The Intellectual Interests Reflected in Libraries of the Fourteenth and ...

FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY LIBRARIES 285
French and Spanish, as well as in English and Dutch translations
from the original Latin. Charles of Orleans had it translated into
French at his court, and there appear to have been twenty-four
printed editions between 1470 and 1500.120 In English libraries,
however, Alexander Neckham's work, On the nature of things, continued
to be found in most libraries of any size in the late fifteenth
century.'2' The three Specula, or mirrors of nature, doctrine, and
history by Vincent of Beauvais, also found a place, despite their
mammoth proportions, in several of the French, English and
Italian libraries. Pico della Mirandola, however, appears to have
preferred the later Speculum divinorum et quorumdam naturalium
by Henry Bate of Malines for his library.'22 More recent encyclopedic
works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also
found in these libraries but they appear to have lost the universality
of appeal that the earlier compositions had had. Thus the
moral compendium or Sophologium of the Augustinian, Jacques le
Grand of Toulouse, is seldom found outside French libraries,123 and
the "Light of the Soul," or Lumen animae of Mathias Farinator,
the Carmelite of Erfurt and Vienna,124 is usually found only in German
libraries, of which an example is that of Sigismund Gossembrot,
the most active German advocate of humanism in the fifteenth
century in Augsburg.125
Scientific or pseudo-scientific interests which were represented
in the catalogues following the divisions of the trivium, centered
about the four basic sciences, astronomy or astrology, arithmetic,
120 Robert Steele, "What fifteenth century books are about," The Library, IV
(1903), 338-40; A. C. Klebs, Incunabula scientifica et medicat (Bruges, 1938), nos.
149.1-12 (Latin); 150.1-8 (French), 151.1 (Netherl.); 152.1 (Spanish); 153.1
(Spanish); 154.1 (English). For the translation of Bartholomaeus' work into
Italian by Vivaldo Belcalzer in the late 13th and early 14th century, and its general
currency in vernacular translations in the 14th and 15th centuries, see V. Cian,
"Vivaldo Belealzer e l'encielopedismo Italiano," suppl. V, Giornale storico della lett.
ital. (Torino, 1902), 35 ff.; and the review of Cian's work by A. Sepuleri, in Archivio
Storico Lombardo, ser. 3, XX (1903), 219-21.
121 M. R. James, The ancient libraries of Canterbury anrd Dover, 289 et passim.
122 P. Kibre, op. cit., 96.
123 L. Thorndike, op. cit., IV, 278-79. There was a copy, however, in the Dominican
House in Vienna in the late fifteenth century, Mittelalterliche Bibl. Kat., I
(1915), 346; and in the library of Sigismund Gossembrot, see note 125 below.
124 L. Thorndike, op. cit., III, Chap. XXXII.
125 Paul Joachimsohn, "Aus der Bibliothek Sigismund Gossembrots," Centralblatt
fur Bibliothekswesen, XI (1894), 264. For a copy of the Sophologium see
p. 262.
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