In this setting, the reader’s imagination is free to place historical and legendary travellers who found or lost their way on the sea — Noah, for example, whose story came to exemplify faith and the promise of salvation.[30] Hugh of St Victor had written his treatise on the meaning of Noah’s Ark, De Arca Noe Mystica, in the previous century, and in the religious drama of the guilds, which developed their full complexity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Noah and his family become exemplary as well as entertaining figures.[31] The main ingredients of the Noah story are woven into the fabric of ‘Properties’: Noah’s freight of animals and birds in Books 12 and 18 on those topics; the olive tree and the ship-building timbers in Book 17 on plants; the whole sea-going experience of waters and tempests in Book 13; Mount Ararat and Armenia in Books 14 and 15; the rainbow in Book 8 on earth and heaven.
Legends about archetypal travellers — sinful, heroic, misguided and repentant — were available to Bartholomew and his students from the Christian Scriptures, but also from Christianised Homeric legend and from classical history. Bartholomew’s graphic description of the sailor in the empty ocean amid wallowing waves could evoke not only the contemporary example of St Francis and scriptural figures such as Noah or the Apostles, but also the pagan figures of Odysseus and Alexander the Great, whose stories had been adapted by Christian writers. The twelfth-century writer William of Conches is explicit about the allegorical significance for the Christian of Odysseus/Ulysses and elements of his story: ‘By Ulysses you must understand the wise man (sapiens) whom Circe, that is, abundance of earthly possessions, does not succeed in transforming.’[32] Or, as Gerhard Ladner has put it:
… the Fathers of the Church could beautifully interpret the heroic travels of Ulysses as a type of the Christian’s journey through terrestrial life. Ulysses had himself tied to the mast so that he would not be lured to disaster by the songs of the Sirens. Similarly, the Christian stranger on earth, the peregrinus, could be said to travel through strange and awesome seas in a ship, which is the Church, affixed to the mast of the Cross, absorbing the sweet and far from meaningless Siren songs of the world, without being deflected from the right course.[33]
Readers could infer allusions to the Odyssey in the monsters Scylla and Charybdis mentioned above, but also in an allusion to the homecoming Odysseus’s welcome by his dog: ‘Guard dogs can live longer, fourteen or sometimes twenty years, as in Homer.’[34] In De Aeolia, ‘an island of Sicily’, Bartholomew alludes obliquely to Odysseus’s misadventure on that island by simply saying that the island was named after Aeolus, whom ‘poets had made up to be god of the winds’.[35]
Like Ulysses/Odysseus, the figure of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) had been annexed by earlier Christian writers as an exemplar of Christian vices and virtues, representing the curiosus, gyrovagus or restless traveller interested in seeing the world for its own sake but saved by the wisdom he eventually gained.[36] Literary evidence indicates that stories about this itinerant everyman, repeatedly being taught Christian virtues of humility, patience, poverty and penitence through his worldly successes, encounters and errors, were popular in Bartholomew's time. His arrogant curiosity and pursuit of worldly experiences took him beyond the bounds of normal travel and into contact with exotic and unnatural creatures including Amazon women and sirens.[37] It has been suggested that in Christianised versions of the Greek account Alexander embodied the worldly traveller subject to the ‘lust of the eyes’ and ‘pride of life’ warned against in the first epistle of John.[38] The Alexander stories that existed in the thirteenth century show that the non-Christian hero was strongly associated in Christian imagination with key locations on the map of the world, especially the earthly Paradise into which he tried to force an entry, and its antithesis, Babylon, the city identified in Scripture with the 'mother of whores and abominations of the earth', where he died.[39]
Bartholomew makes numerous allusions to Alexander in different Books. In Book 15's chapter on ‘Amazonia’ he tells us about the tribe of homicidal women, their taming by Hercules and Achilles, and how Alexander, after demanding tribute, learnt a lesson of humility from the Amazon queen.[40] In the chapter on Persia, Bartholomew refers to the treasure left behind by Alexander in the city of Elemayda.[41] In Book 17, on plants, he notes that there are rushes in India big enough to make boots with, as both Pliny and the Alexander story testify.[42] He alludes to Alexander’s victory in India after which he crowned his soldiers with ivy, since it was sacred to Bacchus and to Mars.[43] However, after describing the vigour and usefulness of the palm tree found throughout Syria, Egypt and Palestine, he concludes dryly that, according to Pliny, some of Alexander’s soldiers choked on unripe dates.[44] And in his chapter on the properties of red wine, Bartholomew tells how the mighty Greek spurned the warning of the wise Adronites and, being drunk, slew his friend.[45] In this Book we also find a comment on Alexander’s legendary association with the stag, which Bartholomew says is evidently long-lived since those given gold collars by Alexander were found still living a hundred years later.[46] In Book 18’s chapter on the dog, he reminds us that the king of Alania (a pagan area on the eastern boundary of Christendom) sent Alexander a cross-bred tiger-dog, so strong it could overcome a lion and an elephant.[47] Bartholomew adds a final sentence at the end of De sirena saying that such monsters can be read about in the history of Alexander the Great.[48] This cryptic reference to Alexander's underwater encounter with sirens, one facet of the Alexander story available to his contemporaries, illustrates the way Bartholomew gives his Christian readers the opportunity to dwell upon a whole set of adventures and resulting wisdoms gained by a pagan hero. In the Christian context of idealised spiritual pilgrimage, Alexander represents the opposite of the ideal; but his story also holds out the hope of salvation for the worldly person who learns and repents.
