giants have many times been seen catching people in the sea, but he has not seen the

49. It is also worth noting that Defective sometimes changes Insular’s forms of prover to forms of assaien. For an example see Defective’s “and þat haþ be many tymes asayed” where Insular provides “esté prové sovent.” Seymour, Defective, 65; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 290.

50. Higgins, Insular, 16; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 117-118, 120 n.7-8. 51. Higgins, Insular, 169; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 449. 202 largest giants himself. Both insertion of himself into the story, and the statements of what he cannot speak about because he did not see, serve to foreground the supposed experiential basis for the knowledge. By emphasizing in this way what he didn’t see, he reminds the reader that the majority of the text is supposed to reflect what he did experience. This is done again, all the more effectively, near the end of his travels as he stands at the farthest east point he can reach and looks toward paradise: “About Paradise I would not know how to speak to you properly, for I was not so far forward, because I was not worthy. But what I have heard said by the wisest men over there I will willingly tell you.”52 Paradise is unreachable and so he cannot speak properly of it, but only repeat what the wise men have told him. This self-insertion––more emotional in the

Defective because his inability to speak causes Mandeville anger––again highlights the idea that when he does speak freely during the narrative Mandeville is giving information from his own experience. These practices of inserting himself into the narrative and of highlighting those things that he heard of but did not see serve to help reinforce the character of the narrative as an eyewitness account. We could also speculate that he is distancing himself from certain marvels by presenting them in terms of hearsay (per auditum) rather than the language of eyewitness.53

52. Higgins, Insular, 179; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 468; c.f. “Of paradys can Y not speke propurly for Y haue noȝt ybe þere, and þat angriþ me.” Seymour, Defective, 130. 53. I note that this is speculation because there is not a perfect pattern. It is tempting to point to the fact that the story of Hippocrates’ daughter is different from many of the other wonders in The Book because it is a singular event (and thus is not a part of the regular course of nature) and also carries no clear religious force. On the other hand, the similar case of the Castle Sparrowhawk (Higgins, Insular, 92-93; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 118- 119) matches these criteria but does not receive the same treatment. Instead, it is said that the powers of the mystical hawk have been prové by men many times. In both cases the reader is provided with three stories of men who interfered with the dragon or hawk. The giants, on the other hand, which Mandeville also states he has only been told about, can be explained as a natural race. Neither the Insular nor Defective version offers a perfect pattern for this move from eyewitness to hearsay. It is possible that the Mandeville author is simply following his sources except that neither Hippocrates daughter nor the Castle Sparrowhawk appear in his sources. Neither of these two sources have a known source text, as Higgins notes, but Deluz suggests that they are built on legends of Byzantine origin recounted in Western romances. She connects them specifically to La noble histoire de Lusignan and the Roman de la Mélusine composed around 1387 but notes that elements of these legends can be found in twelfth-century writers. See Higgins, Insular, 16 n.34, 92 n.325; Deluz, Merveilles du monde,120 n.7-8. 203

The insertions of the narrator’s presence serve multiple roles. They serve to establish his presence, character, and knowledge along with illustrating the marvelous diversity of the world.

During his passage beyond Cathay to India, in a region called Cadilhe,54 Mandeville discusses the marvelous fruit he was shown that, when cut open, revealed a living lamb. This is a fairly common story, but the narrator uses this as a moment to insert himself and demonstrate his knowledge of the world. Mandeville refers to this as a marvel, but states that he is not impressed:

Nevertheless, I said to them that I did not consider it a very great wonder, for there are also trees in our country that bear fruit which become flying birds and are good to eat; and those that fall into the water live, and those that fall to the ground die right away, and they were much amazed by this.55

He tells both the reader and his guides that this is similar to the barnacle geese that hatch in

England. As with other self-insertions the narrator establishes here that he is present and that this narrative is supposed to be an account of his own experience. But he also uses it to establish his knowledge of the world and its symmetry. Mandeville is here crossing into India, moving toward the periphery of the mappa mundi world he has created for his journey. His comment reminds the reader that the land he comes from, England, is also near the periphery of the world, equally and correspondingly far from the centre that is Jerusalem.56 His lack of wonder also highlights his own experience of the world. As we have discussed previously, wonder as an emotion is at least partly associated with the experience of surprise in medieval culture, but Mandeville’s experience and knowledge of the diversity of nature leave him unsurprised by the lamb fruit, while his less worldly guides marvel at his stories of the barnacle geese.

It is important to note here, that Mandeville is not referring to an obscure mythical beast but to a creature with significant traction in medieval thought. The barnacle goose (called

54. Higgins suggests he may be referring to Korea. Higgins, Insular, 157. 55. Ibid.; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 427-428; Seymour, Defective, 111. 56. Edson, “Traveling on the Mappae Mundi,” 393-400; Akbari, Idols in the East, 51-59. 204 variously barnacha, bernekke, and barliates) was a commonly known bird that was either said to grow from barnacles on rotten seaside logs or grow like fruit from trees overhanging the water.

When the birds are mature, they fall from the tree and those that fall in the water live, while those that do not, die. These geese are particularly associated with Ireland and England—the description used in most bestiaries draws on Gerald of Wales Topographia Hibernica, written around 1188—where a breed of goose still commonly known as barnacle geese winters. Scholars have suggested that the fact that these geese only fly to Ireland for the winter meant that contemporaries did not see them born and believed they were the product of the barnacles seen on logs and trees near the water. The existence of these geese was so widely believed that they sparked a debate as to whether they were in fact—being born from trees and water—technically fish. This would make them valid for consumption during Lent. This discussion gained enough traction that Pope Innocent the III felt the need to put forth a bull in 1215 during the Fourth

General Lateran Council specifically condemning this belief and asserting that the geese were still forbidden during Lent.57

In natural philosophical circles, there was at least some debate over the nature of these creatures. Albertus Magnus specifically denies the existence of these geese, but based on his observation rather than on principle. He states:

Certain ones lie when they say that the barliates [barnacle geese], which the people call boumgans, that is, “tree geese,” are so called because they are said to be born in trees, hanging from the trunk and branches and nourished on the sap that is in the bark. They also say that these animals are sometimes generated from rotten logs in the sea and especially from the putrescence of fir trees, maintaining that no one has ever seen these birds copulate or lay eggs. Now this is entirely absurd for, just as I have said in preceding books, I and many of my friends have seen them both copulate and lay eggs as well as nourish their young.58

57. For the most extensive discussion of the barnacle goose, see Maaike Van der Lugt. “Animal légendaire et discours savant médiéval. La barnacle dans tous ses états,” Micrologus 8 (2000): 351-393; see also George and Yapp, Naming the Beasts, 133-134; Albertus, On Animals, 1563 n.90; Daston and Park, Wonders, 62-63. 58. Albertus, On Animals, 1563. 205

Albertus makes no comment that there is anything impossible about the story—though his suggestion that this statement is absurd could suggest he sees them as impossible—but he has seen the geese reproduce and they definitely reproduce as normal birds.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, on the other hand, seems to believe the barnacle goose really does hatch from a tree. He uses it as an example in his discussion of the natural property of cold.

Cold is capable of engendering life by causing the contraction and concentration of vital heat. He states that this can be understood through the example of “a species of bird that grows out of trees, that springs as it were swelling and hatching out of the tree instead of fruit, but as long as they are on the tree, they have no life.”59 This is because the porous parts of the tree draw the humoral exhalations through the bark. But when the birds fall into the water, the cold causes the pores to contract and the exhalations are held within, concentrated together and turned into spirit.

By the multiplying and spreading of that spirit into all the parts, these fruits take life and become birds which are just like other birds in complexion and nature. Thus the barnacle goose lives only when it falls from the tree into water, because the cold of the water causes its vital heat to concentrate in its centre and engenders the spark of life.60 Mandeville’s choice of comparison may seem strange to the modern reader, but Mandeville is here referencing a familiar, if unusual, creature of the West supported by at least some natural philosophical resources. The lamb fruit is thus brought into the realm of explicable natural phenomenon by juxtaposition to the known and explicable barnacle goose that is born and develops in roughly the same way. Mandeville is at once asserting his presence, his knowledge of the world, and reminding the reader of the symmetry of nature as he moves toward the periphery.

59. “…a maner kynde of briddis þat growiþ out of treen, þat springiþ as it were swellinge and breden out of þe treen in stede of fruyt, but as longe as þey ben in þe tree, þey haue no lif.” Bartholomaeus, On the Properties of Things, 135-136. 60. Ibid. 206

The Mandeville narrator also takes the opportunity to demonstrate his natural philosophical knowledge through a discussion of the pole stars and the sphericity of the Earth.

As he is taking the reader through India he pauses to talk about the location of the Transmontane and Antarctic stars and how the differing night sky in the North and South show that the Earth is round.

