Assessing the Exotic: Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge

by

Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

© Copyright by Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt, 2018

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Assessing the Exotic: Authority, Reason, and Experience in the

Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge

Adam Gwyndaf Garbutt

Doctor of Philosophy

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This study explores evidence structures in the medieval investigation of nature,

particularly the marvelous or exotic nature that exists near the boundaries of natural philosophy.

The marvelous, exotic, and unusual are fascinating to both readers and authors, providing

windows into the ways in which the evidence structures of reason, authority, and experience

were balanced in the assessment, explanation, and presentation of these phenomena. I look at

four related works, each engaged with the compilation and presentation of particular information

concerning animals and the diversity of the natural world. While these texts are bound together

by shared topics and draw from a shared body of ancient and contemporary works, they each

speak to different audiences and participate in different genres of literature. I argue that we can

see in these works a contextually sensitive approach to the evaluation and presentation of

evidence on the part of both the author and the audience.

This project also seeks to bridge a gap between the intellectually rigorous medieval texts

and works targeted at a wider reading audience that made use of the knowledge base of natural

philosophy but were not necessarily produced or consumed within the scholastic context.

Albertus Magnus’s De animalibus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum were

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produced, and expected to be consumed, within the Friars’ studium. While these texts also

enjoyed a complex life outside these educational houses, they are marked by the scholastic

educational context they were designed within and for. The Pseudo-Albertus experimentum texts

Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium and De mirabilibus mundi as well as the

travel narrative The Book of John Mandeville, on the other hand, may have been produced within

an educated context but were consumed by a diverse cross-section of the reading population. By

looking at these four texts together I explore the ways epistemic structures shift from the more

scholastically inclined to the more popular texts, as well as point to the cross-pollination of

medical, legal, and natural philosophical epistemologies in the ways each text shapes its

epistemic structures to reflect the needs of its genre and audience.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks first and foremost to my supervisor, Dr. Bert Hall, for

his support and guidance. Thank you for pulling me out of intellectual rabbit holes and

reminding me that dissertations have to finish.

Thank you also to the members of my supervisory committee who have helped guide me

through this project. To Dr. Suzanne Akbari, for her encouragement to look outside my self-

imposed boundaries and to see the interesting and novel connections in my work. To Dr. Faith

Wallis for pushing me to define my categories and for her amazing questions, for which I am

never prepared, that always point me in the most enlightening and fruitful directions. Without

their guidance this thesis would be at once less clear and far less interesting.

I am grateful to Dr. Pamela O. Long and Dr. Rebecca Woods, for their questions and

direction that pushed me to look to the future of this project even as I defended it.

I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Brian Baigrie for his efforts in arranging

my defence.

Thank you to my parents, my partner, and my dog, for their attempts to keep me (mostly)

sane throughout this process. I could not have made it through without you.

Finally, I would like to thank Denise Horsley and Muna Salloum at the IHPST. Thank

you for years of help dealing with paperwork, for accepting forms “just in time,” and for always

knowing how to deal with the latest crisis. Without you this thesis would never have been

submitted.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents v

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

1 Overarching Goal 1

2 Epistemic Structures 16

3 Chapter Outline 25

Chapter 2: Albertus Magnus and De animalibus 33

1 Introduction 33

2 Methods of Reasoning About Nature 45

3 Creating a Coherent Picture of the World: The Bestiary Section of De animalibus 49

4 Diversity as the Underpinning of Albertus's Construction of the World 60

5 Evidence in Law and Natural Philosophy: Legal Evidence and the Reasoning of

Albertus Magnus 71

6 Conclusion 76

Chapter 3: Bartholomaeus Anglicus and De proprietatibus rerum 78

1 Introduction 78

2 The Goals of the Text 88

3 Cosmology 101

4 Particulars 112

5 Active Contradictions 124

6 Experience and Experiment 129

7 Conclusion 134

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Chapter 4: Experimenta and Books of Secrets 136

1 Introduction 136

2 Theory and Practice in Medicine 141

3 Pseudo-Albertus 148

4 De Virtutibus 155

5 De Mirabilibus 167

6 Texts of Practice 173

7 Conclusion 179

Chapter 5: The Book of John Mandeville 181

1 Introduction 181

2 The Book of John Mandeville and its Context 183

3 The Evidence Structures of The Book 192

4 Creating a Witness 199

5 A Comprehensive Worldview 210

6 Conclusion 217

Chapter 6: Conclusion 220

Bibliography 228

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Chapter One: Introduction

1 Overarching Goal

There is a long-standing trope in the history of science, perpetuated particularly in works

on early modern science, that medieval scholars were focused primarily on organizing,

interpreting, and parsing a body of natural knowledge inherited from antiquity. The tenacity of

this view can be partially accounted for by the multi-faceted complexity of the medieval

approach to nature.

Modern investigations of how medieval scholars viewed the natural world have generally

drawn on a set of sources that can be roughly divided into two types; what might be called

popular texts such as the bestiaries, books of marvels, maps and travel literature, and the

scholastic encyclopedias and studies of nature produced in the universities and studia.1 The

popular manuscripts vary greatly in content but are frequently focused on the descriptions of

particular plants or animals alongside discussions of their medical use, special powers, or

symbolic meaning. There is still debate over exactly who used these texts and what purpose they

served in medieval Western thought: from natural histories, to sermon resources, to reading

instruction, the wide variety of these popular texts has led to equally varied speculation on their

use and meaning.2 The medieval academic investigations of nature provide a different set of

1. This already introduces an artificial distinction based more on content than actual context of production or

consumption. Many of the works here labeled popular, such as experimenta for instance, were produced by university or studium educated scholars and would have circulated within this educated community as well as outside it in the community of the courts. For some discussion of the production of experimenta and books of secrets see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 38-53.

2. Numerous excellent works exist dealing with these texts, so I will list only a few. For descriptions of the Bestiaries and varying views on their uses see Willene B. Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-

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information. They also vary greatly in content but they generally focus on theoretical questions

about the materials, structure, and composition of the material world and the process of change

within it.3 The medieval scholars who wrote them focused on questions of how the natural world

worked, how animals were generated, how the function of sight was performed, and so produced

a different type of text than the bestiaries, lapidaries, or experimenta. These very different sets of

sources have led to a collection of different approaches taken by modern historians trying to

unpack and interpret medieval understandings of the natural world.

Through much of the twentieth century these two loosely categorized medieval bodies of

literature on the natural world led to two lines of scholarly investigations by modern historians.

One focuses on scholastic texts, attempting to situate medieval scientific debates within the

context of the transformation of classical and Arabic learning as well as the development of a

Western discourse of natural philosophy, particularly in relation to theological concerns. This

separates it somewhat from the scholarship on what might be called popular works of bestiaries

and lapidaries, that has tended to focus on the symbolic interpretation of plants, animals, and

stones.4 The late eighties and nineties saw the beginning of attempts to bring these two sets of

Family Bestiary (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006); and Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998). For discussion of the other popular texts see Margriet Hoogvliet, "Animals in Context: Beasts on the Hereford Map and Medieval Natural History," in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: The British Library, 2006), 153-165; Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Evelyn Edson, "Mapping the Middle Ages: The Imaginary and Real Universe of the Mappaemundi," in Monsters, Marvels and Miracles, ed. Leif Søndergaard & Rasmus Thorning Hansen (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005), 11-25. See also the articles in Il mondo animale/ The World of Animals, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).

