An early motivation for this study was the sense that Bartholomew’s work should not be described, as it has been in the past, as an early encyclopaedia — with consequent emphasis on its apparent failures of logic, objectivity and consistency.^[30] A modern response to it may involve pleasure and a sense of participation in glimpses of narratives and scenes from everyday life; a panorama that a reader could enter at any point, pull apart into separate Books, or re-read many times — one tempered to the needs of readers with close links to a rural community or accustomed to monastic reading practices. Remarkably, the modern Canadian poet David Solway has found inspiration in Bartholomew; finding ‘a growing sense of delight with … the language of both the Latin original and of Trevisa’s translation. … It was the earthy and material quality of the language, its floral exuberance, rather than the encyclopaedia of often abstract subjects, which I found compelling, almost irresistible.’^[31] A historian too may appreciate the vitality and narrative colour that Bartholomew infuses into a morally useful compilation of knowledge.

The approach taken here follows pointers from the work of educationists of the 1970s based upon Wolfgang Iser's theories of reading. These theories produced empirical models of the reading process and literacy acquisition that are arguably relevant to the study of medieval readers.^[32] Presumably, as we do, medieval readers decoded written symbols and, as they did so, constructed meaning from them with varying degrees of competence. If we can assume that the physiological/phenomenological processes involved in reading were the same in the thirteenth-century reader as they are in us, and also that good teachers of that time knew from experience how to help students to learn and remember, then Iser's notion of ‘active reading’ may tend to support the idea that Bartholomew constructed ‘Properties’ with students’ learning needs in mind.^[33]

We have no information on, or concrete evidence about, the text of ‘Properties’ as Bartholomew first presented it for students at Magdeburg. For later readers, including ourselves, it has come mediated by the responses of many others; yet much of the existing literature on ‘Properties’ has focused on attempts to pin down the ‘authentic’ text, as an idealised abstraction or exemplar. There has been little attention paid to the individuals who commissioned, produced and read such books, then as now, in response to a desire or need specific to their own lives. Carl Reiter offers another useful approach to the responses of medieval readers who copied and amended earlier works; they can, he argues, be regarded in a sense as that work’s re-writers or re-creators. What they pass on to the next reader is something new to some extent, but the work’s authority remains. He invokes Iser’s theory of the active nature of the reading process to support his view of manuscripts as concrete, battered objects behind which lurk actual historical readers. Whether produced in professional scriptoria or owner-produced in the home for here-and-now purposes, we can see the books they re-created as ‘artifacts of the reading process’ rather than, or as well as, carriers of an established text.^[34] It must be acknowledged, however, that historical hindsight requires a complementary approach that does treat works as entities (for example Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the Bible). Nor can it be denied that scholarly and painstaking studies of manuscript affiliations provide vital evidence about a work’s transmission over time. They are a valued prerequisite for longitudinal studies such as this one.

The text of ‘Properties’ is long and dense, even in Trevisa’s English translation, so the approach taken here is to limit detailed examinations and close readings to a sample of the Books and to examples from the work’s themes as they emerge, and as the referential and multi-stranded nature of the text reveals itself. The study does not pretend to be a comprehensive explanation of the range of things and properties that Bartholomew treats: rather, it aims to highlight parts of the textual landscape and the possible relationships between them, to indicate the way the whole may have worked for its medieval readers as they roamed within the text or stopped to ruminate at particular points.