How the universe works

Robert Irwin enjoys a new study of the life, works and complex world of a prolific and eclectic 13th-century friar and scientist

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature

Irven M Resnick & Kenneth F Kitchell Jr

Reaktion Books 2022

Hb, 224pp, £16.95, ISBN 9781789145137

The mediaeval literary world was plagued with self-effacing authors. Rather than proudly write their own name on the title pages of their manuscripts, they ascribed what they had written to someone else, preferably someone famous. In this way the 13th-century German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus became the supposed author of a vast quantity of unmerited and almost certainly unwanted titles, mostly dealing with magic and alchemy. (It was probably one of these sort of treatises that Mary Shelley had Victor Frankenstein consult when he was building his monster.)

Albertus had had a busy administrative career within the Dominican order and not only defended the Dominicans from their critics in the University of Paris and elsewhere, but for several years he held the office of Bishop of Regensburg. To put it mildly, Albertus had no need for the pseudepigrapha that was dumped on him in his lifetime and in the centuries that followed, since he was the fantastically prolific author of treatises on theology, logic, botany, alchemy, zoology, phrenology, mineralogy and much else. His attempt to explain how the Universe worked and what God had to do with it came to 38 volumes in the 1899 edition.

The oeuvre drew on a wide variety of incompatible sources. Quite a lot was based on personal observation. His ecclesiastical duties took him across Europe and this gave Albertus, who was a keen twitcher, the opportunity to take many notes on birds and their ways. Indeed it is thought that it was his excessive interest in wildlife that led to his canonisation being delayed until 1931. His emphasis on the importance of personal observation was admirable. For example, there was a widespread belief that ostriches liked eating iron, but though Albertus repeatedly offered the ostriches several ingots, they were not tempted and they all preferred rocks and dry bones. Also he noted that badgers do not have legs of unequal length and that magpies do not moult when dead. On the other hand, some things he claims to have observed seem improbable, such as that frogs infest clothes in winter.

Albertus further relied on information he was given by people who were professionally involved with birds, beasts and fish, such as falconers, hunters and anglers. Swabian fowlers told him they had seen an old and blind goshawk being kept alive by young goshawks who brought him food. It may be that sometimes the expert informants were having Albertus on.

Then there was the enormous impact of new translations of Greek works, most notably in the 1220s of Aristotle’s Physics and On Animals. Readings of Aristotle transformed the intellectual world of Christendom, but despite Aristotle’s rational approach to natural science, his views on the eternity of the Universe and the immortality of the soul caused him to be regarded with great suspicion by ecclesiastics and his writings had to be handled with caution. Moreover the Aristotelian texts that Albertus had to hand came as Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek originals and this sort of transmission lent itself to the production of errors of a Chinese whispers sort. Also scores of pseudo-Aristotelian texts by self-effacing authors were in circulation and competing with the real thing.

Albertus, who believed that women’s susceptibility to imaginings influenced the formation of the foetus, found Aristotle’s views on women congenial. This included the positing of passive female sperm which awaited the arrival of the active male sperm. A female was a flawed male. She “is caused from the corruption of some natural principles, because nature intends a perfect work. Which is the male, and this is why Aristotle says that ‘a female is a flawed male’ just like a crooked tibia.” Nature would prefer to produce just males, but, sadly, women were necessary for the perpetuation of the species. Finally Albertus drew on a hotchpotch of folklore, fables, bungled etymologies and misreadings of older writings. He made his compendium of natural science from whatever came to hand.

People in the 13th century lived in a universe of marvels in which anything could be contrived by the hidden hand of God. Barnacle geese were born from rotten logs in the sea. The cuckoo sometimes turns into a hawk and then back again. The elephant fought off attacks with its ear. A certain stone called topasion was a remedy for haemorrhoids and attacks of lunacy. Albertus accepted some of these beliefs and denounced others. But the task of demystifying the mediaeval universe was far too big for one man and one century.

Resnick and Kitchell have done heroic work in sorting out both the career of Albertus and the world he struggled to understand.

★★★★