Speculum Arabicum is a collection of thirteen erudite articles which emerge from a 2017 international conference concluding an ambitious five-year (2012-2017) ARC (Actions de Recherche Concertées at UCLouvain) project entitled: “Speculum Arabicum: Objectifying the Contribution of the Arab-Muslim World to the History of Sciences and Ideas: The Sources and Resources of Medieval Encyclopedism.” The object of the project was to produce unbiased information and quantifiable benchmarks in order to make a significant contribution towards a scientifically based assessment of the extent of Europe’s debt to the scholars of medieval Islam. The remarkable list of the publications emerging from this project (at 329-338) allows the interested reader to judge independently if and how these targets were met. But those who commonly start their research on any topic by looking at medieval encyclopedias in order to create a preliminary distilled image of the standard medieval understanding or view of the topic will find the present volume useful and at times thought-provoking. The usual suspects of the Latin encyclopedic tradition in the Middle Ages are extensively discussed throughout the volume with particular stress on the apex of medieval encyclopedic production around the middle of the thirteenth century (Thomas de Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum, the immensely popular Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De propietatibus rerum that survives to this day in some 300 Latin manuscripts, and about 60 copies of various translations, and the immenseSpeculum maius of Vincent de Beauvais.) But other earlier encyclopedic texts receive some attention as well, from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (ca. 630) and Rabanus Maurus’s De naturis rerum (ca. 840), through the twelfth-century compilations such as Liber Floridus of Lambert de Saint-Omer (ca. 1120), Imago mundi of Honorius Augustodunensis, or Alexander Neckam’s De naturis rerum (ca. 1210). Particular attention is drawn to the intersection between the Latin and the vernacular works in the field that appear from the middle of the thirteenth century, most notably Brunetto Latini’s Livre du tresor, Gossuin de Metz’s Image du monde (1246), or the Flemish version of Thomas de Cantimpré by Jacob van Maerlant (ca. 1270).
The word encyclopedia is neither classical nor medieval. It started circulating among humanists in the last decades of the fifteenth century, and was adapted to the vernaculars in the early sixteenth century. Despite this, the anachronistic use of the word and its derivatives (encyclopedic, encyclopedism) in contemporary historiography of certain medieval texts is justifiable without need for apologies. The medieval books which fall under the aegis of the word offered access to an inventory of the created world and to global knowledge, and essentially fulfilled the educational and didactic purpose of edifying the reader. Again and again their compilers stress in their prologues (Vincent de Beauvais’s lengthy prologue to his Speculum maius is particularly noteworthy) the importance of nature as a gateway to the knowledge of God and the understanding of Scripture. This made some of the Latin encyclopedias major tools for preachers. But encyclopedias were often also tools of power and vectors for the diffusion of hegemonic knowledge and ideas.
Medieval encyclopedias usually followed a thematic, not an alphabetical order. Their main method was that of a compilation: their editors selected extracts from authoritative texts and ordered them in a reasoned frame. But their story is not only Latin because the Latin texts constantly intersect with Greek, Arabic and vernacular encyclopedic texts and sources through translation, borrowing and citations, making it necessary to look for continuities between the different linguistic worlds and urging us to efface the modern distinction between science and literature and to approach the field from multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual, and transcultural perspectives.
The title of this collection promises the interested readers an illustration and discussion of the intersecting perspectives between the East and the West within medieval encyclopedism. Anyone expecting new insights from a comparative look at Latin and Arabic encyclopedism in the Middle Ages will be disappointed. Many of the articles indeed reveal the debt of Latin encyclopedias to a large scope of Arabic sources, or underscore in a worthy way the important role of these encyclopedic texts in the diffusion or dissemination of Arabic (mainly scientific) knowledge in Latin Europe. But instead of correcting the regrettable propensity to compartmentalization hampering real collaboration between Arabists, Latinists and Romanists, most of the articles deal with European encyclopedias (Latin or vernacular) and add little to their intersection with the parallel Arabic encyclopedic culture. The chapters which focus on Arabic sources remain strictly confined to the Arabic contexts with no attempt to link them in texts or notes to the parallel Latin encyclopedic culture. Reading through the volume one learns a lot about medieval cultures but remains distant from the desired systematic comparison or synthesis of the separate worlds of Latin and Arabic encyclopedism.
Particularly noteworthy among the chapters of this collection is Baudouin Van den Abeele’s exhaustive survey of Latin encyclopedias and encyclopedism in the Middle Ages (19-64), which should be the starting point for any student of the topic in search of identifying the evolutionary chronology of the genre and the available editions of the specific texts. Even after Mary Franklin-Brown’s monumental Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) which manifested the discursively heterogeneous nature of scholastic encyclopedism and paid particular attention to the organizational paradigm guiding the various encyclopedic authors she studies as well as to the readers and potential users of these tools, he laments the fragmented nature of the historiography of medieval encyclopedism and the lack of a definitive synthesis of this field of knowledge.
Joëlle Ducos’s chapter (223-242)) about vernacular translations of Latin encyclopedias focuses on a case-study of the translations of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum andprovides an excellent discussion of the main themes that emerge from translation studies: transposition, adaptation, revision, abbreviation and circulation. She presents the main standard research questions--why should one translate an encyclopedia into a vernacular language? how can one explain the choice of the translated encyclopedia and the target language? how should one translate an encyclopedic text?--and provides a useful survey of the main translations of Latin encyclopedias. The dominant position of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedic text is highlighted: it was fully translated into French (the widely diffused translation by Jean Corbechon at the demand of Charles V from 1372), Italian, English Occitan, Spanish, Dutch, and Anglo-Norman (book XV only). While Thomas de Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum had a more modest afterlife in German in Konrad von Megenberg’s encyclopedia, and only its third book was translated into French; and of Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum maius, only the Speculum historiale was translated into Dutch, German, Flemish and French.