In this land and in many others over there the Tramontane star cannot be seen at all. It is the star of the sea that does not move which is towards the north. But one can see another star opposite it, towards the south, which is called Antarctic. And just as sailors here take their bearings and steer themselves by that star to the north, so the sailors over there use this star to the south, which is never visible to us, and the one to the north is not visible to them. Through this we can perceive that the earth and the sea are of round form, for the part of the firmament that appears in one country does not appear in another. And it can be easily discovered by experience and by clever research that, if a man found passage by ship and people who wanted to go explore the world, he could sail all around the world, both above and below. This thing I prove according to what I have seen, for I have been towards the regions of Brabant and seen with the astrolabe that the Tramontane is 53 degrees high. And farther forward in Germany and Bohemia it is 58 degrees, and farther forward towards the northern regions it is 62 degrees and several minutes high, for I myself have measured it with the astrolabe.… Afterwards, I went towards the meridional regions—that is, towards the south—and found that the Antarctic star is first seen in Libya, and the farther forward I went in those parts the higher I found this star, such that towards upper Libya it was 18 degrees and several minutes high (60 minutes make one degree). Then in going by sea and by land towards those regions that I have spoken about and to other islands and lands beyond this country, I found the Antarctic star 33 degrees and several minutes high.61

As I mentioned briefly above, the terms assai and proue are used quite frequently to ground the information in the knowledge and authority of the Mandeville figure. It is worth noting here, therefore, that the Defective version can generally be said to favour the term assai even in some places where the Insular version uses prové. In this passage, however, we see the opposite.

Where the Insular version makes use of a variety of language in its knowledge claims the

61. Higgins, Insular, 111-112; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 332-333. As Higgins notes here, this is an expansion on Odoric of Pordenone’s reference to the disappearance of the North star as he travels. It is an odd passage because there is no Southern pole star to be observed and even if there were the supposed sightings on the astrolabe are fairly implausible. The existence of the Southern pole star may have been based on passages from Sacrbosco’s De Sphaera or Bruneto Latini’s Tresor. For further discussion of this point see Appendix C in Higgins, Insular, 260-271; Higgins, Writing East, 132-39; and Deluz, Le Livre de Jean de Mandeville une ‘géographie’,” 147-152. 207

Defective version prefers to make use of proue. So we see “et poet homme bien troever par experience et par subtile indagacioun…Laquelle chose jeo preuve ensy selonc ceo qe j’ay veu…”62 becomes in the Defective “and þat may men proue þus…And þat proue Y þus after þat

Y haue seye.”63 Even Jerusalem’s place in the centre of the world, discussed shortly after, goes from being something a man can “monstrer” to something that may be “proued.”64 Obviously we cannot draw too strong an inference from this because of the variability of the texts in question,65 but it seems worth noting that at a moment where Mandeville’s natural knowledge is being placed in the foreground, the Defective version uses language that contains the implications of rational demonstration or legal proof.

The narrator continues to discuss astrolabe readings of the height of the Antarctic star that he took as he continued his journey and suggests that if he had continued to travel in one direction he would have eventually come back to where he began. He follows this train of thought into a general discussion of the nature of the world and its climates. This section most clearly highlights the Mandeville author’s—and the supposed narrator’s—understanding of natural philosophy. The narrator is not simply asserting that the two pole stars act as fixed points and are only visible independently. He provides specific sightings taken from different locations of his travels to show that the stars remain as fixed points for navigation but rise and fall depending on how far north or south the observer is. The astrolabe was a device closely associated with natural philosophy. By providing the measurements and asserting that he has taken them during his own travels he is not only inserting himself into the narrative to

62. Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 333. 63. Seymour, Defective, 79. 64. Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 336; Seymour, Defective, 80. 65. Deluz notes that in some manuscript versions have “prover” instead of “experience et par subtile indagacioun” so clearly it is possible such a change could be due to differences between versions. Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 333. 208 foreground the experiential basis of his information, he is also demonstrating his natural knowledge.66 Mandeville also moves from his observations into a more general discussion about the roundness of the Earth and the nature of the Earth’s climates.67 Like Mandeville’s insertion of himself taking readings on the astrolabe, this helps to demonstrate to the reader his understanding of natural philosophy and the broader principles of the world.

In recent decades scholars have explored some of the ways The Book of John Mandeville engages with natural philosophy. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, for instance, has discussed the ways

Mandeville draws on the climatic systems and principle of the symmetry of nature to create a coherent and balanced view of natural diversity in line with fourteenth-century natural philosophy. When talking about the bodily diversity of those living in India, he demonstrates knowledge of the importance of climate and astrology. The medieval understanding of generation and physiological difference gave considerable importance to location. The qualities of the climate––the balance of the natural properties of heat, coldness, dryness, and moisture––as well as the astrological forces influencing that particular place served to shape the complexion and predisposition of individuals born there. This was a universal principle that governed and explained the geographic distribution of plants, stones, animals and even people. In countries where cold was the primary quality, mothers were predisposed to bear pale children with long yellow hair, while in hot lands the predisposition was towards black or brown skin with curly hair.68 The effects extended to behaviour as well, with both the climate and astrological

66. Deluz points out that the measurements Mandeville gives have been altered from those in De sphaera. See Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 342 n.8-11. Since the measurements Mandeville gives are fictitious, we are left to assume that this is probably designed to appeal to a general readership. It is possible that an experienced astronomer would spot the observations as clearly incorrect, but the average reader might not have the knowledge or resources to realize. 67. Higgins, Insular, 112-116; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 333-341. 68. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Diversity of Mankind,” 156-76; These specific examples are taken from Bartholomaeus, On the Properties of Things, 135-137. Finer grained distinctions could be based on this system as well. For instance, in his book of questions on Aristotle’s De animalibus, Albertus concludes that the slightly 209 influences significantly impacting human behaviour. Mandeville states that the Indians are unwilling to travel because they are born under Saturn, a slow-moving star, while the English are much happier to travel,

for we are in the seventh climate, which is of the moon, and the moon moves easily and is the planet of travel. Therefore it gives us the nature and will to move easily and travel by different routes and seek foreign things and the diversities of the world, for it goes around the earth more quickly than any other planet.69

Immediately below that we are told that the heat is so intense in the island of Orynes that

“because of the heat’s great force, men’s hangers, videlicet testiculi, come out of their bodies half way down the leg…and those who know nature prescribe that they be bound very tightly and smeared with astringent and cooling ointment…or else they [the men] could not live or endure.”70 Mandeville’s picture of the world is thus based in the causal principles of fourteenth- century natural philosophy representing the bodily and behavioural diversity of the world as strongly influenced by climate and astrological structures. Mandeville’s world is diverse and heterogeneous but constantly balanced according to natural causes because of the symmetry of the world. The heat and influence of Saturn create certain kinds of body and behaviour in India, balanced by their climatic and geographic opposite England. This is very similar to the balance of nature we saw in our discussion of De proprietatibus rerum, although Mandeville is less explicit about the divine ordering of this balance. Mandeville thus presents his discussion of the diverse particulars of the world in the context of a coherent understanding of the natural world and its causes. In the earlier discussion of Albertus’ work, I suggested that Albertus seems inclined to give credence to experience from those who either have detailed and extensive

warmer climate of France is responsible for their desire to “do wondrous things at the beginning and in the end accomplish nothing…”; Albertus, Questions, 258. 69. Higgins, Insular, 101; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 313.

70. Higgins identifies the island of Orynes as Hormuz. Higgins, Insular, 101-102; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 313- 314. 210 personal knowledge or those who have the knowledge of natural philosophy necessary to understand what they are observing. The credible knower must be made a part of the knowledge community in the same way that the witness must be made a part of the ethical community.

Mandeville the narrator is presented as an educated knight who has collected this information by personal experience, or from the reports of reliable men. The narrator’s apparent knowledge of natural philosophy allows him to understand and accurately report what he has experienced and evaluate the veracity of information he has heard. He is shaped into a figure positioned within the knowledge community of natural philosophy, just as the prologue begins the process of placing him within the ethical community of western Christianity. His first-person account and self-insertions stress his presence, reminding the reader that he speaks from experience. We see therefore the narrator taking shape as a figure capable of standing between the categories of credible knower and witness.

5 A Comprehensive Worldview

If witness requires experience, it also requires fama. As I have suggested above, the natural knowledge Mandeville displays and his introduction contribute to the construction of his fama, but this process is complex. In this section, we will explore Mandeville’s creation of a coherent worldview out of the overlapping natural and spiritual geographies he describes. These geographies change the context of the knowledge claims he makes and requires a shifting of epistemic structures in response to the type of claim being made. The Mandeville author is able to adapt smoothly between reason, authority, and experience to address the changing context of his knowledge claims. In doing so, we also see him further shaping the character of the narrator, locating him within both the ethical community of western Christianity and the knowledge 211 community of natural philosophy. Mandeville thus becomes a man of good fama: a man capable of bearing witness to the marvels he has seen.

We must be aware that within the manuscript traditions of The Book itself, different versions change their presentation of marvels slightly to speak to different audiences’ interests.

