Medieval encyclopedias are frequently presented as collages or montages of quotations. The encyclopaedists themselves, most often displaying at the beginning of their works a list of auctoritates or preceding each of the quotations with a marker, do their best to present their work as the fruit of many readings, from which they extracted a great deal of information, which was then organized in an orderly fashion in order to become accessible to a public which hardly has the time, or the means, to accomplish the same eforts. However, the research that we carried out to edit Book IV of the Hortus sanitatis enabled us to deine precisely what were the working methods applied by the compiler: in fact, to gather his information, far from reading the ancient sources, he drew on medieval authors who had already done the compilation work. For book IV, devoted to aquatic animals, we were able to establish that he had used two medieval sources: book XVII of the Speculum naturale by Vincent of Beauvais and book XXIV of De animalibus by Albertus Magnus. In the same perspective, the investigation of the sources of the Hortus sanitatis led us to wonder about a possible relationship between these two encyclopedias of the 13th century and a third one, widely used by both of them, the Liber de natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré – more specifically books VI and VII, devoted respectively to sea monsters and fish. We would like, in this article, to clarify what is the nature of the relationship between these sources, by relating the books which, in each of them, concern aquatic animals. Our approach will follow the construction of knowledge from the 13th to the 15th century: we will begin by showing how the rediscovery of Aristotle influenced the work of Thomas de Cantimpré; how the latter reorganized and transmitted the knowledge of the Greek scholar and what were the results of this work. Vincent de Beauvais and Albertus Magnus then drew heavily on the Liber de natura rerum of Thomas de Cantimpré, as already shown by P. Aiken and J.B. Friedman, but we would like to insist on the particular role played by the Liber natura rerum in the transmission of Aristotelian knowledge on aquatic animals and on the way in which it was received and used, first by Albertus Magnus and Vincent of Beauvais, then, through them, by the compiler of the Hortus sanitatis. Finally, three complex examples, developed in a last part, will show that the rediscovery of Aristotle through Arabic translations may have led medieval encyclopaedists to misinterpretations, which were transmitted until the dawn of the Renaissance. - [Authors]

Language: French

DOI: 10.4000/kentron.668; HALId: hal-00917986