We know of several distant manuscripts composed between 1050 and the first literary glimpses of the Renaissance and printing press in the fifteenth century. We may read these encyclopaedias as vault-like repositories of information, an early inky storage and retrieval system, and perhaps a slightly desperate one. They were a form of intellectual harvesting, a resistance against the disintegration of wider learning (and the wider world) in the face of restrictive religious uniformity and the application of reason to faith. There was no room for scepticism. Writing and reading these rare volumes was almost a political act, although it’s unlikely the studious compilers from A–Z would have seen it that way. The encyclopaedist’s notions of science (the cosmos, biology) were still linked largely to theology, and the category of ‘science’ was mostly understood as practical craftsmanship. The wider world was almost a myth, with one’s nearest cathedral city and Jerusalem the only two destinations worth consideration; the Age of Exploration that would later transform our geographical appreciation of the world was still several centuries away.*
Most of these Latin manuscripts survive in fragments alone, but of the handful that exist in their entirety by far the most appealing is the Otia Imperialia by Gervase of Tilbury – all 196 chapters of it. Despite his name (in the twelfth century Tilbury was a marshy manor on the north side of the Thames and possibly a former Roman village), Gervase spent his adult life in Bologna, Naples, Venice, Arles and Rome; his education derived as much from experience as academia. A well-connected lawyer, once in the service of Henry the Young, the son of Henry II, he composed his great medieval text between 1210 and 1214 for his patron Otto IV of Brunswick, the Holy Roman Emperor. The translated subtitle suggests it was intended as an ‘entertainment’ and ‘relaxation’, although there was certainly also much instruction; the original title was Liber de Mirabilibus Mundi (Book of the Wonders of the World). One rarely read alone in the Middle Ages, and the manuscript was most likely read to Otto at night by his clerks as he struggled with insomnia.
The encyclopaedia is divided into three parts. The first twenty-five chapters examine the world from Creation to Noah, beginning with the storied flow of the Ganges, the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, ‘the four rivers that flow from Paradise’. Gervase then examines the conditions necessary for the formation of clouds and rain. The second section, in twenty-six chapters, is concerned with history and topography, and the current rulers of the known world; and the remaining 145 chapters assume a more spiritual and mythological tone, describing folklore, miracles and the supernatural (or as Gervase has it, ‘marvels of every province, not every marvel, but some from each province’). One review of the project concludes that ‘it looks as though the author, in some hurry to present his book to the emperor, did not expand his notes as he had intended’. We may balk at the contents of this dominant section, being so far removed from the more sober ambitions of Pliny and Isidore, but taken as a whole Otia Imperialia provides a comprehensive survey of the fearful world slowly emerging into a modern one. Gervase relied both on classical and oral traditions, his many biblical allusions combining with contemporary Christian theology and what one might call witches’ tales (or what one eighteenth-century editor called a ‘bagful of foolish old woman’s tales’); no one source was treated with more weight than another. Gervase himself stated in his dedication that many of his entries ‘may be dismissed as idle chatter, but they ought to be given a hearing, because they can provide no trifling instruction or warning with regard to many things’.*
As was common with such a personal endeavour, there was also a prominent smattering of opinion on current affairs: Gervase supports a German claim to the throne of Constantinople and weighs in on papal abuse. In other news, ‘The Isle of Man is quite densely populated, and the way of life there is more refined than is the norm.’
The first full English translation wasn’t published until 2002. The volume runs to more than 1000 pages, and it opens with a summary of previous attempts: an earlier translator at the University of California, ‘laboured strenuously’ on the Latin manuscripts during the 1950s and ’60s, but had his work ‘sadly interrupted’ by his death. The first complete edition provides extraordinary insights into the medieval mind.*
From Part 2, a view of Asia: ‘It starts to the east with the region of paradise, a secure place, remarkable for its possession of every delight, but inaccessible to human beings because it is surrounded by a wall of fire reaching right up to heaven. Within it is the tree of life: whoever eats of its fruit will remain in the same state forever and will never die.’
A few pages on, a description of India: ‘There are … various kinds of monstrous creatures there … There are some, for instance, whose feet point backwards, and they have eight toes on each foot. Others have a dog’s head and hooked claws; their skin is like the hide of cattle, their voice like the barking of dogs. There are … women who give birth five times, but their offspring do not live beyond their eighth year. There are also some creatures with no head: their eyes are set in their shoulders, and they have two holes in their chest to serve as a nose and mouth. There are others near the source of the Ganges who live just on the fragrance of a particular kind of apple. If they travel any distance they take some of these apples with them, because if they were to breathe bad unhealthy air they would die at once.’
And just as you’re thinking, ‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ consider the fate of Indian animals. ‘There are snakes so huge that their diet consists chiefly of stags; they even cross the ocean … The beast called the manticore is found in India too: it has a human face, a triple row of teeth, a lion’s body, a scorpion’s tail, and blazing eyes; it is the colour of blood, and has a voice like a snake’s hiss; it feeds on human flesh, and can run faster than a bird can fly.’*
Campfire tales, ghost stories, unsettling tales of inexplicable occurrences – Gervase’s Otia was full of them. His readers must have fallen upon such wonders as he describes, of mermaids and storm-inducing dolphins, not just with glee, but some degree of nodding familiarity. These were not tales of the gullible, but tales of the everyday. Not to believe them might be the greater sin.
About thirty manuscript copies of Otia Imperialia survive in their entirety, which is about twenty-eight more than Speculum Maius, the mid-thirteenth century work of Vincent of Beauvais. There is a simple reason for this: size. Speculum Maius (The Great Mirror) was an immense gushing river of a work: eighty books in all, divided into 9886 chapters. There are more than 4 million words. It made Gervase of Tilbury’s effort look like homework scribbled on a bus.*
Vincent of Beauvais is widely regarded as the most important educator of the thirteenth century. We know roughly when he died (1264), but not when he was born (somewhere between 1184 and 1194). He became a Dominican friar in Paris before 1220, and he became a ‘lector’ (a specialised reader and educational adviser) in the monastery of Royaumont founded by Louis IX in 1228. He began writing his great encyclopaedia under the king’s patronage in 1235, and didn’t put down his quill until twenty-nine years later; he almost certainly received help from a team of scribes, for no one could have realised this project on their own.
As was the pattern, Speculum Maius was a compendium, a collection of all writing its editor considered cogent, commendable and creditable. It was certainly comprehensive. There are 171 chapters on herbs, 161 on birds, and 134 on seeds and grains; about 900 chapters mention the lives of the saints, and about half this amount allude to chess. It was also contradictory: with about 350 cited sources, from Pliny the Elder to contemporary French scholars, from Cicero to Helinand of Froidmont, it would have been extraordinary had it not been. Entries disputed many things, not least whether a deer’s tail was poisonous, and whether the black poppy was edible.