3. For a discussion of these texts see chapter two of Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); or for an old but still useful detailed catalogue of most well-known manuscripts see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2, During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era (1923; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1947).

4. For scholars who focus on scholastic debates, see William A. Wallace, "The Scientific Methodology of St. Albert the Great,” in Albertus Magnus-Doctor universalis: 1280/1980, ed. Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980), 385-407. Or John M. Riddle and James A. Mulholland, Albert on Stones and Minerals (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). A prime example of the focus on symbolism in bestiaries and lapidaries is Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users.

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sources together. One of the approaches produced by these attempts was the concept of the

emblematic world-view, originally expressed by William Ashworth as “an entirely different

world from ours, a world where animals are just one aspect of an intricate language of metaphor,

symbols, and emblems.”5 Peter Harrison built on this foundation and moved the locus of

discussion much earlier in his book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science,

tracing the development of the emblematic world-view in the Middle Ages and how its

destruction in the Reformation made the Scientific Revolution possible.6 Implicit in the

discussion of the emblematic world-view, however, is a distancing of medieval and early modern

natural philosophers from the world around them. Harrison made this distance more explicit than

other scholars, but all save the most sensitive treatments of the emblematic world-view imply

that the medieval scholars were not exploring the world as it is, but rather the world’s symbolic

meanings. It is a view that functions well for the purposes of scholars of early modern natural

philosophy, producing a clearly identifiable distinction between the character of medieval

investigation and the empirical investigations of early modern philosophers.

The concept of the emblematic world-view is one means of dealing with a problem that

modern scholars often encounter when reading medieval discussions of nature: namely, the

particular phenomena medieval scholars reported. Many of the creatures, phenomena, or

5. William B. Ashworth Jr., "Natural History and the Emblematic World View," in Reappraisals of the Scientific

Revolution, ed. Robert S. Westman David C. Lindberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305. In many ways the idea of the emblematic world view seems to be a reformulation of M.D. Chenu’s concept of the medieval symbolic mentality discussed in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 41-42.; cf. Ashworth “Emblematic World View," 311-313.

6. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a more succinct and somewhat more sensitive restatement of his argument see Harrison, "Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life," in The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23-44.

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properties of nature reported seem outside the bounds of modern reality.7 While it is certainly

necessary to understand that medieval readers engaged with the symbolic meaning and figurae

they saw as inscribed in both text and nature, it is neither accurate nor especially helpful to gloss

over their engagement with the natural world. In pushing back against this trope, however,

medieval historians sometimes focused on bringing to light specific figures held up as

exceptional champions of an empirical approach to nature.8 Other studies attempted to focus on

finding the empirical roots of the seemingly fabulous. Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, for

instance, have attempted to approach the ‘fabulous’ animals found in bestiaries as

misunderstandings of ‘real’ animals; the tales of sailors or travelers that were gradually

embellished into a creature virtually unrecognizable as to its original, ‘real’ aspect.9 In the

history of medicine there exists a line of research, exemplified by the works of John M. Riddle,

that seeks to identify the active ingredients in natural remedies that must have been known to the

empirical practices of medieval folk medicine even if they were unknown to the theoretical

construction of educated medicine.10 Both of these approaches unfortunately seem to rely on a

somewhat naive approach to empiricism. They rely on the notion that experience of an objective

7. Modern readers might have difficulty crediting the existence of sirens, the phoenix, or dragons, all of which are

reported frequently in medieval texts ranging from De animalibus to The Book of John Mandeville. 8. Albertus Magnus, for example, used to be seen as an early empiricist. See as an example Robin S. Oggins,

"Albertus Magnus on Falcons and Hawks," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 441-62. Recent explorations of Roger Bacon are more thoughtful but still somewhat interested in finding heroes of empiricism in the Middle Ages. Jeremiah Hackett, “Ego Expertus Sum: Roger Bacon’s Science and the Origins of Empiricism” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 145-173.

9. Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991).

10. See John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Riddle, Goddesses, Elixirs, and Witches: Plants and Sexuality throughout Human History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For an excellent critique of this position see Michael McVaugh, “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism,” in Natura, scienze e società medievali: Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, eds. Claudio Leonardi e Francesco Santi (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 177-194.

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world will always render the same information that can then be correctly or incorrectly

interpreted. Possibly more importantly, they also rely on an assumption that the language used to

discuss evidence concerning nature can be easily translated into modern concepts.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump marked a turn in the

focus of historians of science to reflect on aspects of the process of natural investigation that had

long been considered intuitive, objective, or universal, particularly questions of the social

process by which experience and testimony could be turned into facts.11 Since then there has

been a great deal of work exploring these issues in the history of science, but medieval historians

are presented with a unique problem in this line of investigation. In the attempt to understand the

process of natural investigation medieval historians must walk a careful line between the

necessary assertion that natural investigation in the Middle Ages did in fact engage with

testimony and experience, and carefully articulating the precise complexities of terms like

experientia or observatio, terms that cannot be simply assimilated into the modern concept of

experience.12

We can see some of the complexities of this problem illustrated in the works of those

historians seeking to find the roots of the new empirical science developed in the Early Modern

period and in the connected discussion of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature.

Peter Dear has argued for an intellectual shift in the conceptualization of experiment that marks

the division between medieval Aristotelianism and early modern experimentalism. On his

account, to the extent that Aristotelians made use of experience, it was necessarily experience of

11. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

(1985; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. For examples see the articles in Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants, eds., Expertus sum. L’expérience par

les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009) (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011); Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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the normal course of nature. The Aristotelian division between art and nature meant that

intervention in the process of nature made experiment invalid for creating natural knowledge.

Intellectual shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, connected to changing mathematical

approaches, led to the rise of experimentalists who ascribed value to the highly constructed

experiences they developed from experiments as a means of creating natural knowledge.13 This

strong division between art and science in Aristotelian natural philosophy has been challenged

recently, particularly by the work of Mark J. Scheifsky. He has argued that the division between

art and nature in Aristotle, and Antiquity more generally, presented a much more complex

distinction, one that saw art as imitating nature on the one hand but also capable of going beyond

nature to bring about effects that unaided nature could not. He also attempts to carve out a space

in which mechanics was considered capable of producing natural knowledge: through machines

used as models for understanding natural processes and through the use of mathematical

properties of physical bodies as a means of explaining behaviors. Scheifsky suggests that the

modern interpretation of a hard distinction between art and nature in Antiquity, with art

necessarily in an inferior role, has created a warped perception of the role of art in Aristotelian

natural philosophy.14

William Newman has presented an even stronger form of this argument, suggesting that

the modern misunderstanding of this distinction has led to a collection of false assumptions about

the value of experiment in medieval thought. He argues that modern scholars have constructed

13. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago

University Press, 1995), particularly chapter 1, 21-25; Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Introduction.

