Because a number of compilations appear around the turn of the thirteenth century, coeval with the translations from Aristotle and the growth of secular colleges in Paris, they have been grouped together in the literature and labelled ‘encyclopaedias’. Robert Collison lists ‘Properties’ as one of the medieval encyclopaedias that amass contemporary knowledge from the Christian, Arab and Buddhist medieval worlds.^[19] K. W. Humphreys includes ‘Properties’ among the ‘scientific books’ held in the library of St Croce, Florence, in 1426.^[20] An exhibition held in the Newberry Library, Chicago, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, includes Wynkyn de Worde's ‘Properties’ as the first printed example of the genre.^[21]

In the introduction to their volume on Christian imagery, R. Kaske and his colleagues comment: ‘During the past several decades, we have become increasingly aware of the allusive density of medieval literature, and of the extent to which much of its imagery depends on certain large bodies of traditional Christian learning.’ While potentially of great value as a clue to the multivalent nature of medieval works, this density can be hard for us to penetrate.^[22] To assist the reader in this task Michael Twomey, in an appendix to the volume, lists and describes compendia roughly contemporary with ‘Properties’ that he categorises as 'major' and 'minor' encyclopaedias.^[23] He includes ‘Properties’ among the major works, along with Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, Rabanus Maurus' De rerum naturis, Honorius Augustodunensis' Elucidarium and Imago mundi, the German Lucidarius (c.1190, a guide for the laity); Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum and Laus sapientie divine; Thomas of Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum and Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum maius. Twomey finds the 'minor' works harder to categorise, but includes Isidore's De natura rerum; Ps-Isidore's De ordine creaturarum; Bede's De natura rerum and Summarium Heinrici; Lambert of St Omer's Liber floridus; Hildegard of Bingen's Physica and Causae et curae; Pseudo-Hugh of St Victor's De bestiis et aliis rebus; Secretum secretorum; Arnoldus Saxo's De finibus rerum naturalium (mid-thirteenth century); Brunetto Latini's Trésor; Book of Sidrach (mid-thirteenth century, also called Fountain of All Knowledge); and Placides et Timéo (a platonic dialogue, c.1250–1300). He includes some of Bartholomew’s near-contemporary sources, such as the work Magnae derivationes by Uguccione da Pisa (d.1210: 'an etymological dictionary with an encyclopedic range'). Twomey considers that this work formed the basis for the alphabetically organized Catholicon by Johannes de Balbis, completed in 1286.

Such a survey allows us to see Bartholomew’s undertaking in the context of a widely felt impulse to compile useful knowledge, and to realise that although the compilers presented their work in different ways, they partook of the same pool of authorised knowledge, borrowed from each other, and shared the same general views about the value and purpose of their undertakings. This appendix is a useful database for the researcher, as it supplies an overview of each work's content and dissemination history and does indeed provide one kind of map of the genre.