At first glance it appears that social and religious changes would form a barrier against the further transmission in England of a scholastic and Catholic text on the factual and moralised properties of things. Nevertheless, representations of the medieval cosmic scheme in printed maps and books demonstrate its continuity from the medieval into the early-modern period; the printed editions of ‘Properties’ in 1495, 1535 and 1582 are among these representations.
It has been argued that when Christopher Columbus set out on his westward voyage in 1492, his expectations were shaped by biblical, patristic and classical descriptions of geography and world history.[79] He was also impelled by the Christian notion of the individual as viator journeying through the time and space of the world, and by a belief in his own destiny as the one destined to find the new heaven and new earth prophesied by St John. At the time when the Americas came to be reached by European travellers, the cosmos could still be conceptualised not only as something spatial surrounding human existence on earth, but also as a temporal process in which the events of world history played a part. Columbus’s reading-matter, especially his copy of the imago mundi map of Hugo D’Ailly, suggest that beliefs about the form and destiny of the world as expressed in medieval world maps still guided the expectations of travellers in his time.[80] Evidence for the continuation of the medieval conception of the world at the centre of the spheres, bounded by the ring of Ocean, can be seen in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps, manuscripts and printed books. In 1481, William Caxton had translated and published The Mirrour of the World, a cosmology based on the work of Vincent de Beauvais, Bartholomew’s near-contemporary and fellow compilator.[81] This conflation of old and new learning based on thirteenth-century authorities and put into the English tongue for the approval of an English lord, shows that for scholars and nobles at the start of the early-modern period the earth still turned at the centre of concentric spheres, subject to motion, to the balance and imbalance of the four sublunar elements and of finite time, and destined for judgement at the end of time. On the face of the earth the peoples created by God inhabited the three regions of Asia, Africa and Europe founded by the sons of Noah after the Flood.
How does Batman respond to Bartholomew’s Books and chapters on the cosmic scheme, as he found them in Berthelet’s edition? A comparison shows that he makes few major changes to Bartholomew’s chapters on the concentric spheres surrounding earth, on the sublunar spheres of the elements, and on the fundamental form of the cosmos described by Bartholomew in Book 8. He gives us glimpses of English travellers venturing abroad for practical purposes but also gives reminders that some places, though more accessible than they had been in the Middle Ages, were still very near the margins of the map, of people’s experience and of their mental horizon. For example, of Iceland he mentions the mosquitoes: ‘Those that goe thether on fishing, are mervailously troubled with a kinde of Flie like a Gnat, and stinketh foule’; but he also refers the reader to a report of a marvellous property of one of Iceland’s mountains:
mount Hecla, so deepe that no eie canne perceive any bottome, out of the which Abisme, appeareth as it were shapes of men, as though they were drowned, and yet breathing foorth a sound, saieng, that they must depart from thence to mount Hecla: as touching the fearefull noyse of the Ile, Read R. Eden, and R. Wells.[82]
Batman's additions to Books 8, 14 and 15 reveal him as a keen armchair traveller knowledgeable about the current travel literature. He effectively privileges the huge array of ‘newe Writers’ and ‘fresher writers’ especially in his additions in Books 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 on newly discovered places, minerals, plants and creatures. He makes references to many of those who had recorded and shared their findings; for example, Humphrey Gilbert’s A Discourse of a Discoverie for a new Passage to Cataia (London 1576).[83] He also refers to ‘the newe Cards and mappes’ as if he expected his readers to have encountered them.[84] By his time, English travellers and the English government were well aware of the New World and had encountered some of its people, although a commentator in the preliminary pages of a copy of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, in the British Library, considers it wonderful that the map adds to the three parts of the world another two: Magellanica and America.[85] Batman supplements Bartholomew’s Book 15 heavily with material from Ortelius, adding the Americas as a fourth to the three major divisions of Asia, Africa and Europe. He adds a lengthy section to the end of Book 15 to rectify the geographical content of the Book in accordance with newly discovered countries and seaways; in particular, with the addition of America.
At the end of the chapter on ‘Eiulath’, a province of India, Batman quotes Thomas Cooper:
In the second of Genesis, the river Pison compasseth the whole land of Heuilah, where there is golde, and the gold there is very good, there is Bdelium and the Onix stone. Euilla or Heuilath, a country in the Orient, about the which the riuer Pison, which we call Ganges, that commeth out of Paradise doth runne.