14. Mark J. Scheifsky, “Art and Nature in Ancient Mechanics,” in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, eds. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 67-108; For a discussion of alchemy and this division between art and nature in the thirteenth century, see William Newman, "Art, Nature, Alchemy, and Demons: The Case of the Malleus Maleficarum and Its Medieval Sources,” in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity, eds. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 109-133.

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what he terms the non-interventionist fallacy: inappropriately representing medieval scholars as

opposed to experience or experiment. Newman, however, does not give a great deal of thought to

the complexities of speaking about experience and experiment. While he points to a line of

interventionist alchemical practice performed by educated alchemists, we must be wary of

overextending this to other aspects of medieval natural investigation.15

Exploring the role of craft knowledge in the development of empirical science, Pamela O.

Long, Pamela Smith, and Deborah Harkness all point to technical, artistic, and cultural

changes—that mostly begin in the mid fifteenth century—linked with the rise of the intellectual

programme of humanism and the interaction between the educated elite and the artisans who

were developing new techniques and machines.16 Long particularly has argued that the

15. William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2004), 34-114, 238-250. As we will discuss in this thesis, references to experience and experiment were not necessarily references to the direct experience of the author. For an example see John B. Friedman, "Albert the Great's Topoi of Direct Observation and His Debt to Thomas of Cantimpré," in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (New York: Brill, 1997), 379-392; Isabelle Draelants, “Expérience et autorités dans la philosophie naturelle d’Albert le Grand,” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), ed. Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 89-121. For an example of the complexity of generalizing the status of experience in alchemy to other forms of natural investigation see Chiara Crisciani’s excellent exploration of the differing role of experience in alchemy and medicine. As she points out, although these are both disciplines that must fundamentally mix theory and practice, the role of experience in their knowledge construction is significantly different. She also suggests that these epistemic differences may be related to the different reception of medicine and alchemy by educational institutions. Chiara Crisciani, “Experientia e opus in medicina ed alchimia: Forme e problemi di esperienza nel tardo medioevo,” Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L'esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004): 149-73.

16. I group these authors together because they share a broad argument focusing on the importance of contact between skilled practitioners and educated natural philosophy as the root of scientific change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All three authors discuss the existence of empirical values in the broader culture that contact with craft knowledge helped to transmit to educated natural philosophy. While not identical to Long, Pamela H. Smith’s arguments about the role of Flemish art in the development of a culture of empirical values has many strong similarities with the broad argument Long lays out. Similarly, Deborah E. Harkness focuses on the importance of Elizabethan London in developing the cultural and epistemic values that Francis Bacon articulates as a new science. See Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400-1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), chapters 3 and 4; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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dichotomous categories that we have used for this discussion have obscured our understanding

because it is precisely the breakdown of these categories in the fifteenth century—thanks to the

development of the humanist intellectual program and the rise of the artisan/practitioner—that

causes natural investigation to take on a new empirical focus. This breakdown of categories leads

to what she sees as an encounter between educated natural investigation and a broader culture of

empirical values that spurs the use of experience in the construction of natural knowledge. All of

these studies, however, are interested in understanding the changes in the fifteenth-seventeenth

centuries that led to a new investigation of nature and so are very focused on new developments

and articulating divisions between the mid to late fifteenth century and the previous culture.

Although Long repeatedly reminds the reader that humanism can be traced back to as early as the

mid fourteenth century, her focus is primarily on the breakdown of divisions between the

artisan/practitioner and the learned elites that she articulates as located in the fifteenth century.17

While Long, Smith, and Harkness do not argue for a radical break with previous culture, they are

focused on novelty and the significant social, cultural, and technical changes of the fifteenth

century, rather than articulating connections with the past. Additionally, experience as a category

in craft knowledge seems much less difficult to pin down than the category of experience in

natural philosophy we will attempt to track here. We will return to Long’s discussion of a

broader culture of empirical values in discussing the different epistemic structures at play,

particularly in the experimenta and The Book of John Mandeville.

Stephen Epstein’s The Medieval Discovery of Nature takes a different approach,

attempting to track the development of the concept of Nature itself. By the engagement with

Nature Epstein means the living ecology of the world. He manages to address to some extent the

17. Long, Artisan/Practitioners, 1-9, 127-131.

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issue of direct engagement with the world even while the main discussion focuses on the

development of an idea of nature as Nature.18 While his work is interesting and insightful, it is

only tangentially related to this project as he is focused on tracking the development of a specific

notion of nature rather than exploring the ways evidence concerning nature was evaluated.

Much recent scholarship has done invaluable work articulating the complexities of

concepts like experience as well as the actual role of sense experience in in medieval natural

investigation.19 In the introduction to the collection of essays on experience in the Middle Ages,

Expertus sum, Draelants points out that the medieval approach to experience does not give it the

kind of independent status it, theoretically, acquires in early modern science. It is one

argumentative tool whose objective, like the tools of reason and authority, is to convince the

reader of the truth of what is said. Experience is not treated as something exterior to the theory

that can be used as an objective test but as one tool among several that can be easily mixed with

the tests of reason and authority.20 These works explore the historical categories associated with

18. Stephen Epstein, The Medieval Discovery of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19. In addition to the two collections in n.12 see also, Marco Veneziani, ed., Experientia: X Colloquio

Internazionale Roma, 4-6 gennaio 2001 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2002); Constantino Esposito and Pasquale Porro, ed., Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 4, L’esperienza, L'expérience, Die Erfahrung, Experience (2004); Alexander Fidora, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, et al., eds., Erfahrung und Beweis: die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/ Experience and Demonstration: The Sciences of Nature in the 13th and 14th Centuries (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007); Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Alexander Fidora, eds., Handlung und Wissenschaft: Die Epistemologie der praktischen Wissenschaften im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert/Action and Science: The Epistemology of the Practical Sciences in the 13th and 14th Centuries (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Michael McVaugh, “The ‘Experience Based Medicine’ of the Thirteenth Century,” in Evidence and Interpretation in Studies of Early Science and Medicine: Essays in Honor of John E. Murdoch, eds. Edith Sylla and William Newman (Boston: Brill, 2009) 105-130; Danielle Jacquart, “Médecine universitaire et créativité intellectuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Sedes Scientiæ: L’émergence de la recherche à l’Université: Contributions au séminaire d’ histoire des sciences 2000-2001, eds. Patricia Radelet-de Grave and Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 17-32; for a discussion of the issue in the particular context of magic see Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre Science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006). For recent extensions of these questions into antiquity see the articles in Jason König and Greg Woolf, eds., Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Francesca Rochberg, Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

20. Thomas Bénatouïl and Isabelle Draelants, “Introduction,” in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 3-5.

