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As I gather, Bartholomaeus Glanville took his name from the most noble family of the earls of Suffolk. As a youth he faithfully observed the Franciscan way of life. When older he frequented the Vale of Isis, Paris, and even, if the surmise is correct, Rome herself. A wise man, he spent the first parts of his studies acquiring skill in philosophy and, equally, theology: in the former, so that he might investigate more precisely the causes of material things; in the latter, so that he might, so to speak, illumine his mind with a divine radiance. Aristotle, Plato and Pliny were his companions in that situation; distinguished by his mastery of them, he elegantly composed and put forth the book of Properties of Things: which the hand of time constantly tended, so that its fame has justly grown to greatness.[1]
Historians have been interested in the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomew the Englishman since the sixteenth century, when John Leland (d.1552) included the compiler in his catalogue of esteemed English writers and planted the notion of Bartholomew’s Glanville origins. Successive ages and literary cultures have found their own uses for the work and its compiler and their own reasons to investigate him and the image of creation that he helped to perpetuate. The present age is no exception — Bartholomew’s identity, career, philosophy and achievement have all been examined and re-assessed since Leland’s time. It is not the intention here to enter into the debate about Bartholomew’s identity but, rather, to draw conclusions about the ways in which later cultures perceived and represented him. We do have sufficient evidence to be able to introduce him as a not-too-shadowy figure, and to follow traces of some of the personae he acquired over time. These traces, in the form of written responses and attitudes to him and his work, invite the historian’s scrutiny as testimony to changes in medieval people’s ideas about things and their properties. The work becomes a point of reference by which we can judge adherences to, or departures from, orthodox medieval representations of the world and society.
Bartholomew is known today from his single large compilation of knowledge referred to throughout the Middle Ages as De proprietatibus rerum, ‘On the properties of things’. There have been debates about his nationality and background: when he lived; whether he was an Englishman, Frenchman or Burgundian, or in the English ‘nation’ at Paris; whether he was educated at Oxford or Chartres. In the nineteenth century Léopold Delisle questioned the accepted notion, illustrated above, that Bartholomew was a fourteenth-century member of the Glanville family of Suffolk and identified him as a French compiler of the thirteenth century. Michael Seymour has suggested that Johannes Anglicus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, both of whom were sent to Magdeburg, may have been members of the natio anglicana in Paris after studying at Oxford. Seymour tentatively identifies him with Bartholomew of Prague, minister provincial of newly-converted Bohemia in 1255–56.[2] Gerald Se Boyar argues that he was educated at Chartres. It is generally agreed, however, that Bartholomew completed ‘Properties’ in Saxony in about 1240, that he was extremely well read, but that he might not have had with him in Magdeburg all the books he draws on — in other words, he cites from memory.[3]
For a contemporary account of him we must rely on a few mentions by early Franciscan writers. Giordano of Giano (professed c.1217 and a member of the second mission to Germany in 1221) supplies the few contemporary glimpses we have of Bartholomew’s career. According to Giordano, brother Bartholomaeus Anglicus was one of two friars then in France sent to organise the new Franciscan province of Saxonia; he himself arranged to conduct them thither in 1231. According to the Franciscan chronicler Thomas of Eccleston, writing in the following century, the Englishman Haymo of Faversham and ‘three other professors’ were admitted to the Order at St Denys in Paris in about 1223.[4] One of these others may have been Bartholomew. He became the sixth minister provincial of Saxonia in 1262 and held the office for almost 10 years. The date of his death may have been 1272, since another brother was elected in his place at the provincial chapter held at Magdeburg that year.[5] A younger Franciscan, Salimbene of Parma, looking back from the vantage point of the 1280s, recalls that Bartholomew had gained a reputation over the years as a great master of the Scriptures in Paris and refers to ‘his book on the properties of things, which volume is divided into nineteen separate books’.[6]
Evidence suggests that Magdeburg had been a site of violent conversion to Christianity.[7] According to Giordano, the Franciscans had settled at Magdeburg as recently as 1223, and his account indicates that in the middle years of the century the church was still involved in efforts to extend its control eastwards. It also reveals that at that time Saxony still had a reputation (if only from a Parisian perspective) as a dangerous frontier of Christendom.[8] Bartholomew may have compiled ‘Properties’ to provide instruction, spiritual and practical guidance, and moral encouragement to recruits in the studium, since he tells us that his compilation brings together simply the words of wise and holy men for simple and humble brethren who might not otherwise have access to them.[9] This was a conventional statement of a compiler’s intent, but Bartholomew’s clear language style and accessible imagery do seem to take into account the comprehension levels of educated and less-educated students; while he himself was clearly a scholar, his language and content appear to cater for a spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the earthy.[10]
