It will be seen that European scholars have been interested in Bartholomew for a long time. But ‘Properties’ and its compiler are only one aspect of a much larger field of study that has been increasingly well-dug in recent decades: that is, the studies of what medieval texts can reveal about medieval ‘science’ — both as explanation of, and the practice of preserving knowledge about, the material world and its contents, predicated upon a belief in the world’s purposeful creation by God. Meier’s assessment of the major compilations as images of a world created and provided for by God, formulated as aids to salvation as well as learning, serve to validate this broader project. Any study, therefore, of medieval responses to ‘Properties’ must take into account seminal and ongoing researches into medieval concepts of knowledge and its moral utility; medieval literary theory; methods of codifying, organising and presenting knowledge in compilations of various kinds; and of the sources, content and forms of informational texts.

In particular, two related kinds of medieval compilation, each with its own manuscript tradition and its own specialist scholars, complement the discursive sources. One of these is the codification of medieval world history and Christian teaching represented in the works of art we know as mappaemundi, the development of which tends to parallel that of the world-book encyclopaedias. The other is the medieval body of received wisdom about ‘things’ made during the six days of Creation — animals, birds, fishes and plants — and their religious significance, embodied in the tradition of bestiary manuscripts dating from late antiquity to the fifteenth century. Recent studies in these areas, as well as this study of the reception of ‘Properties’, indicate that while there are obviously formal differences between maps, bestiaries and compilations such as ‘Properties’, they can all be seen as clerical productions directed towards the goal of preserving religious knowledge and teaching Catholic doctrine. Indeed, Margriet Hoogvliet has argued that maps and encyclopaedias should be seen as complementary and the name mappamundi applied to both.^[44] Similarly, the bestiary literature has proliferated in recent decades.^[45] Scholars conclude that animals and birds could be significant in the Middle Ages as objects of practical interest encountered in real life; analogues of humanity; players in the important historical events recounted in the Christian Scriptures; and visible signs of the ‘invisible things of God’ that the preacher needed to expound. Writers therefore valued an authoritative source-book on the symbolic properties of creatures. In clerical and secular adaptations of the later Books of ‘Properties’, that is, those about birds, plants and animals, we find Bartholomew described as ‘Master of kind’ and even as ‘Bartholomew the bestiary’. As later chapters will show, this study is therefore also indebted to modern exponents of the bestiary and of medieval animal symbolism.^[46]

To conclude this survey of the long-accumulated literature on Bartholomew and his work, it should be pointed out that our compilation here is one example of a textual type within an increasingly explored area. The earlier literature on ‘Properties’ is an invaluable resource in that so much groundwork has been done as a basis for fresh research into the compiler, the manuscripts and the translations, and the place these occupied in late-medieval English life and letters. Twentieth-century research into the context in which the work appeared, and the excavation of related documents, has brought the compiler more clearly into focus. Research into the genre of the thirteenth-century compilatio as a tool of the militant Catholic church, and as part of a wider exchange of knowledge between east and west, has improved our understanding of the genre’s context and function. However, in the present century, important ongoing research is being shared and published in languages other than English. The important studies of the English translation, the later-medieval ownership of manuscripts and the literary borrowings from Bartholomew help to contextualise the work within a widening English readership of the later Middle Ages. The size and scope of the work has so far prevented the appearance of a detailed reception history, but the present study offers a limited contribution to such a project by examining, in English, the work’s transmission and diffusion in a significant area of its medieval and early-modern readership.