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knowledge construction but a complimentary line of work has developed within the philosophy

of science that has also returned to reevaluate the epistemology of medieval scholars partly

through the history of skepticism and error.21

Christine Silvi has illustrated the wide variety of ways these categories can be employed

through her careful linguistic study of French vernacular encyclopedias. She has catalogued and

counted the references to specific authorities and drawn a collection of interesting and

informative conclusions based on her analysis of this data. While she is careful to limit her

claims to vernacular French literature, her discussion of the uses of authority is informative for

considering Latin encyclopedic texts as well.22 As interesting as her analysis is, however, I

believe that further examination and interpretation of these works may contribute to our

understanding of the balance between the categories of experience, reason, and authority as well.

Her careful linguistic study has yielded interesting results but it is not a methodology I am

equipped to imitate.

Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s Wonder and the Order of Nature brings together

the figurative and literal readings of nature through a history of the category of wonder and

marvel. They treat wonder as a category at the margins of the natural that points to the unknown,

the unexplained, and the symbolically meaningful. The categories of wonder and marvel are also

important to my work for the same reasons, because as Daston and Park have discussed, wonder

is a category that points to the boundaries and breaches in the system of knowledge.23 By

exploring the phenomena that cross the boundaries of categories, from natural to preternatural,

21. See particularly G.R. Evans, Getting it Wrong: The Medieval Epistemology of Error (Leiden: Brill, 1998);

Henrik Lagerlund, ed., Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background, (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds., Uncertain Knowledge: Skepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

22. Christine Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité: Étude linguistique de l’expression du vrai dans le discours scientifique en langue vulgaire (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2003).

23. Daston and Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 13-21.

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from known to occult, we can examine the ways different categories of evidence are martialed to

determine the reality of phenomena and to understand or explain them. I will use wonder as a

springboard to questions of the use of evidence to incorporate wonder and marvel into a coherent

picture of nature.

The focus of this study is on nature, but particularly the marvelous or exotic nature that

exists near the boundaries of natural philosophy. The same phenomena that offer a challenge to

the modern reader’s understanding of medieval depictions of nature frequently offer windows

into the ways in which diverse and complex nature was made coherent and comprehensible.

Daston and Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature offered an interesting view of a history of

monstrosity and wonder in medieval and early modern Europe, but our understanding of both

wonder and experience as categories in medieval writing have changed since their book was

published.24 The monstrous and marvelous stand out as particular natural phenomena that

required explanation and incorporation into a coherent view of nature. Despite the continued

assertions that natural philosophy could only be a science of generalities and universals we see a

fairly consistent interest in both audiences and authors to deal with the particulars of nature.25

Particular phenomena need to be explained. For all that medieval scholars asserted that the goal

of natural philosophy was to understand universals, the literature of natural philosophy seems

fascinated with explaining the particulars. The marvelous, the exotic, and the unusual are

24. The view of wonder has been significantly complicated by Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in

the Middle Ages: The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast, 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Caroline Walker Bynum in both Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); and Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) since the publication of Wonder and the Order of Nature. Also, as the list in n.19 shows, the majority of the work on epistemic categories of experience and observation were also subsequent to this book.

25. Benedict M. Ashley, “St. Albert and the Nature of Natural Science,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 73-102.

12

fascinating to readers and authors and they provide windows into the ways in which evidence

categories are balanced in the assessment, explanation, and presentation of these phenomena.

I will be focusing on certain broad commonalities as a means of linking texts that exist in

significantly different intellectual contexts; their participation in the broadly defined category of

encyclopedia and their interest in describing and presenting the particulars of nature. Each text

excerpts, organizes, or explicates information in ways that create a particular and coherent view

of nature. I am focusing on discussions of particulars; animals, plants, and stones, on the exotic

and marvels precisely because these create a liminal intellectual space where experience could,

and must, be deployed alongside reason and authority as a means of constructing or presenting

natural knowledge. This thesis is not about experience as such, although experience is a

significant preoccupation. Instead it seeks to make use of the excellent work that has been done

establishing our understanding of epistemic structures of medieval natural philosophy and

explore the balance of experience, authority, and reason as epistemological tools used by authors

compiling and explicating information about the natural world. Mary Franklin-Brown has argued

that the textual practices of knowledge construction in Scholastic encyclopedias both reflect and

influence the intellectual development of the period. On her account “genre shapes both

scientific writing and scientific thought, both philosophical writing and philosophical thought,

because there is no viable distinction to be maintained between them.”26 While I do not follow

Franklin-Brown completely,27 I do agree that we need to pay close attention to the ways that

26. Mary Franklin-Brown, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2012), 16, more generally 8-17. 27. Her study focuses on authority and textual acts as the primary means of making truth claims. While she is

conscious of experience as a minority paradigm for knowledge construction her focus is very explicitly on authority and knowledge construction as literary practice founded primarily on citation. As we will see in the discussion of De proprietatibus rerum in chapter 3 the majority of epistemic weight is given to the kind of citation practices and textual authority that Franklin-Brown focuses on. The texts used in this thesis, however, show that other knowledge-making paradigms, including experience, should also be present in our discussion. See Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, Introduction, especially 14-16.

13

genre and audience shape a given author’s approach to evidence and the expression of scientific

information. The goal here is to gain a better understanding of the contextually sensitive ways

these epistemic tools were adopted and presented by authors writing in related but different

works intended for different audiences and participating in slightly different genres. In this thesis

I look at four related works, each in its own way encyclopedic—in a broad understanding of the

term28—and each engaged with the compilation and presentation of particular information

concerning animals and the diversity of the natural world. While these texts are bound together

by shared topics and draw from a shared—though not uniform—body of ancient and

contemporary works, they each speak to different audiences29 and participate in different genres

of literature. As such, as I will argue, the balancing of experience, reason, and authority as

epistemically valuable categories of evidence for evaluating and presenting information shifts

significantly. A part of my goal here is to suggest that this does not make one author any more

credulous or intellectually critical than another; rather, it represents a contextually sensitive

approach to the evaluation and presentation of evidence on the part of both the author and the

audience in medieval natural investigation.

This project also seeks to bridge a gap between the intellectually rigorous medieval texts

that typically form the basis of modern examinations of medieval epistemology and works

28. For a short discussion of the modern use of broad or narrow definition of encyclopedias in the Middle Ages, see

Elizabeth Keen, “Shifting Horizons: The Medieval Compilation of Knowledge as Mirror of a Changing World” in Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds. Jason König and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 277-300; Robert L. Fowler, “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 3-30.

29. I should note here that each of the texts discussed was fairly widely read in its own intellectual context and frequently took on new life and new readership over time. Because of the complex lives each of these texts led the audience and distribution of each text will be addressed individually at the beginning of each chapter. To say that the texts spoke to different audiences, however, is not intended to indicate that there is not significant overlap in the readership of each text. Indeed it is entirely possible that one individual would have read all four texts. I am trying rather to suggest that the texts were produced and read in related but different intellectual contexts with different assumptions.

