De natura rerum is an encyclopedic work composed by the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré between 1241 and 1260 for readers wishing to know all the elements of creation. It is presented as a sum of secular and sacred knowledge about nature, collected from ancient and medieval scholars. The work soon became a huge success, and itself became the subject of subsequent compilations and revisions. Two books, each introduced by a prologue, are devoted to aquatic species: Book VI deals with fifty-nine sea monsters and Book VII with eighty-nine fish, giving access to a quantity of ichthyological knowledge much greater than that previous medieval works, thanks to the further consultation of a much larger number of authorities, in particular Pliny, Solin and Aristotle, but also authors unknown until then. The article presents and translates an unpublished notice from book VI, which describes an anonymous sea monster, then tries to identify this "monster". - [Abstract]

Language: French

978-2-84133-938-9; HALId: hal-02364374