Bartholomew the Englishman’s thirteenth-century encyclopaedia was read across Europe for three hundred years. Robert Steele selects passages from John Trevisa’s Middle English translation, lightly modernised, on manners, medicine, geography, precious stones, beasts and the heavens, with a preface by William Morris arguing that the Middle Ages were no mere gap between two civilisations.
A delightful window on how medieval people understood nature, for readers of history, folklore and Chaucer. Download the free EPUB.