14

targeted at a wider reading audience that made use of the knowledge base of natural philosophy

but which were not necessarily produced or consumed within the scholastic context. Albertus

Magnus’ De animalibus marks the first point along this scale as a text produced within a

scholastic intellectual context and intended to be consumed within the educational context of the

Dominican studia.30 De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus is the truest

encyclopedia among these texts and also a direct product of the scholastic intellectual

environment intended for use within the Franciscan studia. It enjoyed a complex and wide-

ranging life outside the studium, however, both as an educational resource in universities and in

private libraries as well as undergoing translation into multiple vernacular languages.31 Similarly

the Pseudo-Albertus experimentum texts Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium

and De mirabilibus mundi were most probably produced within a scholastic intellectual context

but exist as texts of practice in a way entirely unlike the other texts considered.32 They allow us

to reflect on the cross-pollination of information between medical and natural philosophical

intellectual contexts as well as exploring a work that highlights experience in a particular way.

Finally we will explore The Book of John Mandeville, one of the most widely read and copied

works of the Middle Ages. This work, most likely produced in a monastic context, was read by a

30. James A. Weisheipl, “Life and Works of St. Albert” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative

Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); Kennith F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven M. Resnick, "Introduction: The Life and Works of Albert the Great," in Albertus Magnus on Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, eds. Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven M. Resnick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 40-42.

31. Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Introduction générale,” in De Proprietatibus Rerum eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele, Heinz Meyer, et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 3-34.

32. Isabelle Draelants, “Partie I. Commentaire,” in Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum, et animalium (Liber aggregationis): Un texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, ed. and trans. Isabelle Draelants, Micrologus’ Library 22 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni Dell Galluzzo, 2007), 32-56; Antonella Sannino, “Il testo,” in Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale, ed. Antonella Sannino, Micrologus’ Library 41 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni Del Galluzzo, 2011), 15-24, 55-57.

15

huge cross-section of the population and through it I will suggest the importance of legal and

well as philosophical concepts of evidence particularly in popular works.33

1.1 A Note on Audience

I should note here that each of the texts discussed was fairly widely read in its own

intellectual context and frequently took on new life and new readership over time.34 Because of

the complex lives each of these texts led, the audience and distribution of each text will be

addressed individually at the beginning of each chapter. To say that the texts spoke to different

audiences, however, is not intended to indicate that there is not significant overlap in the

readership of each text. Indeed it is entirely possible that one individual would have read all four

texts. I am trying rather to suggest that the texts were produced and read in related but different

intellectual contexts that would produce differing assumptions concerning their construction of

natural knowledge. The individual who read both Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus and The Book

of John Mandeville would surely have approached them with significantly different expectations,

even though the texts share certain broad commonalities in source material and content. It is fair

to say that a text like De animalibus is written to participate in a scholastic discourse in a way

33. John Larner, “Plucking Hairs from the Great Cham’s Beard,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and

West, eds. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 137-142; Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

34. For example, De proprietatibus rerum had several distinctly different audiences at different times. For a brief overview of the ways the text was reshaped for different audiences see Heinz Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte von, De proprietatibus rerum’ (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 232-237. For two more detailed examples see Juris Lidaka, “Bartholomaeus in the Thirteenth Century,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 393-406; and Christine Silvi, “Jean Corbechon «revisité»: Revoir, corriger et diffuser le Propriétaire en françois dans les incunables et les post-incunables,” in Encyclopédie médiévale et langues européennes: Réception et diffusion du De proprietatibus rerum de Barthélemy l’Anglais dans les langues vernaculaires, eds. Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 89-123.

16

that The Book of John Mandeville, or even De proprietatibus rerum, is not. Similarly, even

though I have said that these texts all take part in the broad genre of encyclopedia—a genre that

is as much a useful modern construct as a medieval reality35—they also participate in aspects of

other literary and intellectual genre that contribute to their different approaches to evidence. At

the same time each text attempts to present a coherent picture of the world and the ways the

author chooses to do so reflect their context and audience.

2 Epistemic Structures

The recent work exploring the meanings of the terms experientia, auctoritas, and ratio

demonstrates that it is difficult to draw hard distinctions based on the uses of these terms by

medieval authors. These terms are multifaceted in themselves and intertwined in a complex

manner that does not lend itself to the kind of delineation necessary for articulating how they

interact in medieval natural knowledge. In her masterful linguistic discussion of authority in Old

French literature, for instance, Christine Silvi highlights a collection of complex and provocative

ways to understand argument from authority, but in doing so it becomes an expansive category

that almost encompasses truth claims as a whole.36 In this work I am seeking to explore the

relationship between types of evidence so I must attempt to find productive ways of defining the

epistemic categories in play that both follow contemporary understandings of these concepts and

are also useful categories for the purpose of our investigation. This is the reason I have chosen to

35. Margriet Hoogvliet, “Mappae Mundi and Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image versus text,” in Pre-Modern

Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 63-74; Bernard Ribémont, “On the Definition of an Encyclopaedic Genre in the Middle Ages,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 47-61; Michael W. Twomey, “Inventing the Encyclopedia,” In Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, eds. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 73-92.

36. Christine Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité.

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use the English terms experience, authority, and reason to designate the epistemological

structures at play in medieval natural philosophy. While each category is built on the

recognizable structures of contemporary thought, the need to focus them and establish lines

between them as a means of discussing their balance makes it necessary to acknowledge that

they are, at least to some extent, idealizations and not perfect representations of contemporary

categories.

2.1 Experience

Experientia and experimentum are complex terms that do not map cleanly onto our own

understanding of what experience would mean. As Isabelle Draelants articulates in her

introduction to the study on experience, Expertus sum, the medieval use of the terms experientia

and experimenta cannot be assimilated into the modern understanding of experience. For

medieval scholars experience is not always direct. Medieval knowers frequently invoke

experiences that they have not personally had but that they find recorded in texts. References to

experience can occur through supernatural or spiritual phenomena: it is not limited to the

common order of nature nor necessarily to what can be perceived by the senses. Finally, even

when experience is direct and concerns physical phenomena it does not constitute a rigorous

program of investigation intended to confirm a hypothesis.37 While no medieval scholar would

deny the possibility of forming knowledge through experience, the diversity of natural

phenomena and the fallibility of the human senses meant that it was extremely difficult to

generalize from individual experience. It was thus the most suspect of the three evidence

37. Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,” 5-6.

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categories we are discussing. Under the best conditions experience produced an immediate

knowledge that is distinct from the abstract knowledge desired by scientia.38

Having established what medieval experience was not, it becomes harder to pin down

exactly what it was. Experientia could be used to indicate first-hand experience of the senses,

evidence from the senses capable of being combined with the epistemic tools of ratio and

auctoritas for the purpose of convincing a reader or supporting a knowledge claim. It is equally

likely to refer to written accounts of experience from reliable authors, or to represent a quality

possessed by a particularly knowledgeable or skilled individual; expertise.39 Similarly

experimentum has its own range of meaning from concerning an identified and measured fact of

nature or, more frequently, a catalogue of recipes or animals, plants, and minerals where the

properties and effects are detailed. In this sense it refers to the product of experience.40

In this thesis I am most interested in moments that suggest the author or reader is

evaluating or employing sense experience of the natural world, whether their own or derived

from the claims of an expert or reliable witness. While the category has the potential to tell us

about the role that sense experience and the interaction with the world play in medieval natural

philosophy, we must always be aware that the terms used to refer to experience do not

necessarily relate to the author’s direct intervention, even though they do imply the value of

sense engagement as a means of approaching nature.41 As is well known in the works of Albertus

Magnus, claims to experience were often drawn from previous authors stripped of their

citations.42 The introduction of experimentum or experientia frequently draws on a known body

38. Arnaud Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui?”, in Expertus sum. L’expérience par les sens dans la philosophie

naturelle médiévale: Actes du colloque international de Pont-à-Mousson (5-7 février 2009), eds. Thomas Bénatouïl et Isabelle Draelants (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), 22.

39. Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,” 7-10. 40. Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui,” 20-23. 41. See Bénatouïl and Draelants, “Introduction,”; and Zucker “Expertine sunt Antiqui.”

42. Friedman, "Albert’s Topoi of Observation"; see also Isabelle Draelants, “Expérience et autorités.”

19

of exempla from authorities and can be seen as a means of gathering support from authority. We

must be careful, therefore, not to assume that all references to experientia or even statements

beginning with “I saw” refer specifically to, or conjure in the reader, the assumption that the

author is relating their own sense experience.43 We can, however, still attempt to dig for an

understanding of the role sense experience played in medieval knowledge construction, as long

as we are careful to understand that the terms experientia, experimentum, and even expertus sum,

cannot be simply translated into sense experience. At the same time there does exist—within the

terms experientia and experimentum but also conveyed through other means—the importance of

sense experience to understanding and communicating information about nature. While we must

be careful to consider the range of possible meanings wrapped up in the terms experientia,

experimentum, and expertus sum, we can still attempt to sift through medieval texts to gain an

understanding of how sense experience could be used as an epistemic tool for gaining knowledge

about the world and for convincing others of the truth of a knowledge claim.

For the purpose of this thesis I will be focusing on instances where claims to experience

do appear to be appealing to sense experience of nature for part or all of their epistemic value.

Whether the individual is actually articulating his own experience is less important than the

choice to use sense experience as a tool for establishing the credibility of his knowledge claim.

In all cases we are dealing with textual sources so the value of experience lies in its presentation

in the text and the weight that its author and reader grant it. In this context experience is always

necessarily mediated by the text it is presented in. It is therefore, at a certain level, always

testimony and extremely difficult to entirely disassociate from the authority that backs it.

Questions of the author’s or witnesses’ credibility will always, therefore, play a role in

43. Zucker, “Expertine sunt Antiqui,” 23-24.

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experience claims. As such we will be paying more attention to the ways in which references to

experience are presented, evaluated, and used in order to support or refute knowledge claims

about the world. The question is rarely “did this experience happen?” as much as “what is the

value ascribed to experience as a means of producing knowledge or supporting this knowledge

claim?”

We should not be surprised to find phenomena referred to in the texts as being proven by

experience even if we do not believe that they are possible. As Michael McVaugh has pointed

out, we must be conscious that we frequently have very little information about how—or if—a

test was conducted or what was considered to constitute proof in this context. For medical

recipes this makes it very difficult to know exactly how to assess a recipe that asserts it was

proven by experience, or proved to be effective.44 Experience, even when assumed to be

exclusively first-hand sense experience, is fundamentally enmeshed with the theoretical

commitments of the subject and cannot be perceived as some outside test against which a theory

could be compared and discarded. When John Mandeville tells us that he has tested or proved the

claim that diamonds can be made to grow we will be more interested in the deployment of a

claim that implies sense experience as an important means of supporting this knowledge claim,

than on the question of whether he was, in fact, lying.45 Albertus Magnus is known to reproduce

claims to experience by the unidentified author referred to as Experimentator without citation.

This certainly has an impact on his status as a champion of sense experience, but for our

purposes it is more interesting that he found these claims to experience useful to demonstrate his

arguments. We must be conscious that his use of the term experientia can tell us something about

44. McVaugh, “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism,” 177-194. 45. Iain Macleod Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, trans. Iain Macleod Higgins

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 99; Christiane Deluz, Jean de Mandeville: Le Livre de merveilles du monde (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 306.

21

the use of experience as an epistemic tool but we must approach it carefully and it certainly does

not necessarily mean that Albertus himself had the experience. It must be acknowledged,

therefore, that in this thesis for experience to be a useful category of evidence we must recognize

that it must also be at least somewhat artificial.

2.2 Authority

Similarly, we must define what we mean by authority as an epistemic structure here.

There has been a great deal of work on authority in medieval literature and frequently these

studies have taken a wide-ranging approach to use of the term authority. From nearly its earliest

uses the term auctoritas was bound up with concepts of political and familial power and it is

extremely difficult to disentangle literary authority from political and social authority,

particularly in the context of translation into vernacular languages.46 Taking this broader

approach to examine the uses of auctoritas, authority can thus become not a specific category of

evidence but a term encompassing all textual acts that provide support for the author’s truth

claims in the work, as well as referring to the construction of political and religious authority.47

While these studies have been extremely productive in understanding authority, power, and

authorship in medieval literature, this approach creates a category far too expansive to be used in

this particular study of epistemic tools. For this reason, I intend to use a much closer definition of

46. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39-47. 47. For examples see the articles collected in Michel Zimmermann, ed., Auctor and auctoritas: Invention et

conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (14-16 join 1999) (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001); Marianne Børch, ed., Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004); Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power; Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, eds. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). On authority and vernacular texts, see Alastair J. Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyens, eds., Translation and Authority: Authorities in Translation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016).

22

authority that draws on a specific contemporary use of auctores as a body of credible textual

sources.

In his natural histories Pliny the Elder—in recounting the physical variety, manners, and

customs of peoples living in remote places—states that he will not put forward claims based on

his own credibility but ascribe the facts to the authorities (auctores) because of their greater

diligence and devotion to study.48 To Pliny’s values of superior industry and devotion to study

medieval scholars added the divine authority of scripture and the divine inspiration present in the

works of the Church Fathers, but it is this sense of authority as constituted by a textual body of

reliable sources that we are interested in here. Technically auctoritas could be used to refer to

excerpts and quotations of the auctores, a collection of authors whose texts were considered to

possess sagacity and veracity, whether through divine inspiration, literary quality, or intellectual

merit. The auctores were generally not contemporaries of late medieval scholars and we can

consider auctoritas––in this usage––to represent a body of literature made up predominantly of

ancient writers and Church Fathers whose works had gained credibility of their own through the

belief in the intrinsic value of the works as well as the knowledge and dedication to study of the

auctor.49 In practice, however, authoritative texts were more complicated and much less fixed

than this description suggests. While there were generally recognized auctores each discipline

also had its own collection of authoritative works.50 As we will see over the course of this study,

particularly in the discussion of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum, the use of

sources to provide authority is not limited strictly to ancient auctores. In the context of

48. Pliny, Natural History, vol. 2, Books 3-7, trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 352 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1942), 2:VII.i, 510-513. 49. Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 10-14, 85-117. Although rather old, this work remains an important and frequently cited resource on authority and authorship.

50. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 12-14.

23

encyclopedias we can more usefully break authorities down into the categories of Scripture, the

patres, doctores, and philosophi. These categories could include contemporary scholars and were

not fixed groupings but fluctuated between encyclopedias.51 It is also important to note that this

textual body of authority has often been perceived as creating a constraining body of work but

medieval scholars were also able to excerpt it, rearrange, it and make use of it in constructing

novel and expansive works.52 By collecting and re-interpreting the works of auctores though

commentary, compilatio, or other forms, medieval authors were able to build their own work in

important ways that used auctoritas rather than being limited by it.

Authority as a category of evidence cannot, therefore, be perfectly constrained to this

technical definition of auctoritas. It does, however, identify a manageable starting point for a

category of evidence that would be recognizable to medieval scholars in practice. I shall discuss

the epistemic structure of authority as pertaining to the reliance on excerpts, references, and

citations in which the name of the author or work—whether the authority of these authors derives

from philosophical, religious, or literary qualities—is deployed as an important part of the

evidence for the credibility of the knowledge claim. I will also attempt to differentiate between

authority as an epistemic structure and credibility, which I will use more generally to describe the

reliability of authors and compilers as well as the acts aimed at supporting the truth value of their

own—or in the case of The Book of John Mandeville the narrator’s—knowledge claims rather

than drawing on the auctores.

51. For two studies that attempt to create useful typologies of the authorities used in encyclopedic texts see Christine

Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité; and Isabelle Draelants, “La science naturelle et les sources chez Barthélemy l’Anglais et les encyclopédistes contemporains,” Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et reception vernaculaire/Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, eds. Baudouin Van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 43-99. It is important to note that this does not exhaust the meanings of the term auctoritas. As Scanlon points out, the concepts of literary and political authority are entangled nearly from the earliest known uses of the term. For further discussion see Scanlon, Narative, Authority, and Power, 39-46; Minnis, Translations of Authority.

52. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, chapter 3; Silvi, Science médiévale et vérité, Particularly chapters 2-4.

24

2.3 Reason

Ratio is, happily, a comparatively uncomplicated and recognizable category in medieval

texts referring to argument based on logical structures and, particularly in the context of natural

philosophy, the process of rational demonstration. This mode of argumentation was passed down

through the works of late antique scholars like Boethius, which used reason rather than

theological authority to demonstrate theological truths. With the translation and adoption of

Aristotelian philosophical works from Greek and Arabic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

rational demonstration became generally recognized as the foundation of scientific knowledge.

Axiomatic premises are, however, hard to come by when dealing with nature. In the practice of

natural philosophy Aristotle became the model for a rational method of investigating nature; as

Burnett puts it “In this form of argumentation, which twelfth-century commentators (following

Boethius) referred to as ratio, premises are inferred from the experience of the senses. The

resulting arguments are ‘probable’ (‘probabilis’) and their validity must be judged on the basis of

their reasonableness (ratio).”53 Particularly in the context of natural philosophy ratio was often

used and presented as a tool capable of either opposing or supporting auctoritas.54

Reason is thus largely able to map on to the contemporary category of ratio, since in its

contemporary use it was frequently perceived as a specific tool for the production and

presentation of knowledge. I will thus use it for those knowledge claims where the argument or

reasoning itself is expected to provide the necessary support.

53. Charles Burnett, “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 2, Medieval

Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 380. 54. Burnett, “Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” 378-382; For a more general and wide-ranging discussion of the

category of reason see Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly chapter 5.

25

As may be illustrated by this attempt at creating useful definitions, the categories of

evidence in medieval thought are complex, overlapping, and interrelated. In attempting to sort

through them and understand their balance we must attempt to understand the contemporary

categories themselves as well as possible, but for the sake of clarity we must also attempt to

differentiate them in ways that may appear to create the existence of firm lines that did not exist

in contemporary minds. These epistemic tools could be, and were, combined in inventive and

complex ways, particularly when considering the employment of experience and experiments

passed down through authoritative texts. While the categories I have outlined represent useful

heuristic tools we should be careful not to interpret them too rigidly.

3 Chapter Outline

3.1 Chapter 2: De animalibus of Albertus Magnus

In De animalibus Albertus demonstrates a careful and critical approach to the task of

constructing a coherent picture of nature. He shows us a complex approach to evaluating

evidence concerning parts of the world he has no access to. The epistemic structures of reason,

experience, and authority are carefully weighed in each case, but reason offers the only certain

way of refuting a claim. The diversity of nature creates a wide possibility space, where

experience may be used to confirm or call into question reports, but it is not sufficient to refute a

claim. It is possible for something to be contrary to our expectations of nature but still explicable

through natural causes. Monstrous births occur because of the subversion of certain natural

processes but they occur extremely rarely and still are explicable by natural mechanisms. They

violate expectations, but not natural reason. Reason allows Albertus to sift through testimony to

determine that which is possible based on natural mechanism and that which is not, such as a

26

creature capable of living in fire. Reason allows him to throw out a claim that suggests that

natural principles are violated on a regular basis, such as the birth of a basilisk from the egg of a

cock. These things Albertus is willing to refute entirely. The rejuvenatory power of the eagle,

however, is susceptible to explanation via natural reason. It is unexpected but it does not violate

natural principles or natural mechanism in any way. Thus, even though it has not been

experienced by contemporaries, his understanding of the diversity of the natural world makes

Albertus unwilling to reject the story. He includes it in the information considered accurate as he

attempts to construct an image of the natural world.

The evidence structures traced in the work of Albertus Magnus form the foundation of

this study. In subsequent chapters we will explore texts that move gradually toward a popular or

extra-scholastic context and see the ways that the authors’ use of evidence shifts according to

changing context. There is no one universal approach in medieval natural philosophy to

balancing the epistemic value of reason, experience, and authority; rather, there is a spectrum of

shifting practices that seems closely tied to the intellectual context of the intended audience.

3.2 Chapter 3: De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus

The De proprietatibus rerum shows us a very different set of epistemic structures

following its own genre and goal. The task Bartholomaeus has undertaken is one of compiling

and, as such, he avoids articulating his reasons for choosing between authorities in the way

Albertus does. Bartholomaeus instead attempts to present a coherent view of the world by

ordering and juxtaposing the accounts of his authorities in such a way as to present room for

concordance in matters of cosmology. The concept of the diversity of nature once more plays an

important role in allowing Bartholomaeus freedom to present conflicting information from

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authorities in the context of the particulars of nature. The goal of compilation marks the text and

places authority as its epistemic core. Natural diversity serves as a means of producing a

coherent view of the world out of the widely varying reports of authorities. Conflicts of

cosmology are smoothed away while marvel and diversity create a space where conflicts on the

particulars of nature can be tolerated.

The world Bartholomaeus describes encompasses all the texts discussed in this thesis.

The careful natural history of Albertus is visible in discussions of generation and corruption,

while the practice-oriented medico-magical information of the experimenta is visible in the

individual properties of animals or diseases. The world he describes is also recognizably the

world of Mandeville and the mappae mundi. The reader is capable of engaging with these

different texts equally because each establishes its epistemic structures according to the genre

and context of the work.