The differing expectations of the reader’s interests between the Insular and Defective versions is highlighted in the discussion of the marvelous behaviour of fish on the island of Calonak. Once a year, the fish of all kinds in the world come to Calonak71 and throw themselves upon the shore, remaining there for three days while the fishermen may take as many as they please; when one species of fish leaves, another takes its place:

There is moreover a great wonder on this island that is nowhere else in the world. For all the kinds of fish of the sea come once a year, one species after another, and they cast themselves on the shore of that island, such that no fish are seen in the sea, and they stay there for three days, and everyone in the country takes as many of them as they want…and no one knows the reason why this can be. But those of the country say that it is to revere their king, who is the worthiest there is, as they say, and because he fulfilled what God said to Adam, “Crescite et multiplicamini et replete terram,” and because he thus multiplied the world with his children, therefore God sends the fish of the whole sea freely to him and for his country.…I do not know the reason why this is––God knows it who knows everything––but this thing seems to me a greater wonder than anything I have ever seen. For Nature makes very many different things and very many wonders, but this marvel is not of nature; rather, it is entirely against nature that the fish which have the freedom to go all around the world should come to give themselves up to death of their own will and without any compulsion. Therefore I am certain that it cannot be without great significance.72

This is a very interesting event, particularly because it receives significantly different treatments in the Insular and Defective versions. In both versions, Mandeville calls it the greatest marvel he has witnessed and tells us that no one knows the reason for this, but the people of Calonak believe that the fish come to pay homage to their king. In the Insular version, however, this marvel serves as the starting point of a lengthy moralization. Mandeville tells us that the fish come to do homage to the king because, with his many wives and many children, he has obeyed the command of God to wax and multiply. The narrator specifically states that we are not to take

71. Higgins notes that this may be Champa in modern-day southern Vietnam. Higgins, Insular, 118 n.405. 72. Ibid., 119; Deluz, Merveilles du monde 347-348. 212 this as a natural marvel but as against nature, and as such is to be treated as spiritually meaningful. In the Insular version, this marvel is an intersection of spiritual and natural geography.

In the Defective version this marvel is presented as purely natural. It drops the moralization and any reference to this marvel being against nature. Where in the Insular version the marvel serves as a strong affirmation of faith and God’s willingness to reward all those who follow his commands, in the Defective it loses much of its religious force:

And in that land is another marvel that is in no other land, for all manner of fish of the sea come at a certain time of the year, each manner of fish after the other…And men know not the cause but those of that land say these fish come thither to give worship to their king as the most worthy of the world for he has so many wives and has got so many children of them. And this I think the greatest marvel that I have seen, that fish have all the sea at will to be in should, with their own good will, come thither to proffer themselves to death.73

We are still told that it is the most marvelous thing that Mandeville has seen, but it is presented as a natural marvel, with no explicit statement that it has greater meaning. It is possible that the audience could be expected to identify the idea that the king is worthy because he has waxed and multiplied, but the text seems to avoid specific mention of God’s intervention in this marvel, as well as removing the direct statement that it is against nature. It is interesting, however, that the translator chose not to reproduce the original statement which made that connection explicit.

What we are left with is a marvel that seems natural, a part of the wonderful diversity of nature.

This shift of tone and focus occurs repeatedly in the Defective version. Defective does not remove all religious discussion, but it disentangles the natural and spiritual interests to a certain extent and focuses on marvels as aspects of nature in a way that gives it a different character

73. “And in þat lond is anoþer merueyl þat is in noon oþer lond, for al maner of fyschis of þe see comeþ a certeyn tyme of þe ʒere, eche maner of fysch aftir oþer… And men woot noʒt þe cause but þei of þat lond seiþ þis fyschis comeþ þedir to do worschip to here kyng as for moost worþi of the world for he haþ so many wifes and getiþ so many children of hem. And þis þinkiþ me þe grettist merueyl þat I haue seye, þat fyschis þat haueþ al þe see at wille to be yn schal wiþ here owne good wille come þedir to profre hemself to deeþ.” Seymour, Defective, 84. 213 from the Insular version. We must bear in mind that different versions structure the relationship between natural and spiritual geographies differently in order to highlight matters of greatest interest to their intended audience.

While the Defective version tends to reduce the moralization, compared to the Insular version, it still demonstrates a strong interest in Christian history and the spiritual implications of the world. It is important not to set up the natural and spiritual views of the world as opposed. In every variation this is a text that can be read equally for what it has to say about the spiritual implications of the world as about its physical characteristics.74 The world can be engaged as both a physical place and one overwritten by spiritual meaning at the same time. In these places where the spiritual overlaps or interweaves with the natural geography, we can see a shifting of tactics and knowledge claims at work.

One of the most dramatic collisions of natural and spiritual landscape comes after passing through the land of Prester John and encountering a place called the valley perilous. We are told that this is a dangerous place that may contain the entrance to Hell. Certainly it is a place no man, Christian or pagan, enters lightly and few people come out of. This story is a passage taken, and only somewhat embellished, from the travel account of Friar Oderic of Pordenone. Like

Oderic, Mandeville and some of his companions decide to venture into the valley, despite the dangers, but where Oderic simply believes himself holy enough to withstand the place

Mandeville makes a point of preparing himself spiritually:

There were with us there two worthy Friars Minor, who were from Lombardy, who said that if there were any of us who wanted to enter, they would put us in good standing [with God] and go in with us. When these worthy men told us this, trusting in God and in them, we had mass sung and were confessed and took communion and entered, [all] fourteen [of us].75

74. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Audiences, 7-14, 106-129, 248-258; Yeager, “The World Translated,” 158-162; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, chapter 4, particularly 108-110. 75. Higgins, Insular, 167; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 447. 214

Mandeville makes a point of being confessed and shriven by a Friar Minor of Lombardy (as many scholars have noted, this may be a nod to Oderic) before venturing in. Once in the valley, their experiences are very similar. The valley is described as covered in corpses as if it were the site of a battle between two major armies. The hills resound with the sound of invisible drums and at the centre is a screaming demon head. They are repeatedly dashed to the ground by winds, and tempted to stray from their path by wealth lying around. While both Mandeville and Oderic make it through, they each report that some members of their party disappear and are never met again. The Insular version expands slightly on this account to include a lasting black mark

Mandeville receives, as of a ghostly hand, that stays with him for years until he repents all his sins and strives to live a good life. Interestingly, the Defective leaves out the mention of the black mark and so sticks more closely to Oderic’s original experience.76

This is an interesting moment because it highlights the way the author blends the experience of the physical world with the spiritual. The valley is a marvel and so, like other marvels, Mandeville’s claims focus on his own experience as a way of knowing the marvel. It is also, however, a spiritually important place that confirms Mandeville as a member of the

Christian community. It comes after Mandeville has spent significant time in the court of the great Khan as well as passing through the lands of non-Christians. The valley allows Mandeville to reassert his Christian character––experiencing Mass and being shriven––as well as demonstrating his worthiness since God supports him and helps him pass through the valley where others fail. While the Defective version does remove the passage about Mandeville receiving a lasting black mark, in most other respects the story stands. There is no move to reduce the spiritual meaning of the valley as there is in some of the other marvels. This valley is

76. Seymour, Defective, 120-125; Higgins, Insular, 166-169; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 445-448. 215 a marvel precisely because it is such a dramatic intersection of the spiritual and physical worlds.

As such, it does not need to be supported through theological or rational demonstration; experience is the only way to know it. It helps to remind the reader, however, of the coherence of

Mandeville’s world. The spiritual discussions of geography that mark the passage to Jerusalem are largely absent when Mandeville begins to discuss the marvelous East, but that approach to geography as having both physical and spiritual meaning is brought back in his experience in the valley.

This ability of the author to create a vision of his encyclopedic world as a coherent whole, exploring both literal and figurative aspects of geography, seems important to create a setting where the author’s experience claims are credible. The introduction of the work expounds the joys of pilgrimage, the worthiness and importance of Jerusalem, and the intent of the author to provide the reader with directions for the pilgrimage; and for those who cannot travel themselves, a narrative to help them understand the glory of the Holy Land. The introduction establishes the work within the context of a tradition of pilgrimage narratives and the author as a devout Christian.77 This then establishes the context in which Mandeville can make specific claims about spiritual truths concerning the world. In these claims, Mandeville primarily makes use of biblical quotation and reports of saint’s lives. The interaction of spiritual and natural geographies is particularly interesting in what can be called the ‘geographical section’ where

Mandeville moves most fluidly between different kinds of knowledge claims as he asserts the centrality of Jerusalem, the sphericity of the world and the possibility of circumnavigation.