Stories were a valuable resource for the preacher as a way of engaging the attention of listeners even if they were, as Bartholomew himself puts it, ‘pagan follies’, error gentilium. He also points out in his chapter on Suecia, home of legendary Amazons, that we ought to believe pagan writers, scriptores historiae tam Graecorum quam Romanorum, who describe the Swedes as gens valde robusta, feared by Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar: as Jerome said, we may trust the sayings of poets and writers which do not harm the faith or contradict known truth.[49] Moreover it is possible that pagan stories could serve the purpose of heightening the clarity of the sacred through contrast with the profane. Bartholomew’s many references to Alexander reinforce the suggestion that pagan stories provide contrasting figures which set off the virtues and significance of the church’s objects of veneration. David Williams considers Alexander the Great a heroic but physically grotesque figure, both a builder and a destroyer, as an example of the didactic use of contrast and paradox in Christian teaching:
It is not impossible that in Alexander the Great the people saw shadows of a prototype of Jesus, a manifestation of the paradox of divinity in which the unnatural, even monstrous, combination of distinct natures, human and divine, unite in a single being. This certainly was the perception of, at least, the thirteenth century Armenian scribe [Ps. Callisthenes] who openly compares Alexander to Christ and who attaches to his poem a plea to be excused for this audacity.[50]
How else, the reasoning might be, to represent Christ and the Apostles but by antithesis? Evelyn Edson notes that for Lambert of St Omer in the twelfth century Alexander was a unifier of the physical world, compared to Christ as unifier of the spiritual world; and that Bartholomew’s English contemporary Matthew Paris (d.1259) depicts Alexander and Christ enthroned together.[51]
A striking example of the use of contrast and paradox occurs in Bartholomew’s introduction to the properties of the earth in Book 14. Bartholomew starts by citing Isidore: the earth is situated in the middle of the heavens, equidistant from all furthest points, signifying both its unity and its variety.[52] He explains the names given in other times and places to earth: terra, humus, tellus, ops, arida, solum, signifying her attributes; in old time she was called ‘Ceres mother of gods’, and ‘Goddess Vesta’. He then describes a great seated female figure wearing a turreted crown, placed on a chariot, accompanied by submissive lions and cocks, holding in one hand a key, in the other a percussion instrument; the charioteers brandish naked swords.[53] Peter Dronke, in his chapter entitled “Bernard Silvestris, Natura, and personification” on the philosophy of the school of Chartres, notes that some scholars well into the thirteenth century did represent Earth and natura as a personified figure derived from the Roman goddess Terra or Tellus, a magna mater who nourishes and protects all.[54] This dramatic identification of the Christian ideal with the pagan image may therefore have been less surprising to medieval clerics than it is to us.
Bartholomew partly explains his inclusion of the pagan goddess among the properties of terra by saying that her attributes signify the seasonal round and the yearly rituals of ploughing and harvest ‘under the cover of stories’, sub integumentum fabularum.[55] Peter Dronke locates the device of integumentum fabulae within the twelfth-century School of Chartres and the philosophy of Bernard of Salisbury: through this device a legendary narrative can encase sub-textual meaning, which it is then up to the commentator to reveal.[56] In this instance the glossator is a ‘commentator’ who reveals a deeper meaning available to his contemporaries, lying beneath the description of the pagan earth-mother. The glosses point to the example of the Christian church and the Virgin Mary, to her faith and hope, her fullness of grace, her excellence, ripeness and stability; and to her total devotion to her Lord, in striking contrast to the personification of terra described in the column text.[57] The reader could draw both characters at once from the same page — the pagan story could be a paradoxical cover for, and vivid antithesis of, the image of the church (ecclesia) as bride and mother of Christ.[58] We might conclude then that this outwardly pagan and surprising passage in Book 14 could serve as a pause for reflection, not only upon the fertilising properties of religious life and the harvest of souls but also upon the virtues of Mary, her example to men and women, and her identification with the church as holy and fertile mother. At the same time, the chapter in Book 14 describing the fruitful properties of the earth prepares the way for Book 15 on the properties of places and peoples found upon its face — some still waiting to be sown with the word of God.