In the last decades of the twentieth century, the earlier assumptions about ‘Properties’ and its peers started to be questioned as historians rethought the nature of so-called medieval science as an enterprise in its own right and with a particular function in its own time. The contentious issue of genre arises in part from the fact that Bartholomew placed side by side the teachings of the Church Fathers and extracts from the works of Aristotle newly available in Latin — for him and his readers, the respectively old and revered, and modern and controversial. David Greetham examines ‘Properties’ as a specifically Franciscan work, addressing what he sees as a fundamental problem; namely, that Bartholomew is trying to provide biblical exegesis, practical information and affective stories all at the same time. Thus his work ‘exemplifies the intellectual discomforts of the medieval philosophy of science’.^[30] Greetham concludes, however, that the inherent contradictions within ‘Properties’ contributed to its popularity, and helped to transmit a 'tensioned and ambiguous' philosophy of nature through the course of the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. More recently, and in the context of an ongoing debate about the nature of medieval investigation of the natural world, David Lindberg concludes:

Contextual elements relevant to this study include the role of the thirteenth-century church as the primary patron of learning and its efforts to combat Cathar heresy; changing techniques of book production; the expansion of the book market into the lay world; and the friars’ pursuit of a philosophy of nature combining allegorical and classical elements. The troubles surrounding the Catholic church at the time were an important factor in the production of authoritative books; French and Cunningham show that the friars’ compilations, particularly those of the Dominicans, were tools designed for waging intellectual war on the Cathars. This urgent ecclesiastical need for patronage and control through teaching had a gradual effect on the theory and practice of authorship and compilation.^[32] In addition, the friars — particularly the Franciscans — were intent upon the study of the natural world as a way of understanding God. French and Cunningham also examine and elucidate the character and function of the friars’ natural philosophy (which privileges light and its symbolic properties) in the context of the concerns of the church and of the Order. They conclude that Roger Bacon, for example, drew on ‘Properties’ to investigate physical phenomena, especially light, in order to align Aristotle’s teaching with Franciscan beliefs and orthodox doctrine: ‘The famous medieval conflict between “science” and “religion” is in fact a construct of the nineteenth century. The medieval discipline of natural philosophy, by contrast, was one in which nature was explored in the cause of defending Roman Catholicism — fighting heresy and promoting lay spirituality.’^[33]

The inclusion of religious allegory in the medieval compilations, then, has been a problem for historians because it appears to muddy the springs of scientific thought and to contradict their assumed purpose. In the 1980s, ‘Properties’ and its encyclopaedic contemporaries became the subject of illuminating research in Europe. Christel Meier traces the sources, models and likely functions of the compilatio as a genre and suggests new ways of defining it in medieval terms, noting a discrepancy between the negative judgements of modern readers and the positive approval of medieval commentators. She suggests that we need to see the compilations not as high-medieval innovations, but as products of a long tradition dating from late antiquity and formed by minds already ripe. Their function was to act as combined library substitute, repository of knowledge and guide to salvation.^[34] Heinz Meyer points out that the fourteenth-century derivatives of ‘Properties’, the Liber moralizatae mentioned above and the Reductium morale of Pierre Bersuire, testify that the properties of the material world as described by Bartholomew could indeed hold moral and ethical significations for the clerical reader and fulfil the criterion of moral utilitas. He asserts that the consistent body of marginal glosses occurring in early Latin manuscripts were an essential vehicle within the earliest manuscripts for the allegorical and moral meanings of the text. The later shedding of the glosses in fourteenth-century manuscripts indicates that readers became more interested in the work as a source of factual, rather than moralised, accounts of the properties of things. However, the complexity of ‘Properties’ forbids a simple antithesis between worldly and spiritual readings, and may offer a reason for its success under different conditions.^[35]