author
active 13th century Anglicus Bartholomaeus
A Franciscan scholar from the 13th century, remembered for creating one of the Middle Ages’ best-known encyclopedic books. His "De proprietatibus rerum" gathered knowledge about nature, theology, medicine, and everyday life into a single widely read work.
1 Audiobook
Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus
by active 13th century Anglicus Bartholomaeus
About the author
Little is known for certain about his early life, but Bartholomaeus Anglicus was an English Franciscan scholar active in the 13th century. He studied and taught in the world of medieval learning, with connections to Paris, and later became known across Europe through his writing.
His fame rests on De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), written around the mid-1200s. The book set out to explain the created world in an organized way, bringing together material on subjects ranging from theology and the human body to animals, plants, geography, and stones.
That work became one of the most popular reference books of the later Middle Ages. Copied, translated, and printed many times, it helped shape how generations of readers encountered knowledge long before the modern encyclopedia.