Thesis ID: CBB880338358

Assessing the Exotic: Authority, Reason, and Experience in the Construction of Medieval Natural Knowledge (2018)

unapi

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 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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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB880338358/

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Authors & Contributors
Ventura, Iolanda
Draelants, Isabelle
Checchi, Davide
Zimmermann, Albert
Verner, Lisa
Tellkamp, Jörg Alejandro
Concepts
Natural philosophy
Animals
Herbals and bestiaries
Philosophy
Zoology
Natural history
Time Periods
Medieval
13th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Ancient
16th century
Places
Europe
Bern (Switzerland)
England
Switzerland
Italy
Greece
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