Only small portions of De naturis rerum by Thomas of Cantimpre have ever been printed. One reason for this is that manuscripts of it, although quite numerous, are commonly either anonymous or attributed to Albertus Magnus. So, although it was composed in the first half of the thirteenth century, its authorship was not recognized in the Histoire litteraire de la France until one of the later volumes on the fourteenth century. Yet its text is readily recognizable not only by the author's statement that he had spent some fifteen years in its preparation, but by the fact that most of its nineteen or twenty books are introduced by a Sermo generalis. Its composition between 1228 and 1244 was confirmed by the discovery that a new tin mine in Germany to which it referred was dated by Matthew Paris in 1241. The account in the Histoire litteraire was chiefly based on Latin manuscripts of the Bibliotheque Nationale... In 1912 C. Ferckel gave a fuller list of the manuscripts, indicated by an asterisk in the yet fuller list which I gave in A History of Magic and Experimental Science, where I further called attention to a third version or variety of manuscripts which open with the book, usually numbered sixteen, on the seven regions of air. There follows yet another supplementary list of manuscripts since noted from either catalogues or by personal inspection. ... The manuscripts which follow are arranged alphabetically by places of their libraries beginning with Basel F.III.8 and ending with Wolfenbuttel 2258.. - [Author]

Language: English