3.3 Chapter 4: The experimenta of Pseudo-Albertus

As we move towards works connected to what might be called the popular sphere, we

also move away from knowledge of the work’s author. While De animalibus and De

proprietatibus rerum were unquestionably written by the individuals they are ascribed to, the two

experimenta I will discuss are pseudonymous and, as we will see shortly, the figure of John

Mandeville is completely fictional. Such complexities of authorship offer us interesting windows

into the relationship between the author and the credibility of the text. These two experimenta are

ascribed to Albertus Magnus as a means of supporting their knowledge claims through his

established credibility, despite being written by an unknown hand.55 Likewise the development

55. Draelants, “Commentaire,” 15-17, 26-29; Sannino, “Il testo,” 55-57.

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of the figure of Mandeville can offer us an excellent window into the creation of a credible

author precisely because John Mandeville probably never existed.56 These works enjoyed a wide

circulation and have as much to tell us about the construction of credible knowledge as those

works by well identified and well established authors.

In the discussion of the Pseudo-Albertus experimenta I hope to highlight two points.

First, a shared understanding of the epistemic role experience plays in understanding the

particulars of nature between medicine and natural philosophy. Medical practice, like the

discussion of specific plants and animals in encyclopedias, must delve into the complex world of

the particulars of nature, the properties of specific ingredients and even their connection to the

complex forces of nature and astrology. As such the readers and authors show a shared

understanding of the importance of experience as a means of knowing despite the theoretical

structures that exist to explain nature. We will examine the epistemic structures of the

experimenta texts attributed to Albertus Magnus as an example of this popular genre and of

works with strong links of context and genre to both the medical and philosophical worlds. It is a

text that focuses upon the marvelous properties of nature while also explicitly naturalizing these

properties. It shares links to the medical, magical, and philosophical traditions both in its

structure and its sources.57

The second point I wish to show, is that the obsession of these texts with practica––the

knowledge of how to manipulate the world rather than just knowledge of understanding its

causes––and the condensed nature of the natural philosophy it does present, meant that the reader

is being presented with a somewhat simplified version of the epistemic principles we can see

56. For a short discussion of the potential identification of the author of The Book of John Mandeville, see Iain

Macleod Higgins, “Introduction,” in The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), xvi-xx.

57. Isabelle Draelants, “Commentaire,” 17-26.

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active in the “more scholastic” works. The nuance of the relationship between reason, authority,

and experience that we can see in the production of a rational medical practice and in the

encyclopedia’s exploration of natural particulars is washed away. We are presented with an

epistemic view that not only relies strongly on claims to experience, but even appears to present

experience and reason as opposed epistemic tools. The experience here, however, is specifically

a pre-authorized experience derived from an authoritative witness. It is not sufficient that it was

witnessed generally, the specific credibility of the witness is important. As texts of practice we

will also briefly explore possible lines of connection between the Pseudo-Albertus experimenta

texts and the work that has been done by Long, Smith, and Harkness on the broader culture of

empirical values they see as important to the development of empiricism in early modern

science.

Experimenta texts, with their medical and/or magical information about the attributes of

plants and animals, were extremely popular among a certain section of the reading public.58 As

such experimenta, like the Pseudo-Albertus text discussed here, constitute an interesting window

into the view of nature experienced outside the realm of formal university disputation. The texts

offer a bridge between those written in a specifically educational context––such as the texts by

Albertus and Bartholomeus previously discussed––and the most popular of works I intend to

discuss, The Book of John Mandeville. Taken together this produces a text that is focused on

interesting and engaging the reader but provides a simplified natural philosophical structure with

a strong focus on the epistemic importance of experience. It insists that the causes of these

marvelous phenomena are natural but their particularity and complexity leave them knowable

only through experience. In its justification of experience—rather than rational demonstration—

58. Eamon, Secrets of Nature, 38-90; Draelants, “Commentaire,” 24-26.

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as a means of gaining knowledge it drives a much firmer wedge between reason and experience

than seen in the writings of Albertus or the medical theory of Montpellier.

3.4 Chapter 5: The Book of John Mandeville

The Mandeville author appealed to a wide and varied audience of readers and his

methods of knowledge construction offer us some insight into the evidence practices of this

eclectic audience. In this chapter we will point to some distinct similarities to the evidence

practices demonstrated in previous texts as well as some new avenues of investigation. The

Mandeville author constructs the narrator’s credibility both through establishing his social status

and demonstrating Mandeville’s knowledge of natural philosophy: the principles of the natural

world. The Mandeville figure is thus presented as a credible knower and his report focuses on the

particulars of nature, a context where experience is a valid means of gaining natural knowledge.

The contextually sensitive approach to evidence is highlighted dramatically because of

this work’s structure as a travel narrative. While it remains closely related to encyclopedic texts

in its formation, it also shares formulae and tropes with pilgrimage and romance literature giving

it a special structure that brings to the foreground many of the evidence practices discussed in

previous chapters.59 The negotiation between depicting the literal and figurative meaning of

geography and the natural world––characteristic of medieval travel narratives––highlights the

contextually sensitive approach to evidence we have been developing during this study. In the

59. “Travel narrative” is a modern descriptor that focuses on one aspect of a very diverse collection of works.

Contemporaries would probably have referred to most works as part of a specific genre such as pilgrimage narrative or missionary account. One of the most interesting aspects of late medieval travel narratives, like The Book of John Mandeville, is that it bridges a collection of contemporary genres to create something very new. This can be seen partly in the wide variety of ways the text was read as discussed by Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences. See also Paul Zumthor and Catherine Peeble, “The Medieval Travel Narrative,” New Literary History 25, 4, part 2 (1994): 809-824.

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context of the natural world we see the Mandeville author relying on experience as a means of

knowing the particulars of nature while other evidence structures, reason and authority, establish

the universals. The author’s approach to the spiritual meanings of geography is no less rigorous,

but he relies, of course, on the authority of scripture rather than experience or disputation as a

means of establishing spiritual truths about the world. Where these systems overlap we can see

their evidence practices interact, making use of multiple evidence structures to establish a “fact”

that exists in multiple contexts. In negotiating these spaces the author highlights both the social

and intellectual practices that seem important to constructing the epistemic value of the narrator’s

claims. The natural philosophy and pilgrimage narrative structure of The Book provide a

backdrop for the author’s primary interest, describing the particulars of the world. Even though

not considered appropriate as the focus of natural philosophy, the knowledge of the diversity of

the world was ever present in natural discussions. In this context experience, like that of the

traveler, was considered the best method for gaining knowledge of the natural world.60

Mandeville’s discussions of the diversity of the world, and his focus on the marvelous

and strange, locates the natural information of his book within a context where the experience

claims he makes may become the most appropriate kind of knowledge claim. Experience,

however, is not valuable in and of itself but must be judged in reference to the reliability of the

subject and their ability to accurately recount that experience. In the context of law the reputation

and ability to recall and reco