In 1372, on the orders of King Charles V, the monk Jean Corbechon of the order of Saint Augustine translated into French the encyclopedic work written a century earlier by the Franciscan Barthélemy the Englishman, De proprietatibus rerum. A sum of knowledge on nature and science, it is very successful, at a time when the desire to understand the universe is spreading among an increasingly wide audience. We learn that angels are always represented with long curly hair because their desires arise from the root of thought as hair arises from the head; we also discover there all the properties of the sky and those of the articular drop, and we know everything about the intelligence of the elephant as well as the perfections of divine persons. Following Jean Corbechon, Bernard Ribémont offers us here, put in modern French, a series of extracts from the Livre des propriétés des choses, which plunge us not only into the heart of medieval scientific thought but also into the heart of the imagination of the time, a source of wonderful images. - [Publisher]

Language: French

ISBN: 978-2-234-05189-8