The early membership of the Order was made up of laymen and laywomen, but clerics began to fill its offices during Francis’ lifetime. As Lawrence Landini shows, coercive popes, able ministers and sympathetic bishops were all factors in the Order’s growth and social integration but also in its inexorable clericalisation.[11] The date of the completion of ‘Properties’ coincided with events of great significance for the Order, as Juris Lidaka points out, because the dismissal of Elias as Minister General in 1239 turned recruitment policy away from laity and towards those with a clerical education.[12] This hastened the clericalisation process but worsened controversy over the possession of books and other material goods. After difficult years of division, papal support resumed under Nicholas III, who issued the Bull Exiit qui seminat in 1279, formalising the right of Friars Minor to have the use not only of food, clothes and office books but also ‘necessary material for the pursuit of wisdom’.[13]
Bartholomew’s work is often referred to as the most popular medieval encyclopaedia, and grouped with other large-scale compilations of the late twelfth to thirteenth centuries, in particular De naturis rerum of Alexander Neckam (1156–1217); De natura rerum of Thomas de Cantimpré (1201–80); Speculum naturale of Vincent de Beauvais (1187–1264); and the interpretations of Aristotle of Albert the Great (1193–1280).[14] These compilers were close contemporaries who all produced their major works in the 1230s to 1250s. They did not necessarily come into contact with each other, and they differ in the degree to which each incorporates the liberal arts curriculum, in the empiricism or otherwise of their approaches to nature, and in the way they organise their material. The works have in common that their compilers were clerics and mendicant scholars who drew upon the writings of the church fathers and of the classical philosophers, their commentators and translators. While the group as a whole has in the past been described as innovative, it has now been convincingly identified with a much earlier-established genre of medieval compilatio, or ‘world book’, following early-medieval models such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and Honorius of Autun’s Imago mundi. Bartholomew is the only Franciscan compiler among them whose work is accessible to English-speaking readers.[15] ‘Properties’ can then be considered as one of a peer-group of compilations of knowledge made in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that arose from the church’s immediate need but that gained lasting prestige during the Middle Ages. The works of Bartholomew’s near contemporaries Neckam, de Cantimpré, Albert the Great and Vincent de Beauvais also have histories of reception during the later Middle Ages but, while their traces can be found in the work of later writers (for example, Ranulph Higden made much use of Vincent’s Speculum maius in his fourteenth-century universal history Polychronicon, and Geoffrey Chaucer also evidently knew Vincent's work), they were not translated into English or printed in England.[16]
Michael Twomey, discussing how one might approach a reception history of medieval encyclopaedias, has proposed three phases in the history of the genre: the earliest phase from the seventh century, when encyclopaedias were used as pedagogical aids in the schools, both setting and ownership being institutional and the user a teacher; a later phase when encyclopaedias were used as raw material for sermons and the chief users were preachers; and the still-later period when the encyclopaedia might be part of a private library, a possession with monetary value figuring in inheritances and bequests. In this phase production might be by professional scribe, possibly in the vernacular, and users might be educated laymen together with regular and secular clergy. The reception history of Bartholomew’s work exemplifies and firms these suggested phases. Twomey concludes that ‘Properties’ became ‘the pearl of great price’ for book owners and for writers in later-medieval England: ‘For literary authors, both religious and secular, Bartholomaeus’ encyclopaedia is far and away the encyclopaedia of choice — at least, as far as current research suggests — with Vincent’s Speculum a distant second.’[17] Moreover it continues after 1500, into the era of print and Protestantism. Twomey warns, however, that, although there might be evidence to identify individuals and intellectual communities who owned and used the book, the motives of users are extremely difficult to reconstruct and any reception history must necessarily be tentative. While individual use and ownership can only occasionally be substantiated within the life story of ‘Properties’, the hope is that we may learn from such a long span of use something about the successive cultures that found it significant.