Work is now at least underway to produce critical editions of two of the most successful encyclopaedic works of the Middle Ages: Bartholomew the Englishman’s mid-thirteenth-century De proprietatibus rerum, and the French adaptation of this text made by Jean Corbechon, c. 1372. In anticipation of the fruits of this labour, Joëlle Ducos has here brought together papers originally presented at a workshop held at the Sorbonne in 2008. The result is a useful overview of the current state of research into Corbechon’s Livre des propriétés des choses and adaptations of De proprietatibus rerum into other European vernaculars. Corbechon’s Livre des propriétés des choses is the focus of the four essays that make up Part One. ... Part Two examines renderings of De proprietatibus rerum in Anglo-Norman, Dutch, Occitan, Mantuan, and Castilian, the linguistic diversity here easily matched by the diversity of these contributions in terms of scope and methodology. In the two essays likely to be of greatest interest to French Studies readers, Brent A. Pitts compares the description of the ‘isles devers le northwest’ found in the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Livre des Regions to that found in other medieval encyclopaedic works, and the late Peter Ricketts draws upon the botanical lexis of Book 17 of De proprietatibus rerum to assess the contribution of the fourteenth-century Occitan translator. - [Abstract]

Language: French

DOI: 10.1093/fs/knw139