Table of Contents
As we saw in the last chapter, the size and scope of ‘Properties’ allowed it to become a resource to be mined by specialists of various kinds in the later Middle Ages, but it was still kept and valued as a whole work by religious and scholarly institutions and by book-owning individuals at the highest level of society. This chapter asks how ‘Properties’ could present an image of the world that was a guide to salvation at a time when faith, not works, was required; as history, that could meet the needs of the Tudors; as library substitute in the age of the printing press; as a guide to the symbolic properties of things when material properties were politically and commercially important.
The printing press aided and reflected the process by which knowledge was being systematised — not only existing knowledge but also new information and ideas. Continental printed works show that a precedent existed for praising Bartholomew as a writer. In 1494 Johannes Tritheim, Abbot of Sponheim (d.1516), had included Bartholomew natione Anglicus in his catalogue of notable ecclesiastical writers, describing him as a man extremely devoted to the Scriptures and by no means inferior in learning, who produced works of considerable authority.[1] The title-page of the edition of ‘Properties’ printed at Nüremburg in 1519 contains a passage praising Bartholomew for his learning, acknowledging his care and labour, commending the work’s usefulness as an object of study, noting the demand for it in print, and urging the buyer to go ahead and disregard the cost.[2] The printed editions of ‘Properties’ in England in 1495, 1535 and 1582 imply that in this country also there was a market for the work in an updated and manageable format, in the era of increased book-production and rising literacy.[3] Yet these dates are associated now with events or developments that seem, in retrospect, to mark major changes in thinking about the world, human society and religious practice. William Harrison in The Description of England (1587) describes the population in terms of four, not three, estates — nobility, gentry, yeomen and labourers. He expresses concern at the ‘new gentlemen’ such as burgesses and merchants, who import expensive wares and disturb the conventional economies.[4] There are indications that people were forming new concepts about the nature of an ideal society or commonwealth based on English Protestant culture rather than a shared European and Catholic culture. In the printed editions of Properties we find observable changes in the content to suit an English readership, and circumstantial evidence that influential literary figures appropriated Bartholomaeus Anglicus for England and the English as a symbol of national wisdom and authority.
On the basis of De Worde’s 1495 edition of Properties, Thomas Berthelet offered readers a much more manageable and orderly text in his new edition of 1535. Berthelet was a successful London printer who produced pamphlets and documents for Henry VIII and was the appointed King’s Printer from 1530 to 1547.[5] Contemporary references and his publication record suggest that, as a practical man of business, he fed a growing market for functional, concise editions of legal statutes, health manuals and translations of medical treatises. Together with the printers Pynson, Redman and Grafton, Berthelet was especially active in publishing legal statutes of a few pages only that could be bound together, 'indispensable for those actively engaged in the law'. In 1539, Berthelet issued a volume of legal treatises, reissued in 1544; he also published practical health manuals which sold well, and is recorded as ‘talkyng of one boke and of an other’ with Thomas Paynell and agreeing on the usefulness of translating the eminently useful medical works Regimen sanitatis Salerni (published 1528) and De morbo gallico (published 1533).[6]
In his preface to the reader, Berthelet emphasises the educational nature and practical utility of ‘This worke intitled Bertholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum’ as a ready reference on material things. He makes much of his referral back to a Latin exemplar, and the accessibility of the revised format:
newely printed with many places therein amended by the latyne examplare: wherby ye shalle nowe the better understand it, not onely bycause many wordes & sentences that were here & there lefte out, be restored agayne, but also by reson the propre names of men, landes, cites, townes, ryuers, mountaynes, bestes, wodes … & fishes, be trewely ortografied. And for bycause this werke is so profitable & the manyfold thinges therin conteyned soo nedefull to be knowen and had in a redynes, I have distilleded this table wherby ye shal shortly fynd, what ye liste to rede.[7]
Berthelet omits Trevisa’s prohemium, and replaces the tabula with a detailed list of topics with Book and chapter references but without page numbers, which could have functioned as both a table of contents and as an index (see Figure 7). The content differs little from that of the earlier edition, with Berthelet also diverging from 'the latyne examplare' by omitting all the chapters of Book 1, replacing them with a woodcut illustration of God followed by a passage entitled De Trinitate, on the Trinity, condensed from Bartholomew’s first two chapters. These changes in the presentation of Properties suggest that Berthelet was responding to demands of the market and to competition in the trade, but also to readers who would want interesting informative material, clearly presented and easily accessible.[8]
The climate of the times demanded careful attention to Henry’s developing policy on religious observance. Henry’s measures against Lutheran infiltration suggest that he was on his guard against this reforming movement in the earlier years of his reign. The Properties edition of 1535 was made before controls on Catholicism tightened under Edward VI, but at a time of increasing tension over definitions of heresy. The printing trade was under close scrutiny: in 1525 De Worde had been called on to show cause why he had printed a work by John Gough, a printer and bookseller under suspicion of heresy and sedition; in 1526 Berthelet had been reprimanded for printing translations of three works of Erasmus, having failed to exhibit the works to the Bishop of London's officials.[9] The years 1534 and 1535 saw legislation, including the Act of Supremacy and the Act for the Submission of the Clergy, which affirmed the king’s control of the church in England.[10] Indeed, it seems surprising that Berthelet should publish Properties, a work of Catholic theology and world-view, at a time of such great religious and political change, and in such close proximity to the centre of government. That Berthelet was able to consider the project at such a time lends support to the view of historians who stress the religious continuities in Henry’s reign, and who perceive the break with Rome as a gradual and piecemeal process driven by Henry’s immediate political needs and by the sympathies of prelates such as Cranmer and Cromwell. It was not until the reign of Edward VI and then of Elizabeth that the Anglican prayer book, the English Bible and the doctrine of justification by faith alone were firmly instituted. Christopher Haigh presents a range of evidence for the slowness and reluctance of the country as a whole to follow Henry’s lead in rejecting Catholic practice.[11] Such gradual change may partially account for Berthelet’s ability to market ‘Properties’ as an acceptable, useful work.
Another reason may lie in the work’s continuing status as a repository of wisdom. It has been suggested that Henry’s actions were not only driven by expediency and acquisitiveness, but that he identified with Old Testament prophets who purged uncleanness and embodied wisdom. Richard Rex, noting that Henry acted ‘as the chif an best of the kings of Israel did, and as all good Christian kings ought to do’ in the words of Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, suggests that Henry saw in himself parallels with the prophet Josiah and with King Solomon: ‘The royal supremacy itself, with its power to order the church, could be paralleled from Solomon’s establishment of the Temple (2 Chronicles 6). And it was as Solomon in judgement that contemporaries saw the white-clothed Henry preside at the trial of Lambert in 1538.’[12]
For Henry, as for Guido Buonolcosi and Charles V nearly 200 years earlier, the learning of the past embodied in Bartholomew’s compilation offered a valuable tool for wielding power. Properties did not contradict and could support Henry’s understanding of universal order and lordly rule. From this point of view, it was permissible to dissolve religious houses and to appropriate their wisdom-conferring libraries.
The evidence suggests that ‘Properties’ as a printed book survived increasing scrutiny of the press in Henry’s time partly because, though a Catholic work, its practical utility answered a need of the times. Moral interpretations implied in the glosses were no longer attached to the text; therefore, the text did not need to be associated only with the preaching of Catholic priests and friars; its scope and content could still cast a flattering mantle of omniscience over those who patronised it. As a financial venture it could succeed through the cooperation of a close network of business backers and associates.