Thanks to the work of Christel Meier, Heinz Meyer and others, the so-called encyclopaedias are now considered to be representatives of a long-standing medieval tradition of compilatio — that is, the encyclopaedic compilation made for a specific set of purposes and following certain scholarly conventions.^[36] Meier concludes that compilers from Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, to Bartholomew and his peers in the thirteenth, take the Genesis account of creation as a temporal or conceptual starting point for a book of the world, and use a title such as imago mundi or speculum mundi to reflect that universal scope. Some compilers (such as Vincent de Beauvais) choose a six-day format that mirrors the six-day genesis of the created world; others (such as Bartholomew) order the content from Creator to created, incorporeal to corporeal, reflecting cosmic hierarchy. Meier notes that individual works give the impression not of chaos or lack of form but of a closed and complete order: the variety of things of all kinds appears as abundance and perfection, so that the 'world book' again resembles the world itself; like the world, nobody can grasp it all, but they can recognise that there is an ordering principle at work. In addition, a 'world book' that describes creation implies the inverse notion that the world is a book that we can read. The main reason for compiling given throughout the life of the genre is the work’s functional and moral utilitas in leading to knowledge of God. She deduces that the fundamental criteria for a medieval world book are that it should function as a library substitute, as a repository of knowledge and as a guide to salvation; compilers should use the technique of excerption and maintain a tight connection with tradition.^[37] In these conclusions and criteria, Meier provides us with a way of thinking about the compilation genre and about Bartholomew’s task of aspiring, first and foremost, towards moral and spiritual usefulness.

Questions about the genre opened up by such reappraisal have been the topic of a major colloquium in the past decade.^[38] Papers focus upon the significance and function of the ‘encyclopaedias’ in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages; not only European compendia of knowledge, but also Arabic and Jewish. The papers cover ‘Definitions and theoretical questions’; ‘Organisation of knowledge’; ‘Epistemology of encyclopaedic knowledge’; ‘Cultural and political uses’; and ‘Reception and transmission of texts’. In this last category, Juris Lidaka takes ‘Properties’ as a case-study, and provides a résumé of recent findings concerning the compiler in his social and political context. Lidaka draws conclusions from a study of features of the Paris book trade that help our understanding of the work’s earliest exposure to a widening readership.^[39] Christel Meier’s paper published in the same volume summarises and clarifies, in English, her theory of the functions and purposes of the world-book genre and the concept of moral utility that underpins it.^[40]

At the time of writing, the most concentrated research on the genre, and on ‘Properties’ in particular, is being carried out by an international team of researchers based at the Universities of Münster in Germany, Orléans in France and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. This project includes the preparation of a new edition of ‘Properties’ in parallel text (Latin and French), which will treat the marginal glosses as an integral part of the text.^[41] At the Catholic University of Louvain, a team of researchers is currently studying ‘encyclopedias as images of the world and as vehicles of change in Islamic and western thought in the Middle Ages’.^[42] This includes examinations by Godefroid de Callataÿ into intellectual exchanges between east and west; studies of the bestiary and animal iconography by Baudouin Van den Abeele, who is also a participant in the new edition of ‘Properties’ mentioned above; and particular attention on the part of Jérémy Loncke to ‘Properties’ as a significant representative of the genre.^[43] These and other researchers have spoken on Bartholomew’s work and on other aspects of the encyclopaedic genre at colloquia held in 2003 and 2005.