In this section, we see Mandeville call upon experience, astronomical data, reasoned argument, biblical quotes, and what he presents as a sort of folk tale, in order to establish the

77. Higgins, Insular, 4-6; Seymour, Defective, 3-5; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 89-93. For a discussion of Mandeville’s use of the Christian Ethos in the text, see Frisch, Invention of Eyewitness, 49-60. 216 sphericity of the world and the physical centrality of Jerusalem. This section differs interestingly from much of the rest of the work because here he is establishing both spiritual and natural larger truths of the world. We can see this overlap between spiritual and natural geography in

Mandeville’s insistence that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world. We are told that it can be proved, for if a man takes a spear and sets it in the Earth at midday it will not cast a shadow.

Also, David bears witness to this when he says Deus operatus est salutem in medio terre, God worked salvation in the middle of the Earth. These two justifications seem to have little relation, because they appeal to different approaches to geography.78 The quote from David points to the greater truth of Jerusalem as the spiritual centre of the world, but we can also see a move to map this spiritual geography directly onto the natural geography, adding a demonstration to show

Jerusalem as the physical centre of the world. These claims emphasize the interconnectedness of the spiritual and physical understanding of geography. To say that Jerusalem is spiritually the centre is not identical to saying that it is physically the centre in that they require different kinds of claims, but to Mandeville it is important that the reader understand that the two overlap.

It may be worth noting that the Defective version adds a new conclusion to Mandeville’s story. As in the Insular version Mandeville reaches paradise far in the East and then turns back because the roaring rivers and dangerous beasts prevent all living men from entering paradise.79

Mandeville then returns home to rest and write about his travels because he is old and tired.80 In the Defective version, however, he travels by Rome on his way back to England and shows his book to the Pope who reads it and confirms that everything he says is true:

And for as much as men only believe what they have seen with their own eyes…therefore I made my way in coming homeward to Rome to show my book to the Holy Father the Pope…so that he with his wise counsel would examine it…when he and his wise counsel

78. Seymour, Defective, 80-81; Higgins, Insular, 112-114; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 336-337. 79. Higgins, Insular, 179-181; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 467-470; Seymour, Defective, 130-131. 80. Higgins, Insular, 185; Deluz, Merveilles du monde, 479-480. 217

had examined it all through, he said to me for certain that all there in was true. For he said that he had a book in Latin that contained that and much more, after which book the mappa mundi is made…and therefore the Holy Father the Pope has ratified and confirmed my book in all points.81

It is interesting that the text that in many ways chooses to remove the moralization of natural marvels also chooses to add a passage where Mandeville’s text is confirmed by such a powerful religious figure. This is very similar to an oath added to some versions of Friar Odoric of

Pordenone’s travel narrative where he swears that everything he has written he has either seen or learned from reliable men.82 It does not seem designed to back up any individual claim so much as it seems intended to authorize the book as a whole and demonstrate the credibility of the traveler and his experience. In Mandeville’s case, he seems to be invoking both spiritual and temporal authority to support him by having his work approved by the pope with reference to a

“Latin book” that would represent established intellectual information. The character is thus located at once within both the ethical community of western Christianity, and the knowledge community of natural philosophy. The authority of the Pope is invoked as one more tool to support Mandeville’s fama.

6 Conclusion

The Book of John Mandeville presents a contextual approach to knowledge claims to match the complex and interconnected readings its audiences can engage with. The structure of

81. “And for as myche as many men trowe not but þat þei se wiþ here owne ieȝn…þerefore Y made my wey in my comyng hamwarde to Rome to schewe my book to þe holy fader þe pope…so þat he wiþ his wise counseyl wolde examyne hit…when he and his wise counseyl hadde examyned hit alle þurȝ, he seyde me for certeyn þat alle was sooþ þat was þerynne. For he seide þat he hadde a book upon Latyn þat conteyned þat and myche more, after whiche boke þe mappa mundi ys ymade…And þerfore þe holy fader þe pope haþ ratefyed and confermed my book in alle poyntes.” Seymour, Defective, 136. 82. Daston and Park, Wonders, 63-64; Odoric notes that “And as for such things as I saw not myself, the common talk of the countries beareth witness to their truth.” Sir Henry Yule, ed. and trans., Cathay and the way thither, vol 2 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913), 266-267. 218 the work as a report of experience is used to establish many claims about the natural world because the author’s focus on the particulars of the world and invocation of natural diversity creates a space where experience is an appropriate way of knowing. In a similar vein, the simultaneous shaping of the work as a pilgrimage narrative leads the audience to expect the figurative interpretation of geography that is layered overtop of the natural geography. Where they interact, we can see the author working to integrate them and establish a more complete picture of the world.

Most interestingly, this work allows us to see the ways the category of credible knower we have identified in natural philosophy maps onto the category of legal witness. They are not identical, but they have provocative similarities. As I have argued earlier, in the works of natural philosophers such as Albertus Magnus we can see that knowledge of the diversity of the world encouraged a willingness to give credence to reported information about the world. The monstrous and the marvelous were entirely credible, as long as they were not contrary to reason, because nature was diverse and wonderful. The experimentum literature of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medicine frequently depended on experience for developing or modifying treatments. Knowledge of theory was the starting point, but experience was required to understand the ways causes interacted in a specific case. The diversity and contingency of nature thus created a space where experience had a place in constructing knowledge of the particulars of the world. Mandeville’s discussions of the diversity of the world, and his focus on the marvelous and strange, locates the natural information of his book within a context where the experience claims he makes may become the most appropriate kind of knowledge claim. Experience, however, is not valuable in and of itself but must be from a credible knower. 219

The credible knower is an individual with the expertise or education to properly grasp the phenomena to which they attest. In essence, they must have a reputation that locates them as a reliable source within the knowledge community of natural philosophy. Similarly, the legal witness must be someone with the good fama to reliably testify to what they have seen or been told. These categories are similar but not identical, and it is important to note that while both categories foreground the value of experience, what made good fama would not necessarily make that individual a credible knower. In the context of law, reputation and ability to recall and recount the information accurately appears to be key to experience being considered credible. In the context of natural philosophy, reputation remains important but natural knowledge is also at issue to ensure that the witness is capable of correctly interpreting what they have experienced.

The Mandeville author collapses these categories and we can see the figure of John Mandeville constructed as both witness of good fama and credible knower as a means of establishing the credibility of his experience throughout the book.

The author uses the figure of Mandeville to navigate the complex and contextually sensitive epistemic landscape of The Book. He moves between experience, authority, and reason depending on the nature of the knowledge claim he is making. At the same time, he works to locate Mandeville within both the knowledge community of natural philosophy and the ethical community of western Christianity. All of this works to establish Mandeville’s fama as both credible knower and credible witness: capable of properly understanding, evaluating, and attesting to the experiences he has had and the information he has gathered from reliable sources. Chapter Six: Conclusion

This project has followed the thread of natural knowledge from a careful scholastic commentary designed to educate, into a popular travel narrative designed to elicit wonder and pleasure from the reader. Each text excerpts, organizes, or explicates information in ways that create a coherent view of nature according to the needs of its genre and audience. While some of these texts seem more “scientific” to the modern reader than others, each is consciously piecing together a view of nature based on the same sources of natural information. The evidence standards of the authors and audiences change depending on the genre and purpose of the work.

Albertus Magnus needs a different approach to convince his audience of the particular behaviours of animals in De animalibus than the Pseudo-Albertus needs to convince the audience of the effectiveness of a certain experiment in De virtutibus. Each text shows a distinct interest in discussing the particulars of nature, but at the same time is keenly aware of the limitations of human knowledge. If there cannot be a science of particulars, nevertheless there is an intense interest in understanding and describing the diversity of nature in all its particularity.

Even in the most scholastic of the texts we addressed, the diversity of nature carves out a space, although a carefully controlled space, for experience in the construction of natural knowledge.

Each of these texts is rational and coherent within the standards of its own genre. We cannot draw a single conclusion concerning the relative epistemic value of reason, authority, and experience because both medieval authors and the readers dealt with the evidence claims of a text in a contextually sensitive manner. Speaking about nature did not have the same, supposedly, monolithic assumptions about evidence that we have in the context of modern

220 221 science. Medieval scholars and readers accepted that nature was multivalent and that evidence structures for speaking about nature could be context dependent. Different types of claims about nature required different types of evidence and the balance of reason, experience, and authority, could vary based on the claim itself as well as the standards of the genre.

De animalibus shows us a scholastic commentary; the author demonstrates a complex approach to evaluating evidence concerning parts of the world he has no access to. The epistemic tools of reason, experience, and authority are carefully weighed in each case, but for Albertus reason plays the central role, modified by, and modifying, authority and experience. The diversity of nature creates a wide space of possibility, where experience may be used to confirm or call into question reports, but it is not sufficient to refute a claim. The category of marvel extends natural explanation to the diverse particular phenomena that push at the boundaries of natural knowledge. Reason allows him to evaluate the reports of authorities and confidently reject any that suggest the violation of natural principles.

Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum demonstrate a different approach to the balance of reason, authority, and experience. Rather than a commentary, his encyclopedia is a compilatio. The goal of compilation marks the text and places authority at its epistemic core. The self-defined goal is to collect and abbreviate rather than to explain. Yet we can still see

Bartholomaeus shape his work, through juxtaposition of sources and figurative reading, to draw coherence out of the conflicting authorities. Conflicts of cosmology are smoothed away, but the diversity of nature allows room for disagreement in particular phenomena. While preserving the appearance of agreement between authorities is important in matters of cosmology, a plurality of explanations of particular phenomena does not threaten the overall coherence of his world. Even as the genre pushes authority to the centre, reason and experience can be used to adjust, to 222 expand, and to support, in order to bring the discordant voices of authority into a coherent picture of the natural world.

Experimenta texts offer us a very different view of both epistemic structures and natural knowledge. They are texts of practice, not explanation, and their focus on practice and particulars makes use of experience not as a source of knowledge but of know-how. At the same time, the experience they contain is valuable because it is attested to by the authorities it cites and the credibility of Pseudo-Albertus. Experience does not stand alone but must be filtered through and attested to by a credible knower. The structures of natural philosophy the text wraps itself in invoke the authority and knowledge of natural philosophy without actually providing a clear understanding of the principles they claim to reflect. De virtutibus and De mirabilibus provide a simplified, “popularized” view of natural knowledge, a view targeted at the promise of the control over nature. These texts represent themselves as the practical application of natural philosophy and, in doing so, elevate the value of the authorized experience they repeatedly point to as being the root of their know-how. They elide the boundary between practice and theory precisely because they do not articulate the nuanced understanding of epistemic structures we saw represented in works of learned medicine and scholastic natural philosophy.

The Book of John Mandeville draws together many different aspects of this study just as it draws together multiple genres to form a travel narrative. It shows us the complex ways these epistemic structures can be woven together to navigate a world that is at once symbolic and literal, spiritual and physical. The balance of the epistemic tools must be adjusted to the context of the knowledge claim. While claims to experience and eyewitness testimony may suffice to establish the marvelous particulars of the world, claims about the spiritual geography or universal aspects of nature are established using reason or authority. Nor is the use of experience 223 a simple matter. The value of the experience is intimately tied, in both the intellectual and popular cultures, to the credibility of the experiencer. We can see the complex construction of a witness who is capable of standing within the structures of both natural philosophy and law. The text demonstrates more fully what we began to see in De virtutibus—and may even have seen a glimmer of in De animalibus—the possible encounter between two sets of epistemic values, one derived from the intellectual community of natural philosophy and the other seeming to stem from a legal consciousness existing most strongly in the diverse audience reading these more popular works.

It is this encounter between two sets of related, but not identical, epistemic values that points to the most interesting avenues for further research; the connection between the identified epistemic structures of natural literature and the epistemic structures of witness testimony in medieval law. We have only been able to gesture at the connection here partly because there has not, as yet, been a concerted effort among historians of law to define the concept of witness in the way that terms like experientia and observatio have been carefully analyzed. We can see possible connections between the epistemic structures Albertus uses and the changing evidence standards of civil and canon law. The increased role of witness testimony and common knowledge in canon and civil law seems to map on to the role of experience, both firsthand and as reports from reliable individuals, in Albertus’s De animalibus. The lines of influence here are both interesting and complex. While the developing standards of legal practice were probably influenced by scholastic thought, so too the authors and readers of these texts may well have been influenced by legal concepts of witness. It is telling that the text bearing the most striking marks of a legal approach to experience is The Book of John Mandeville, the text with the widest reception and most general readership of those we have examined. 224

The Book of John Mandeville brings together an interesting collection of threads here.

Not only does it further expand our understanding of the relationship between experience in natural philosophy and legal witness, it points to a possible connection with the concept of virtual witness we saw connected to experimenta. The Book is able to weave together the spiritual and natural geographies deploying evidence in a contextually sensitive way, and as part of doing so brings together the concerns and evidence structures of natural philosophy with the style and interests of the genre of pilgrimage narrative. Pilgrimage narratives were designed, at least partially, to allow the reader to mentally travel with the writer. While this experience of reading was not as good as traveling to the holy places themselves, the reader gained spiritual benefit through the vicarious experience of travel that they received from the work. The Book brings this genre into contact with the interest in the natural particulars and the evidence structures of natural philosophy we have been tracking throughout the works in this study, as well as with the evidence structures of law. What is produced from this collision seems interestingly related to the virtual witness we discussed in relation to the experimenta. The careful construction of Mandeville as credible witness and credible knower, combined with the expectations of pilgrimage literature, encourages the reader to travel with him, to act as virtual witness to both the spiritual and natural marvels of the world. His ability to move across spiritual and natural landscapes thus draws the natural marvels into the vicarious witnessing structures supplied by the genre of pilgrimage narrative while the careful construction of the narrator allows him to stand as credible witness in multiple epistemic communities.

This is still not early modern virtual witness, but we can see how The Book expands upon all the connections we drew to the experimenta. The careful creation of the author’s credibility allows him to stand as witness and attest the reality of the marvels. Where Pseudo-Albertus’s 225 credibility was pre-established, Mandeville’s must be constructed through systems that appeal to both the intellectual and lay reader, to both the devotional and natural audience. The use of continual self-insertion and the insistence on first-hand experience serve to ground the work in the supposed author’s experience even more firmly than we saw with Pseudo-Albertus, if only because they are even more frequent and more insistent on Mandeville’s participation. Where

Pseudo-Albertus’s descriptions of experiments are relatively bare and unadorned, Mandeville’s descriptions of marvels are, comparatively, replete with circumstantial detail. The genre structures that would have helped the armchair pilgrim follow Mandeville to Jerusalem are just as productive for carrying them into India to witness the marvelous diversity of nature. It is well beyond the scope of this study to attempt to identify the root of the technology of virtual witness, but its relationship to experimenta and pilgrimage/travel narratives may well offer compelling directions for future study.

We have seen the ways the balance of reason, authority, and experience change in relationship to the genre and audience they are deployed to serve. Medieval writers demonstrate a contextually sensitive approach to evidence that adapts their use of epistemic structures to the needs of the genre and the audience. We have also traced a change in the status of experience that seems to correlate to the move toward more popular works. While an interest in the particulars of nature made experience valuable at every level of natural knowledge, the experimenta and travel narrative centre experience in ways that may reflect the interests of a more broadly popular readership. De virtutibus’s focus on practice and The Book’s incorporation of legal witness speak to a readership that rates the epistemic value of experience much more highly and more generally than the readership Albertus and Bartholomaeus expected their scholastically educated context to produce. The nuance of educated natural philosophy’s 226 approach to experience is lost to this general readership amid the recounting of practices for controlling nature or the marvelous properties of exotic lands. In its encounter with popular audiences, natural philosophy begins to encounter a set of epistemic values, both legal and practical, that perceive experience as a way of knowing in ways that scientia does not. It is possible that we can see the glimmers of the popular culture of empirical values that would help to create a new science in the early modern period.

At the same time, character remains important in every context. Good fama is required of the experiencer, whether it is built upon the natural knowledge that lets them understand their experience, or the social and cultural status that make them capable of acting as legal witness.

Experience alone is never sufficient: it must be the experience of one with the good fama required to reliably bear witness to it. We finish this study with The Book of John Mandeville because it is here that the epistemic structures of natural philosophy and popular culture most clearly collide and entangle. The category of the credible knower and legal witness collapse into the figure of John Mandeville, just as the genres of encyclopedia and pilgrimage narrative collapse into The Book. The threads of this study are brought together to illustrate the importance of genre and context to understanding the epistemic standards of medieval authors and readers.

We must be conscious that this study has only addressed a small sample of medieval texts concerning nature and we must be careful in attempting to make any general claims. These were, however, very widely read texts that enjoyed a long and, in most cases, fairly diverse readership.

Most of these texts continued to be read and reproduced into the age of printing, experiencing an ever widening and more diverse audience and often seeing a shift in the way they are treated by new audiences. Despite the significant differences we have shown in the ways each text makes use of the epistemic structures of reason, authority, and experience, the way these texts engage 227 with nature was clearly compelling to their readers. The overlap between audiences suggests that the readers were capable of engaging with each text on its own terms. Medieval readers did not have a monolithic set of assumptions concerning how evidence should be treated in the context of natural investigation; rather, different genres of text were approached with different expectations. Each text is capable of putting forward a coherent and believable view of nature within the confines of its own genre. They each deploy the same basic epistemic structures, but they exist on a spectrum that does not require the same approach to evidence from an experimentum as is expected from a scholastic commentary.

