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| Bartholomaeus Anglicus | |
|---|---|
| Name | Bartholomaeus Anglicus |
| Birth date | c. 1203–1210 |
| Death date | c. 1272 |
| Occupation | Franciscan friar, scholar, encyclopedist |
| Notable works | De Proprietatibus Rerum |
| Nationality | English |
Bartholomaeus Anglicus was a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar and encyclopedic compiler active in the Kingdom of England and Paris who authored the influential Latin compendium De Proprietatibus Rerum. His work synthesized material drawn from classical authors such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Isidore of Seville and from medieval scholars including Hugh of Saint Victor, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, becoming a standard reference across medieval Europe in contexts connected to universities, clerical learning, and monastic libraries. His life intersects with institutions like the University of Paris, the Franciscan Order, and royal courts such as that of Henry III of England.
Bartholomaeus belonged to the Franciscan Order during the lifetime of figures like Saint Bonaventure and worked amid intellectual currents shaped by the School of Chartres, the Scholasticism debates involving Peter Lombard, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, and the influence of the Corpus Aristotelicum. Sources link his career to Franciscans active at the University of Paris alongside contemporaries such as Alexander of Hales and Robert Grosseteste, and to English intellectual circles connected to Oxford University and provincial episcopal sees like Canterbury and Lincoln. His education and affiliations placed him within networks overlapping with the papacy of Urban IV and the reforms of Gregory IX, while his writings circulated through manuscript production tied to scriptoria in cities such as Paris, Oxford, Paris, and Prague.
Bartholomaeus's oeuvre centers on large compendia reflecting the medieval encyclopedic tradition established by Isidore of Seville, Cassiodorus, and later adopters like Rabanus Maurus and Honorius Augustodunensis. His De Proprietatibus Rerum epitomizes the genre in the company of works like Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Maius and the Etymologiae tradition, drawing on authorities including Galen, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Boethius, Plotinus, Solomon (biblical tradition), and Josephus. Other attributed or related compositions circulated in manuscript compilations and influenced readers from medieval scholastics to Renaissance humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus.
De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things) is an encyclopedic handbook organized into sections on God and creation, angels, human beings and the body, natural history, minerals, plants, animals, astronomy, meteorology, and wonders of distant lands. It synthesizes material from Aristotle's On the Heavens, Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Isidore of Seville's Etymologias, and medical authorities like Galen and Hippocrates, while echoing theological framings found in works by Augustine of Hippo, Bede, and Hugh of Saint Victor. The text became available in vernacular translations—Middle English and Middle French—thus reaching audiences from scholars at the University of Paris to urban patrons in London and readers in the Holy Roman Empire and Iberian Peninsula. Printers in Venice and Basel produced early incunabula editions, extending reach into the Renaissance alongside editions connected to printers such as Aldus Manutius.
De Proprietatibus Rerum functioned as a reference across disciplines in medieval and early modern Europe, informing natural philosophy taught at institutions like the University of Paris and University of Oxford, guiding compilers such as Vincent of Beauvais, and shaping texts consulted by figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Trevisa, and Thomas Linacre. Its circulation affected practical knowledge in arenas involving royal households of Edward I and Edward III, civic hospitals associated with St Bartholomew's Hospital, and learning in convents and cathedral schools such as Lincoln Cathedral School. Renaissance humanists and early modern scientists, including readers in networks around Niccolò Machiavelli and Cardinal Bessarion, encountered its synthesis even as empirical methods advanced in the work of Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon.
Hundreds of medieval manuscripts preserve De Proprietatibus Rerum, with notable codices held in repositories like the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Vatican Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and regional archives in Prague and Seville. Critical editions and translations appeared from the early print era with editors and printers in Venice, Paris, and Basel, while modern scholarly editions and studies have been produced in contexts including the Institut de France, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and university departments at Sorbonne University and Columbia University. Paleographers and codicologists study marginalia linked to owners such as John Lydgate and patrons in the House of Tudor.
Medieval reception praised the work's utility for clerics, physicians, and administrators in networks tied to papal chancelleries and episcopal courts, while later critics in the early modern period contested its reliance on authority over experiment amid debates involving Galileo Galilei, William Gilbert, and Francis Bacon. Humanists like Erasmus and scholars in the Republic of Letters reassessed its sources, prompting annotated editions and partial rebuttals by physicians such as Andreas Vesalius and commentators in faculties of medicine at Padua and Montpellier. Modern historians of science and medieval studies at institutions such as Harvard University and University of Cambridge analyze Bartholomaeus's method as exemplifying compilation, transmission, and the intersection of theology and natural knowledge.
Category:13th-century scholars Category:Medieval encyclopedists Category:Franciscans