The description reveals that a medieval image of the world as depicted in the Psalter and Hereford mappaemundi, in which the four great rivers flow out of Paradise, could still be part of the early-modern scholar’s mental furniture. However, it is here combined with a shrewd awareness of the world’s material potential for the explorer. In Batman’s presentation of the world map we can see a dual focus — that which takes the reader outwards towards the exotic and new, and that which turns inwards towards Batman’s national and local concerns. But his comments on the properties of newly discovered or explored places such as America and India show that the two foci are really one; namely, the resources or advantages, or problems, those places might offer the English in the political arena of the time.
Some of his comments do suggest that old certainties were being questioned or transformed: he adds an ambiguous phrase to the heading ‘The number of spheres’: ‘as the truth is, and as Plato and Aristotle describeth them’; and comments in the margin: ‘The varietie of opinions concerning the heavens, doe manifest the incertaintie of humane skell: Some of the Mathematicians, omit the burning heaven, and adde the tenth … The Schoole men omit the seate of God.’[86] What is striking about Batman’s cosmological comments is his evident interest in the occult philosophy being expressed by some writers in his own century. In particular, he adds nearly a folio side to the end of Book 8’s final chapter ‘Of darknesse’, saying: ‘I have thought good to set before thee, forth of the booke de Occulta Philosophia of Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, his Ladder, wherein is the wonderfull compact of the universall division of the number of 12, beginning with the twelve orders of blessed spirits, omitting the 12 names of God.’ There follow lists of 12 ‘Angells president over the signes’, Tribes of Israel, Prophets, Apostles, signs of the zodiac, months, plants, stones, ‘principall members’ of the body, and ‘The 12 pointes of the dampned Divells’. Then come the four seasons and finally ‘A briefe note how to understand the Ephimerides’.[87]
Batman follows De Worde and Berthelet in omitting chapters iii to xxi of Book 1 on God and the names of God, but replaces them with an extract on ‘the ladder of unity’, again from the De Occulta Philosophia of 1531, by the contemporary continental magus Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Mystical aspects of Catholic doctrine and worship may have been officially discarded, but Batman shows us that a new mysticism, based on occult interpretations of Pythagoras and Plato, still provided explanations about the cosmos and gave status to those claiming esoteric knowledge of its workings. There is much evidence for the use of astrology at this time — both at the level of popular demand for consultations on day-to-day matters, and as a guiding tool for policy makers.[88] Like the magus Cornelius Agrippa and the popular astrologer Simon Forman, John Dee (1527–1608), an English Cambridge graduate who came within most of the contemporary definitions of ‘magus’, is another example of the proponents and codifiers of a new form of medieval cosmology more acceptable to Protestant theologians. Dee owned at least two copies of Bartholomew’s work, one in Latin and one in English.[89] The manuscripts owned by Dee contain ciphers and notes in the margins, some of which have been identified as being in Dee’s hand.[90] By profession he was an astrologer, at one time employed by the Queen but later excluded from the court. His notes and diary record that in 1583 his library in Mortlake was ransacked by angry neighbours who feared him as a conjuror of evil spirits. Some of his property was later returned.[91] The Latin manuscript once owned by Dee and now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is missing a folio containing the chapter on the fall of the evil angels, but one can only speculate that it may have been ripped out in such an incident.[92]
In Book 2 of ’Properties’, Bartholomew had given a medieval Catholic account of the properties of fallen angels and spiriti maligni drawn from scriptural and medieval sources.[93] Batman’s response to Bartholomew’s accounts of evil spirits tends to confirm that the accepted wisdom on the nature of the cosmos supported the notion of social order based on degree, but also encouraged people at all levels of society to believe in the invisible presence on earth of spirits, both good (personal angels) and bad (the servants and helpers of the Devil). In a long addition to the chapter ‘On dreaming’ in Book 6, Batman cites, among others, his near-contemporaries Peter Martyr on dreams and Edward Fenton on monstrous births.[94] This Protestant interpretation of Bartholomew’s evil angels in terms of human possession by incubi is consistent with the social trends documented in the court records of English witchcraft persecutions in the late sixteenth century.[95] The idea of Lucifer and his aides as part of the Protestant vision of the apocalypse still fitted the idea of a cosmos of spheres teeming with celestial and infernal inhabitants. However, Batman adds comments in the margin of Book 1 on the need for faith as the basis for good works; and on the importance of conscience and true contrition, not confession, as the way to forgiveness — comments in tune with the directives of the Protestant church.[96] He does not mention the saints or the Virgin Mary, but a reader in a copy of his work has made an anti-marian note in the margin of Book 1, and later calls her ‘an idoll’: ‘The virgin Mary was not without sin for John acknowledges Christ her saviour Luk. 1.46.’[97]