Note 1254 — Chapter LIII
Reading edition
Only extracts of the De natura rerum have been printed (by J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, III, and in HL and Ferckel as noted below). Some discussion of the MSS and a partial list of them will be found in Appendix I to this chapter. I have chiefly used MSS Royal 12-E-XVII, 13th century; Royal 12-F-VI, 14th century; Egerton 1984, 13th century, fols. 34-145; Arundel 323, 13th century, fols. 1-98; and Arundel 164, 15th century, at the British Museum; and BN 347B and 523A at Paris. As any topic to which a chapter is devoted can be found without much difficulty in these MSS, which are divided into books and chapters and equipped with tables of contents, I shall usually not take the time and space to make specific citations by folio in the ensuing chapter.
Of Thomas’s Bonum universale de apibus I have used the 1516 edition.
Some books and articles on Thomas and his natural science are: Bormans, “Thomas de Cantimpré indiqué comme une des sources où Albert le Grand et surtout Maerlant ont puisé les matériaux de leur écrits sur l’histoire naturelle”; in Bulletins de l’Acad. roy. des Sciences de Belgique, XIX, 132-59, Brussels, 1852.
Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, pp. 211-33.
HL 30 (1888) 365-84, Delisle, “La Nature des Choses, par Thomas de Cantimpré,” supplementing and correcting the earlier account by Daunou in HL 19 (1838) 177-84, where the De natura rerum had been called an anonymous work known only from Vincent of Beauvais’ citation of it.
A. Kaufmann, Thomas von Cantimpré, Cologne, 1899, 137 pp., an unfinished work published posthumously without a projected section on Thomas’s natural science, which the author had scarcely begun.
Stadler, “Albertus Magnus, Thomas von Cantimpré, und Vincent von Beauvais,” in Natur und Kultur, IV, 86-90, Munich, 1906.
C. Ferckel, Die Gynäkologie des Thomas von Brabant, ausgewählte Kapitel aus Buch I de naturis rerum beendet um 1240, Munich, 1912 (in G. Klein, Alte Meister d. Medizin u. Naturkunde).