First, a note on nomenclature used in this book: since we have no definitive version of the Latin text of De proprietatibus rerum and no copy extant from Bartholomew’s time, I have chosen to use an abbreviated name, ‘Properties’, for his work. This is intended to distinguish what we might call the notional compilation, known to us only through a variable array of manuscript material, from the concrete and complete versions of it that are available between hard covers. A printed edition of the Latin text produced in Germany in 1601 is available in facsimile edition and I abbreviate this to ‘DrP’ in citations.^[18] The Oxford critical edition of John Trevisa’s English-dialect translation completed in 1398, On the Properties of Things, is abbreviated to Properties.^[19]

Bartholomew’s compilation is extant in about 100 Latin manuscripts and fragments; a complete manuscript runs to about 400 folios. The layout, running headings, tabula and marginalia of the earliest extant manuscripts of ‘Properties’ testify that scribes were reproducing the work in scholarly format by the end of the thirteenth century, consistent with the view that it was promoted as a handy reference work for preachers.^[20] Lidaka concludes that Bartholomew compiled ‘Properties’ as a useful manual for the evangelising German friars in the 1230s: ‘As a general introduction, De proprietatibus rerum aided those who needed help in finding material: this made it useful for libraries and for the less advanced, but it would not be of much value to the well educated.’ He adduces evidence for its reception in the thirteenth century that ‘places it squarely at such a lower level of readership’.^[21] Nevertheless, research into the ownership of ‘Properties’ manuscripts suggests that the work’s readership soon came to extend beyond the boundaries of the Franciscan Order, and that the text was used by scholars of other Orders who required moralised compendia of knowledge as an aid to sermon writing and biblical exegesis. In 1297 the Dominican Master General Boccasini (later Pope Benedict XI) may have given the book to a Dominican convent, and Pope John XXII may have bought a copy in 1329.^[22] Charles Samaran suggests that the copy owned by the Avignon Cardinal Pierre de Prés was the one acknowledged by his protégé, the Benedictine Pierre Bersuire, to be a main source for his Reductorium morale of c.1343.^[23]

A vernacular translation of ‘Properties’ appeared in 1309 when Vivaldo Belcalzar made an abridged version in the dialect of Mantua for his lay patron, Guido Buonalcosi. Later manuscripts and printed editions testify that ‘Properties’ was subsequently translated into several European languages, including English, during the fourteenth century, and that translation and original were copied, adapted and mined for material over the next two centuries. It was printed in Germany and France as soon as presses were active in the 1470s. In 1398 John Trevisa completed the English translation, On the Properties of Things, for his patron Lord Thomas Berkeley IV (d.1417). Of this version, Seymour lists eight manuscripts and three fragments extant in England, the United States and Japan, dating from the early to the late fifteenth century. In 1495 Wynkyn de Worde made the first printed edition of the English version, followed by the editions of Thomas Berthelet in 1535, and Stephen Batman in 1582.^[24] There are in existence, therefore, incunables and early printed editions of the work, in both the Latin and the vernacular versions, dating from the 1470s to about 1600.^[25] After the early 1600s it ceased to be reprinted but remained of interest to antiquarians and to modern historians.

The Franciscan Order was an international mendicant brotherhood whose members travelled widely to study, preach and evangelise. The wide distribution of Bartholomew’s work reflects its rapid spread across Europe and across social milieux. Of the Latin text, Seymour lists nearly 100 manuscripts of English, French, German and Italian provenance, now found in collections in western and eastern Europe and the United States, dating from the late-thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. From the fourteenth century, vernacular versions — Italian, French, English, Provençal, Spanish and Dutch — add to this number.^[26] As a result ‘Properties’ was absorbed into separate continental cultures and has other reception histories, and other bodies of literature, beyond the scope of this book.