Other articles focus on a close reading of specific texts which allow them to make some broader generalizations regarding the topic of the collection. At 67-82, Godefroid de Callataÿ and Liana Saif study the Indo-Persian cosmological and astrological ideas and concepts possibly underlying the ninth-century encyclopedic compilation of cosmological texts known as the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica (more specifically the Kitāb al-Ustūṭās which constitutes the first part of Kitāb ‘ilal al-rūḥāniyyāt [On the Causes of Spiritual Forces]). They then discuss the later appropriation and reformulation of these ideas in various texts of Islamic esoterica.
Charles Burnett (83-96) introduces the Liber novem iudicum (The Book of the Nine Judges), a twelfth-century text on judicial astrology which assembles information from nine astrological authorities (mainly Arabic). He uses this peculiar text as a platform for a stimulating discussion of what is an encyclopedic text and what is the correct medieval term for such a genre (summa, compilatio, compendium, catena, or florilegium).
Jean-Charles Ducène studies the geographic discourse in Mamluk encyclopedias of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries (Nuwayrī (d. 1333), al-‘Umarī (d. 1349) and Qalqašandī (d. 1418)) and shows the subtle interplay between their commitment to a global survey of the world based on ancient sources and the particular interests of their political sponsors (97-111). These encyclopedias include detailed and up-to-date descriptions of Christian lands in Europe and Africa, which also rely on local Christian informants, such as a certain Domenchino Doria from Genoa. But it seems that their compilers attempted to turn their texts into manuals of contemporary political geography of the Islamic word from India to Al-Andalus in the service of the ruler’s court in Cairo.
Fatma Sinem Eryilmaz studies the Imperial Scroll (Tomar-i Humāyūn), an unusual historical source providing a giant universal history (113-140). The scroll, which was begun in the 1560s during the reign of Sultan Süleymān (r.1520-1566), used universal history to shape an ecumenical and quasi-prophetic mission for the Ottoman ruler as the ultimate receiver of divine mission of world leadership as well as the inheritor of sacred and secret knowledge which God shared first with Adam and transmitted through Avicenna to the Ottoman dynasty. While the scroll cannot be classified as an encyclopedia, some of its qualities (cosmological logic and reasoning, multi-disciplinarity, universal scope) make it part of encyclopedic literature, broadly defined.
Grégory Clesse studies the process of selection, ignoring, revising and reorganization of Arabic medical sources (specifically Isaac Israeli’s Liber febrium, Constantinus Africanus’s Viaticum which was a translation of Zād al-mussāfir by ibn al-Jazzār, and Avicenna’s Canon) in the great medieval encyclopedic compilations (143-161). He identifies the different strategies of integrating such sources in Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum naturale and in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum.
Meyssa Ben Saad studies zoology in the monumental summa of the ninth-century Basra polymath al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-ḥayawān (completed ca. 847) highlighting the encyclopedic nature of his information (179-200). This allows her to discuss thoughtfully the crucial question of the existence of Arab encyclopedism in the Middle Ages, and to bring a whole set of Arabic texts, including the Kitāb al-ḥayawān, into the fold of “encyclopedic texts.”
At 201-220, Thierry Buquet focuses on the increasing number of exotic animals in Thomas de Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum, and shows that the Louvain Dominican introduced some recently available sources such as Aristotle’s zoology and Jacques de Vitry’s Historia orientalis, but was mainly indebted to standard earlier source such as Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore.
Florence Ninitte (243-269) shows that Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale played an important role in the reception of Arab-Muslim knowledge within the Christian West. She does that by looking at how later compilations which heavily relied on the discussion of Islam in Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, book XXIV, 39-67 (Giovanni Colonna’s Mare historiarum (from the mid-fourteenth century), and the second translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium by Laurent de Premierfait from 1409) used it to harvest essential material about Islam and its prophet. Laurent de Premierfait even expanded his information about the prophet by inserting additional material. An identical core narrative based on Speculum historiale thus evolved into two different stories.
Giuseppe Zarra (163-178) studies the integration of material about the pharmaceutical properties of animals from the Thesaurus pauperum (a collection of recipes prepared with natural and easily accessible ingredients, that was conceived as a manual for self-medication and is regarded by the author as a small encyclopedia of medieval medicine), into the Sienese translation of Brunetto Latini’s widely popular encyclopedia Livre du tresor (Tesoro laurenziano).
The last two papers are only marginally connected to the core topic of the collection. At 271-285, Lorenzo Mainini investigates thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany and Emilia as environments particularly rich in terms of cultural production where the scientific tradition nourished vernacular production in the form of a variety of vernacular encyclopedic writings from Brunetto Latini and Aldobrandino da Sienna to Dante. This resulted in the production of heavily interpolated versions of existing encyclopedias, in rendering existing encyclopedias into narrative texts and in the production of vernacular encyclopedic compilations of extracts from a variety of moral, ethical, political and scientific authorities. Mattia Cavagna (287-328) offers a detailed survey of scientific, didactic and encyclopedic manuscripts and early printed books held at the Royal Library of Belgium, and urges us to study more systematically the encyclopedic dimension of the large scientific collections of manuscripts and early books in other libraries.