Table of Contents
The subject of this and the following chapter is a suggested way of reconstructing early perceptions of Bartholomew’s work during the first phase of its life story. They can only be suggestions as we have no hard evidence for earliest readers’ responses to the text, but our understanding of the medieval use of allegory can alert us to the need to look beneath the surface at both things and their properties as Bartholomew presents them.
Bartholomew summarises the contents of each Book in his preface.[1] The categories seem, on the face of it, clear and well-defined, leading modern readers to expect the kind of ordered and objective descriptions of things consistent with modern expository texts. These are not forthcoming, however, and commentators have expressed bafflement at Bartholomew’s failure to keep to his stated categories in a rational manner. Léopold Delisle, for one, had referred in the 1880s to ‘le désordre qui règne dans le Proprietatibus rerum’.[2] The following passage expresses a twentieth-century English researcher’s frustration at the apparent incompatibility of chapter arrangements with the ‘system’ Bartholomew predicts in the Praefatio:
This excellent system, which should be compared with those of contemporary encyclopedias, keeps Bartholomew from gross lapses into incoherence; but within its framework some faults of arrangement are apparent. Repetition is a common failure … a more careful revision would have decreased the length of the book by eliminating duplications [such as the two chapters on bees] … In Book XVIII the animals are not classed under species, but alphabetically, with their young distinguished separately; so that ‘De bove’ … occurs at chapter xiii, ‘De tauro’ at chapter c … Even more oddly, ‘De cornu’, of the horn, ‘De ficario’, of the seller of figs, and ‘De bubulco’, of the oxherd, occur among the animals. Birds and insects are classed together in Book XII, and reptiles with animals in Book XVIII; but their eggs receive consideration in Book XIX, among the assortment of objects which could not be fitted in elsewhere.[3]
Elizabeth Brockhurst was a pioneer of ‘Properties’ studies in England, and her thesis was seminally important in that it drew the attention of post-war English historians to Bartholomew and his compilation within an English manuscript tradition. I quote the above in order to emphasise the contrast with the approach taken in this chapter, which seeks to explain the work’s organisation and content as appropriate for its own time and purpose. Although the work’s allegorical nature has been acknowledged and discussed in recent years in several languages it still remains to describe Bartholomew’s ‘excellent system’ in terms of his own day and readership, in English, and to incorporate Book 19 into the explanatory framework.
I propose that in Bartholomew’s work moral and religious themes serve to link and underpin apparent confusion on the surface. These themes are appropriate to religious instruction: the positive aspects of spreading the Word; the passage of our lives and the need for submission to authority, and other virtues; the rewards of serving God; ways towards salvation. While making use of conventional models of piety and service, Bartholomew also expresses Franciscan philosophy and aims: in his attitude to the natural world and the role of the senses, and his evocation of an apostolic, non-enclosed form of religious work.
Brockhurst’s concern over the duplication of chapters on bees provides a starting point from which to examine this apparent anomaly from a thirteenth-century clerical point of view. The image of the bee has an important unifying role in the work as a whole, and Bartholomew’s attention to it is significant for our understanding of the work. In the first place, they were ubiquitous domestic creatures with an important economic role in lay community and monastery.[4] Debra Hassig notes in her study of twelfth-century English bestiary manuscripts that in medieval England ‘every monastery and abbey had its own apiary, and many of the peasants who worked or rented Church lands also kept bees in order to pay part of their yearly rent in wax’.[5]
Buzzing about the meadows and vineyards, communally producing honey and wax for the careful apiarist, the bee is palpably an orderly, useful creature within a disciplined community of its own. Hassig finds that the communal bee could serve in the Middle Ages as an ideal type of civic order and usefulness, capable of extension into a range of associated ideas. The bestiary texts and illustrations emphasise the bee’s associations of orderliness, organisation and a fair division of labour, while the communal ideal represented by the beehive describes a monastic situation of freedom in Christ under the lordship of the abbot, collecting the honey from flowers identified as the love of God. Bees as tractable producers of real honey and church candle-wax readily connoted an ideal of moral and civic order and utilitas, while their apparent sexlessness also signified chastity and the Virgin Mary.[6] Ivan Illich, in his study of Hugh of St Victor’s treatise on monastic reading, Didascalicon (c.1128), states that ‘since Christian antiquity, metaphors for spiritual experiences taken from the language of bee-keeping appear whenever new communities of monks grow out of old hermitages’.[7] Michael Twomey lists among the major encyclopaedias of the Middle Ages Bonum universale de apibus, 'the definitive medieval study of bees, which develops an extended allegory of spiritual authority'.[8]
According to Neil Hathaway, these major encyclopaedias are themselves justified in the very etymology of the term compilatio, which derives from pilare, ‘to pillage’. Hathaway points out that Macrobius had expressed the idea of the moral usefulness of abstracting from others' works through an analogy with bees, nectar-gathering from others’ fields: ‘We should in a way imitate the bees which ... pluck the flowers, and then whatever they are wont to bring back they divide up into the honeycomb, changing the varied liquor into one flavor by a certain mixture.’ Here then are bees serving an allegorical and didactic purpose early in the medieval period. Hathaway argues that the analogy shed its pejorative associations with stealing as Christian writers, notably St Jerome, made use of it.[9] Hathaway’s study indicates that by Bartholomew’s time compilation was acknowledged as a useful didactic method that brought together, and made available, nourishing and palatable teachings already in existence.