The global array of authorised knowledge brought together in the compilations became a resource for specialists in separate fields of study, and in the later Middle Ages we can see professionals making customised compendia specific to their fields. ‘Properties’, with its pull-apart format and comprehensive coverage of worldly matters, evidently lent itself to the making of extracts and adaptation. Users drew excerpts from ‘Properties’ to compile books for their own use, edification or enjoyment in modernised, functional formats, in Latin — the language of scholars as well as clerics — and in English and French. Braswell’s study of utilitarian literature indicates that ‘Properties’ and other authoritative, informative texts gained repute among the growing numbers of literate professionals in English society who could draw on Latin as well as vernacular versions.[7] In particular, Books 12 to 18 of ‘Properties’ tended to be copied to make smaller, customised compilations of authorised information. For example, physicians and astrologers made shortened versions and abstracts of ‘Properties’ with emphasis on harmful, remedial or prognostic properties of animals, stones and plants. Writers on heraldry and history also turned to it as a source on the moral, symbolic and historic properties of those things.
There is plenty of manuscript evidence that people used ‘Properties’ or material derived from it to put into new writings for their own lives and needs. These needs might be for reliable, authorised information about the physical world such as physicians or alchemists might require in a handy manual format. Others might need the moralised interpretations of things preserved in, for example, the medieval Latin bestiaries as a source for sermons or tracts that they could present in a local vernacular. By contrast, some writers needed accounts of the properties of things that could be interpreted in more than one way for the purposes of irony, satire or emblematic representation. Such writers would include partisan social commentators and representatives, such as propagandists and heralds.
‘Properties’ was not the only compilation available to late-medieval English readers. Those of Thomas de Cantimpré, Albertus Magnus and Alexander Neckam were available in Latin but were not translated into English. One of the strengths of ‘Properties’ was that it preserved knowledge laid down by writers of the past and, being organised in clearly defined Books and chapters, could be easily excerpted. Seymour reasonably concludes that Bartholomew’s was the most popular of the compilations on the natures and properties of things because it was accessible and adaptable.[8] Adaptations of ‘Properties’ made in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries indicate that the Latin ‘Properties’ in particular was valued as an available repository of useful knowledge carried forward from the past: from the classical writers Aristotle and Plato, Pliny and Solinus via their Christian mediators, and from the Christian fathers and earlier compilers, Jerome and Gregory, Augustine, Bede and Isidore of Seville.
‘Properties’ was one available source of information about living things capable of a flexible range of interpretation, and which made ancient knowledge available to readers, regardless of the specialist points of view they brought to the work. We can see in some cases the importance given by writers to acknowledging the sources cited by Bartholomew. For example, in a fourteenth-century volume of Latin extracts from Books 12, 16, 17 and 18 of ‘Properties’ a reader has underlined the names of authorities as they occur in the text: Pliny, St Gregory, Aristotle, Constantinus, St Basil, St Ambrose, St Denis, the Book of Job and Isidore of Seville.[9] In a fourteenth-century codex that includes ‘Properties’ Book 15, a reader has written: ‘Take note of which authors one should put one’s trust in’ against Bartholomew’s reference to Jerome’s authority.[10]
Names of sources are included in a home-made collection of remedies and medical notes in Latin, bound with recipes in English, around a core of items from ‘Properties’ to form what appears to be a personal commonplace book or manual, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The extracts come from Books 16, 17 and 18 of ‘Properties’ and are introduced by the rubric ‘What follows are excerpts from the book entitled De proprietatibus rerum’.[11] In this home-made book the text is taken right up to the margins; no space is wasted and many chapters are omitted, but the writer has squeezed the names of Bartholomew's authorities into the margins. There is no decoration, but red-ink headings and paragraph marks make the whole thing readable as a reference work in spite of the density of text on the page. A comparison with the contents of Trevisa’s Properties, Book 17, indicates that the plants included tend to be herbs and fruits associated with medicine, food and cooking while the exotic and the generalised are excluded.[12]
As Anthony Edwards has demonstrated, ‘Properties’ was regarded in the later Middle Ages in England as a source book to be plundered for a diverse range of miscellaneous information, as writers applied its authority to secular, devotional and didactic literature.[13] Sometimes we can see the same manuscript serving as a source for widely different purposes over time, as in the case of British Library Manuscript Add. 27944 which, Ralph Hanna suggests, Thomas Berkeley caused to be made in London to advertise the translation and his own literary patronage.[14] In a very different type of study of the same manuscript, Michael Seymour deduces that it supplied copy-text for a medical practitioner who, in around 1425–50, abstracted material from Book 7 on arthritis, sciatica and gout.[15] The abstract reflects a concern on the part of this reader for segments of the vernacular manuscript with a particular practical, medical application for him or herself, rather than for the work as a whole.
Several such epitomes exist in Latin and in vernacular languages. In another study, Seymour notes that Book 7, in the redaction known as liber de regimine sanitatis et de virtutibus naturalibus, had been appointed for use by lecturers at the medical university of Montpellier in 1340. He finds that the content is ‘wholly medical’, and ‘probably reflects the day-to-day concerns of a practising physician … who wanted an inexpensive summary of contemporary medical opinion’.[16] A more personal, home-made collection of medical extracts occurs in Wellcome Institute Manuscript 335, a narrow octavo notebook convenient for the pocket, containing recipes, prayers and paintings of plants. It comprises a herbal accompanied by extracts from ‘Properties’ Books 5 and 7 headed ‘Excerpts from the book entitled De Proprietatibus rerum (B. Anglici). And firstly, concerning the lung.’[17] This leads into headed excerpts in Latin on the breath, stomach, liver, skin, spleen, gut, kidneys, bladder, urine and dizziness. Prayers to the Virgin and to St Gregory follow, and excerpts from a surgical treatise. Recipes for cures written in French at the start and finish of the codex are further evidence that this collection served a practical need for home remedies, but that these might be accessed in three languages. The Books on birds, stones, plants, animals and substances, and the long chapter on fishes, are barely altered at the level of the chapters; word-by-word examination of the text could reveal whether more detailed cuts have been made.
It may not be clear that a writer had a particular purpose or point of view in making an adapted version of ‘Properties’. The unknown maker of British Library Harley Manuscript 512, an abridged Latin ‘Properties’ entitled ‘On the natures and properties of things’, included all the Books, shortening them to abridge the whole compendium in a manner breve et plano (‘brief and to the point’), but with no apparent emphasis on one area of knowledge.[18] Perhaps a reader in a particular locality would pinpoint plant or animal species known or obtainable in the area. Neither do we know exactly how individual readers became familiar with ‘Properties’ or obtained copy-text. While such processes are hidden from us, the adaptations show that literate people had the means to make copies of parts they wanted for their own use or edification, and to translate, abridge and turn the lengthy and comprehensive work into a manageable text for themselves.