This thesis highlights the importance of being conscious of genre and audience in our approach to questions of medieval evidence standards and epistemology. Science and nature are discussed in a wide variety of medieval texts and we should be prepared to engage with a similar variety of epistemic approaches. Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia is no more credulous than

Albertus’s commentary, despite the genre structures that lead Bartholomaeus to present the appearance of an uncritical approach to authority. If we wish to understand medieval science we must engage with it in its wide variety of social and textual contexts and we must recognize that readers were capable of engaging with these texts in a complex and contextually sensitive manner. Bibliography

1 Primary Sources

Adelard of Bath. Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and on Birds. Edited and Translated by Charles Burnett, with the collaboration of Italo Ronca, Perdo Mantas España, and Baudouin van den Abeele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Albertus Magnus. Albert the Great: Questions Concerning Aristotle’s On Animals. Translated by Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Albertus Magnus, Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus Libri XXVI, nach der Cölner Urschrift: Mit unterstützung der Kgl. Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München, der Görres-Gesellschaft und der Rheinischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Forschung. Edited by Herman Stadler, 2 vols. Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1916. Albertus Magnus. Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. Translated by Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irvine M. Resnick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999. Albertus Magnus. Book of Minerals. Edited and Translated by Dorothy Wyckoff. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Albertus Magnus. Opera Omnia: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edenda apparatu critico notis prolegomenis indiciums intruenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside. Vol. 7, part 1, De anima, Edited by Clemens Stroick. Aschendorff: Monasterii Westfalorum, 1961. Albertus Magnus. Opera Omnia: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edenda apparatu critico notis prolegomenis indiciums intruenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside. Vol. 27, part 2, De homine, edited by Henryk Anzulewicz and Joachim R. Söder. Aschendorff: Monasterii Westfalorum, 2008. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text. Edited by M.C. Seymour et al., 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. De proprietatibus rerum. Vol. 6, liber XVII. Edited by Iolanda Ventura. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. De rerum proprietatibus: Frankfurt 1601. Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964.

228 229

Best, Michael R. and Frank H. Brightman, eds. The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, also a Book of the Marvels of the World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Deluz, Christiane, ed. Jean de Mandeville: Le Livre de merveilles du monde. Paris: CNRS, 2000. Draelants, Isabelle, ed. and trans. Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium (Liber aggregationis): Un texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand. Micrologus’ Library 22. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, and Muriel Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pliny. Natural History. Vol. 2, Books 3-7. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 352. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Digital Loeb Classical Library. Pliny. Natural History. Vol. 3, Books 8-11. 2nd ed. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 353. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Digital Loeb Classical Library. Pliny. Natural History. Vol. 4, Books 12-16. rev. ed. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 370. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Digital Loeb Classical Library. Sannino, Antonella, ed. Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale. Micrologus’ Library 41. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. Seymour, M.C., ed. The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. William of Conches. A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy: A Translation of the New Latin Critical Text, translated by Italo Ronca and Mathew Curr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Yule, Sir Henry, ed. and trans. Cathay and the Way Thither. Vol 2. London: Hakluyt Society, 1913.

2 Secondary Sources

Agrimi, Jole, and Chiara Crisciani, “The Science and Practice of Medicine in the Thirteenth Century According to Guglielmo da Saliceto, Italian Surgeon.” In Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, edited by Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham, 60-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 230

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville.” Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1500, edited by Rosamund Allen, 156- 176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Akehurst, F.R.P. “Good Name, Reputation, and Notoriety in French Customary Law.” In Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, edited by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, 75-94. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Ashley, Benedict M. “St. Albert and the Nature of Natural Science.” In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by James A. Weisheipl, 73-102. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Ashworth, William B. Jr. "Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg, 303-332. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Asúa, Miguel de. “Minerals, Plants and Animals from A to Z. The inventory of the Natural World in Albert the Great’s philosophia naturalis.” In Albertus Magnus: Zum Gedenken nach 800 Jahren: Neue Zugänge, Aspekte und Perspektiven, eds. Walter Senner with the collaboration of Henryk Anzulewicz, Maria Bruder, Ruth Meyer, Maria Nauert, Pablo C. Sicouly, Joachim Söder, and Klaus-Bernward Springer, 389-400. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001. Bagliani, Agostino Paravicini, ed. Micrologus, natura, scienze e società medievali 8, Il mondo animale/ The World of Animals (2000). Barrera-Gómez, Noemi. “Bartholomaeus Anglicus como compilador. fuentes y autoridades en el Liber de Deo del De proprietàtibus rerum.” In La compilacion del saber en la Edad Media/La compilation du savoir au Moyen Âge/The Compilation of Knowledge in the Middle Ages, edited by Maria José Muñoz, Patricia Cañizares, and Cristina Martin, 85- 103. Porto: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales, 2013. Bartlett, Robert. The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages: The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast, 2006. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Baxter, Ron. Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Bénatouïl, Thomas, and Isabelle Draelants, eds. Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5- 7 février 2009). Micrologus’ Library 40. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. Bénatouïl, Thomas, and Isabelle Draelants, “Introduction.” In Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à- Mousson (5-7 février 2009), edited by Thomas Béntaouïl and Isabelle Draelants, 3-15. Micrologus’ Library 40. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. 231

Best, Michael R. and Frank H. Brightman, “Introduction.” In The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, also a Book of the Marvels of the World, edited by Michael R. and Frank H. Brightman, xi-xlviii. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Bogaart, Saskia. “Vernacularisation of Latin Science: On the Properties of Things and Van den proprieteyten der dinghen.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, 31-41. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Børch, Marianne, ed. Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004. Boudet, Jean-Patrice. Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006. Bowman, Jeffery. “Infamy and Proof in Medieval Spain.” In Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, edited by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, 95- 117. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Brévart, Francis B. “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion: Wonder Drugs in German Medico-Pharmaceutical Treatises of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth centuries.” Speculum 83 (2008): 1-57. Browe, Peter. “Die scholastiche Theorie der eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder.” in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, edited by Hubertus Lutterbach and Thomas Flammer, 251-264. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003. Brundage, James A. The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Brundage, James A. "Proof in Canonical and Criminal Law.” Continuity and Change 11, no. 3 (1996): 329-339. Brundage, James A. "Universities and the 'Ius Commune' in Medieval Europe." In The Profession and Practice of Medieval Canon Law, edited by James A. Brundage, 237-253. Aldershot: Ashgate-Variorum, 2004. Burnett, Charles. “Scientific Speculations.” In A History of 12th Century Western Philosophy, edited by Peter Dronke, 151-176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Burnett, Charles. “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance.” In Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 2, Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, 365-384. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Miracles and Marvels: The Limits of Alterity.” In Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Franz J. Felten, 232

Nikolas Jaspert with the collaboration of Stephanie Haarländer, 799-817. Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1999. Bynum, Caroline Walker. "Wonder.” The American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 1-26. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400- 1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Chenu, M-D. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West. Translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Clark, Willene B. A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2006. Crisciani, Chiara. “Experientia e opus in medicina ed alchimia: Forme e problemi di esperienza nel tardo medioevo.” Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L'esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004): 149-173. Crombie, A.C. Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Duckworth, 1994. Cunningham, Andrew. “The Identity of Natural Philosophy: A Response to Edward Grant.” Early Science and Medicine 5, no. 3 (2000): 259-278. Cunningham, Andrew. “A Last Word.” Early Science and Medicine 5, no. 3 (2000): 299-300. Cunningham, Richard. “Virtual Witnessing and the Role of the Reader in a New Natural Philosophy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 207-224. Cunningham, Stanley B. "Albertus Magnus on Natural Law.” Journal of the History of Ideas 28, no. 4 (1967): 479-502. Daston, Lorraine, and Elizabeth Lunbeck. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Dear, Peter. Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Dear, Peter. The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. De Leemans, Pieter, and Michèle Goyens, eds. Translation and Authority: Authorities in Translation. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. 233

Deluz, Christiane. “Introduction.” In Jean de Mandeville: Le Livre de merveilles du monde, edited by Christiane Deluze, 7-85. Paris: CNRS, 2000. Deluz, Christiane. Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une ‘géographie’ au XIVe siècle. Louvain- LaNeuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988. Demaitre, Luke. Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013. Demaitre, Luke. “Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 30 (1975): 103-123. Denery, Dallas G. II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds. Uncertain Knowledge: Skepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Donahue, Charles Jr. “Proof by Witnesses in the Church Courts of Medieval England: An Imperfect Reception of the Learned Law.” In On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, edited by Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally Scully, and Stephen White, 127–158. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1981. Draelants, Isabelle, “Expérience et autorités dans la philosophie naturelle d’Albert le Grand.” In Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), edited by Thomas Béntaouïl and Isabelle Draelants, 89-121. Micrologus’ Library 40. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. Draelants, Isabelle. “Partie I. Commentaire.” In Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium (Liber aggregationis): Un texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, edited and translated by Isabelle Draelants, 5-208. Micrologus’ Library 22. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007. Draelants, Isabelle. “La science naturelle et les sources chez Barthélemy l’Anglais et les encyclopédistes contemporains.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, 43-99. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Ducos, Joëlle, ed. Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Eamon, William. “Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science.” Sudhoffs Archiv 69, no. 1 (1985): 26-49. Eamon, William, and Gundolf Keil, “‘Plebs Amat Empirica’: Nicholas of Poland and His Critique of the Mediæval Medical Establishment.” Sudhoffs Archiv 71, no. 2 (1987): 180- 196. 234

Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Eastwood, Bruce S. “Early-Medieval Cosmology, Astronomy, and Mathematics.” in Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 2, Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael Shank, 302-322. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Edson, Evelyn. "Mapping the Middle Ages: The Imaginary and Real Universe of the Mappaemundi.” In Monsters, Marvels and Miracles, edited by Leif Søndergaard and Rasmus Thorning Hansen, 11-25. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005. Edson, Evelyn. Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. London: British Library, 1997. Edson, Evelyn. “Traveling on the Mappa Mundi: The World of John Mandeville.” In The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, edited by P.D.A. Harvey, 389-403. London: British Library, 2006. Edson, Evelyn. The World Map 1300-1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Edwards, A.G.S. “The Text of John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 15 (2002): 83–96. Ellard, Peter. The Sacred Cosmos: Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Early Twelfth Century School of Chartres. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007. Emery, Kent Jr., William J. Courtenay and Stephen M. Metzger. Philosophy and Theology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal Courts: Acts of the XVth Annual Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale University of Notre Dame, 8-10 October 2008. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Epstein, Stephen. The Medieval Discovery of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Esposito, Constantino, and Pasquale Porro, eds. Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L’esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004). Evans, G.R. Getting it Wrong: The Medieval Epistemology of Error. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Fidora, Alexander, and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, et al., eds. Erfahrung und Beweis: die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/ Experience and Demonstration: The Sciences of Nature in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007. Fowler, David C. Life and Times of John Trevisa: Medieval Scholar. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. 235

Fowler, Robert L. “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems.” In Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 3-30. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Fraher, Richard M. "Conviction According to Conscience: The Medieval Jurists' Debate Concerning Juridical Discretion and the Law of Proof." Law and History Review 7, no. 1 (1989): 23-88. Franklin-Brown, Mary. Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. French, Roger, and Andrew Cunningham. Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. Friedman, John B. "Albert the Great's Topoi of Direct Observation and His Debt to Thomas of Cantimpré." In Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 379-92. New York: Brill, 1997. Friedman, Russell L. Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Frisch, Andrea. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 2004. Fumagalli, Mariateresa, and Massimo Parodi. “Due enciclopedie dell’Occidente medievale: Alessandro Neckam e Bartolomeo Anglico.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 40, no. 1, Momenti e modelli nella storia dell'enciclopedia: Il mondo musulmano, ebraico e latino a confronto sul tema dell'organizzazione del sapere (1985): 51-90. George, Wilma, and Brunsdon Yapp. The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary. London: Duckworth, 1991. Grant, Edward. “God and Natural Philosophy: The Late Middle Ages and Sir Isaac Newton.” Early Science and Medicine 5, no. 3 (2000): 279-298. Grant, Edward. God and Reason in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Grant, Edward. The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Green, Richard Firth. Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Greetham, D. C. “The Concept of Nature in Bartholomaeus Anglicus (FL. 1230).” Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 4 (1980): 663-677. 236

Greetham, D.C. “Models for the Textual Transmission of Translation: The Case of John Trevisa.” Studies in Bibliography 37 (1984): 131-155. Hackett, Jeremiah. “Ego Expertus Sum: Roger Bacon’s Science and the Origins of Empiricism.” In Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à- Mousson (5-7 février 2009), edited by Thomas Béntaouïl and Isabelle Draelants, 145-173. Micrologus’ Library 40. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Harrison, Peter. “Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life.” In The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, edited by Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, 23-44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hathaway, Neil. “‘Compilatio’: from Plagiarism to Compiling.” Viator 20 (1989): 19-44. Higgins, Ian Macleod. “Introduction.” In The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, translated by Ian Macleod Higgins, ix-xxvi. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Higgins, Ian Macleod. Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997. Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “A Medieval Scientific Encyclopedia ‘Renewed by Goodly Printing’: Wynkyn de Worde's English ‘De proprietatibus rerum.’” In Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 2, The Vernacularization of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Late Medieval Europe (1998): 119-156. Hoogvliet, Margriet. "Animals in Context: Beasts on the Hereford Map and Medieval Natural History.” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, edited by P. D. A. Harvey, 153-165. London: The British Library, 2006. Hoogvliet, Margriet. “Mappae Mundi and Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image versus text.” In Pre- Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 63-74. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Hossfeld, Paul. "Die Arbeitweise des Albertus Magnus in seinen naturaphilosophischen Schriften." In Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, edited by Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann, 195-204. Mainz: Matthias-Grünwald-Verlag, 1980. Hünemörder, Christian. "Die Zoologie des Albertus Magnus." In Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, edited by Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann, 235-248. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980. 237

Jacquart, Danielle. “Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory.” In Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 2, Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, 590-610. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jacquart, Danielle. “Médecine universitaire et créativité intellectuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge.” In Sedes Scientiæ: L’émergence de la recherche à l’Université: Contributions au séminaire d’ histoire des sciences 2000-2001, edited by Patricia Radelet-de Grave and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, 17-32. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Johnson, Tom. “The Preconstruction of Witness Testimony: Law and Social Discourse in England before the Reformation” in Law and History Review 32 (2014): 127-147. Keen, Elizabeth. The Journey of a Book: Bartholomew the Englishman and the Properties of Things. Canberra A.C.T.: ANU E Press, 2007. JSTOR eBooks. Keen, Elizabeth. “Shifting Horizons: The Medieval Compilation of Knowledge as Mirror of a Changing World.” In Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Jason König and Greg Woolf, 277-300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kitchell, Kennith Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick. "Introduction: The Life and Works of Albert the Great." In Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, edited by Kennith F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick, 1-42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. König, Jason, and Greg Woolf, eds. Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 Kuehn, Thomas. “Fama as Legal Status in Renaissance Florence.” In Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, edited by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, 27-46. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Kuhn, Thomas. “Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science.” In The Essential Tensions: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, edited by Thomas Kuhn, 31-65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Lagerlund, Henrik, ed. Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Láng, Benedek. Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Larner, John. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Larner, John. “Plucking Hairs from the Great Cham’s Beard.” In Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci, 133-155. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 238

Lawler, Traugott. “On the Properties of John Trevisa’s Major Translations.” Viator 14 (1983): 267-288. Lidaka, Juris. “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century.” In Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996. Edited by Peter Binkley, 393-406. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Lidaka, Juris. “Glossing Conception, Infancy, Childhood, and Adoloscence in Book VI of De proprietatibus rerum.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, 245-266. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Lindberg, David C. “Before Science: The Invention of the Friar’s Natural Philosophy by Roger French and Andrew Cunningham (Review).” The Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 2 (1997): 313-315. Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. To A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Lindberg, David C. "The Science of Optics." In Science in the Middle Ages, edited by David C. Lindberg, 338-368. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Lindberg, David C. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lindberg, David C., and Katherine H. Tachau, “The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing.” In The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 2, Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, 485-511. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Long, Pamela O. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400-1600. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011. Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Long, Pamela O. "Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age.” Isis 88, no. 1 (1997): 1-41. Long, Pamela O. “Trading Zones: Arenas of Exchange during the Late-Medieval/Early Modern Transition in the New Empirical Sciences.” History of Technology 31 (2012): 5-25. Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias, and Alexander Fidora. Handlung und Wissenschaft: Die Epistemologie der praktischen Wissenschaften im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/Action and Science: The Epistemology of the Practical Sciences in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008. Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. “Entre l'histoire et la poétique: le 'songe politique.’” Revue des Sciences Humaines 183 (1981): 39-53. 239

McVaugh, Michael. “Arnold of Villanova and Bradwardine’s Law.” Isis 58, no. 1 (1967): 56-64. McVaugh, Michael. “The ‘Experience Based Medicine’ of the Thirteenth Century.” In Evidence and Interpretation in Studies of Early Science and Medicine: Essays in Honor of John E. Murdoch, edited by Edith Sylla and William Newman, 105-130. Boston: Brill, 2009. Mcvaugh, Michael. “The Experimenta of Arnau de Villanova.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1971): 107-118. McVaugh, Michael. “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism.” In Natura, scienze e società medievali: Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, edited by Claudio Leonardi and Francesco Santi, 177-194. Micrologus’ Library 28. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008. McVaugh, Michael. “The Nature and Limits of Medical Certitude at Early Fourteenth-Century Montpellier.” Osiris 6, Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition (1990): 62-84. McVaugh, Michael. The Rational Surgery of the Late Middle Ages. Micrologus’ Library 15. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006. McVaugh, Michael. “Treatment of Hernia in the Later Middle Ages: Surgical Correction and Social Construction.” In Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, edited by Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis García-Ballester, 131- 155. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Meier, Christel. “On the Connection between Epistemology and Ordo in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period.” In Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey, 93-114. Leuven: Peeters, 2004. Meier-Staubach, Christel. “La matérialité et l’immatérialité des couleurs. A propos du traité ‘De coloribus’ d’Avranches 235.” In Science antique, Science médiévale: Actes du colloque international (Mont-Saint-Michel, 4-7 semptembre 1998), edited by Louis Callebat and Olivier Desbordes, 451-469. Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000. Meier, Christel. “Organization of Knowledge and Encyclopaedic Ordo: Functions and Purpose of a Universal Literary Genre.” In Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 103-126. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Meier, Christel. “Über den Zusammenhang von Erkenntnistheorie und enzyklopädischem Ordo in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 36, no. 1 (2002): 171- 199. Meyer, Heinz. Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte von De proprietatibus rerum. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000. 240

Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Minnis, Alastair. “Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari: The Late-Medieval Discourse of Compilation.” In La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, edited by Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan, 47-63. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Minnis, Alastair J. Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mulchahey, M. Michèle. “First the Bow is Bent in Study…”: Dominican Education Before 1350. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998. Musson, Anthony. Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasant’s Revolt. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Newman, William R. "Art, Nature, Alchemy, and Demons: The Case of the Malleus Maleficarum and Its Medieval Sources.” In The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman, 109-133. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Newman, William R. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. North, John. “Encyclopaedias and the Art of Knowing Everything.” In Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 183-199. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Obiwulu, Aloysius. Tractus de legibus in 13th Century Scholasticism: A Critical Study and Interpretation of Law in Summa Fratris Alexandri, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003. Oggins, Robin S. "Albertus Magnus on Falcons and Hawks." In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, 441-62. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Page, Sophie. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Park, Katherine. “Natural Particulars: Epistemology, Practice, and the Literature of Healing Springs.” In Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi, 347-367. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Partridge, Stephen and Erik Kwakkel, eds. Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 241

Resnick, Irven M. “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction.” In A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, edited by Irven M. Resnick, 1-11. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Resnick, Irven M., and Kenneth F. Kitchell. “Introduction.” In Albert the Great: Questions Concerning Aristotle’s On Animals. Translated by Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr., 3-9. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Reynolds, Philip Lyndon, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Ribémont, Bernard. “L’autre et la merveille dans les encyclopédies du Moyen Âge.” In Littérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Ribémont, 155-169. Orléans: Paradigme, 2002. Ribémont, Bernard. “Une «botanique» encyclopédique confrontée à la merveille: l’exemple du De proprietatibus rerum.” In De natura rerum: Études sur les encyclopédies médiévales, 187-215. Orléans: Paradigme, 1995. Ribémont, Bernard. “On the Definition of an Encyclopaedic Genre in the Middle Ages.” In Pre- Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 47-61. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Ribémont, Bernard. “L’établissement du genre encyclopédique au Moyen Âge.” In Littérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge, edited by Bernard Ribémont, 5-23. Orléans: Paradigme, 2002. Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Riddle, John M. Goddesses, Elixirs, and Witches: Plants and Sexuality throughout Human History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Riddle, John M., and James A. Mulholland, Albert on Stones and Minerals. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Rochberg, Francesca. Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Rouse, Mary A., and Richard Rouse. “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, ca. 1250- ca.1350.” In Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, edited by Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, 259-338. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Rutkin, H. Darrl. “Astrology and Magic.” In A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy and the Sciences, edited by Irven M. Resnick, 451-506. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Saninnino, Antonella. “Il testo.” In Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale, edited by Antonella Sannino, 5-71. Micrologus’ Library 41. Florence: SISMEL- Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. 242

Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Scheifsky, Mark J. “Art and Nature in Ancient Mechanics.” In The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman, 67- 108. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Schwertner, Thomas M. St. Albert the Great, Science and Culture Series. New York: The Bruce Pub. Co., 1932. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Reprinted with new introduction by the authors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Page references are to 2011 edition. Silvi, Christine. “Jean Corbechon «revisité»: Revoir, corriger et diffuser le Propriétaire en françois dans les incunables et les post-incunables.” In Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires, eds. Joëlle Ducos, 89-123. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Silvi, Christine, Science médiévale et vérité: Étude linguistique de l’expression du vrai dans le discours scientifique en langue vulgaire. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2003. Seymour, M.C. Authors of the Middle Ages: Sir John Mandeville. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Seymour, M.C. “Introduction.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus and His Encyclopedia, eds. M.C. Seymour et al., 1-35. Aldershot: Variorum, 1992. Seymour, M.C. “Introduction.” In The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M.C. Seymour, xi-xxx. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Seymour, M.C., et al., eds. Bartholomaeus Anglicus and His Encyclopedia. Aldershot: Variorum, 1992. Smail, Daniel Lord. The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Somerset, Fiona. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Spruit, Leen. “Albert the Great on the Epistemology of Natural Science.” In Erfahrung und Beweis: die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/ Experience and Demonstration: The Sciences of Nature in the 13th and 14th Centuries, edited by 243

Alexander Fidora and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann et al., 61-75. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007. Tachau, Katherine H. Vision and Certitude in the age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics 1250-1345. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988. Takahashi, Adam. "Nature, Formative Power and Intellect in the Natural Philosophy of Albert the Great.” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 451-481. Taylor, Jamie K. Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Thorndike, Lynn. “Further Considerations of the Experimenta, Speculum astronomiae, and De secretis mulierum Ascribed to Albertus Magnus.” Speculum 30, no. 3 (1955): 413-443. Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol. 2, During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era. 1923. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947. Thorndike, Lynn. "The True Place of Astrology in the History of Science.” In The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Michael H. Shank, 239-244. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Tugwell, Simon, ed. Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Twomey, Michael W. “Editing De proprietatibus rerum, Book XIV, from the sources.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, 221-244. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Twomey, Michael W. “Inventing the Encyclopedia.” In Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey, 73- 92. Leuven: Peeters, 2004. Twomey, Michael W. “Middle English Translations of Medieval Encyclopedias.” Literature Compass 3, no. 3 (2006): 331-340. Twomey, Michael W. “Towards a Reception History of Western Medieval Encyclopedias in England before 1500.” In Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, edited by Peter Binkley, 329-362. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Tzanaki, Rosemary. Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Van den Abeele, Baudouin, “Barthélemy l’Anglais et Jean Corbechon: Enquêtes sur le livre XII, De avibus.” In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, 245-266. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. 244

Van den Abeele, Baudouin. “Introduction générale.” In De proprietatibus rerum edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele, Heinz Meyer, et al., 3-34. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Van der Lugt, Maaike. “Animal légendaire et discours savant médiéval. La barnacle dans tous ses états.” Micrologus, natura, scienze e società medievali 8, Il mondo animale/ The World of Animals (2000): 351-393. Veneziani, Marco, ed. Experientia: X Colloquio Internazionale Roma, 4-6 gennaio 2001. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2002. Ventura, Iolanda. “The Curae ex animalibus in the Medical Literature of the Middle Ages: The Example of the Illustrated Herbals.” In Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles: communications présentées au XVe Colloque de la Société Internationale Renardienne (Louvain-la-Neuve, 19-22.8.2003), edited by Baudouin Van Den Abeele, 213-248. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 2005. von den Brincken, Anna-Dorothee. “Jerusalem on Medieval Mappaemundi: A Site both Historical and Eschatological.” In The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, edited by P.D.A. Harvey, 355-380. London: British Library, 2006. Wallace, William A. "Albertus on Suppositional Necessity in the Natural Sciences." In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by James A. Weisheipl, 102- 128. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Wallace, William A. "The Scientific Methodology of St. Albert the Great.” In Albertus Magnus- Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, edited by Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann, 385- 407. Mainz: Matthas-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980. Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000-1215. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1982. Weisheipl, James A. "Appendix 1. Albert's Works on Natural Sciences." In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by James A. Weisheipl, 565-577. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Weisheipl, James A. “Life and Works of St. Albert.” In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by James A. Weisheipl, 13-51. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Wickham, Chris. “Fama and the Law in Twelfth Century Tuscany.” In Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, edited by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, 15-26. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Wickham, Chris. “Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry.” Past and Present 160 (1998): 3-24. Williams, Steven J. “The Early Circulation of Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the West: The Papal and Imperial Courts.” Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali 2, Le scienze alla corte di Frederico II (1994): 127-144. 245

Yeager, Suzanne M. Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Yeager, Suzanne M. “The World Translated: Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde, The Book of Sir Jon Mandeville, and Their Medieval Audiences.” In Marco Polo and the Encounter of the East and West, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci, 156-181. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Zambelli, Paola. The Speculum astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. Zimmermann, Michel, ed. Auctor and auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (14-16 join 1999). Paris: École des Chartes, 2001. Zucker, Arnaud. “Expertine sunt Antiqui?” In Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5- 7 février 2009). Edited by Thomas Béntaouïl and Isabelle Draelants, 19-39. Micrologus’ Library 40. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. Zumthor, Paul, and Catherine Peeble. “The Medieval Travel Narrative.” New Literary History 25, no. 4, part 2 (1994): 809-824.