Memory and the Illuminated Pedagogy of the Propriétés des choses

As academic Latin material began to cross over into the vernacular, in late fourteenth-century France, artists sought to help the new readership adapt to the demanding content. A unique iconography developed for copies of Jean Corbechon’s 1372 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum seems to have drawn on the arts of memory practised by learned readers, in order to entice lay audiences into the text. This programme of illustration alternated a recurring scene of a master teaching students with ever more imaginative, non-realistic pedagogic scenes that can be interpreted as visualizing to the students, and the miniatures’ viewers, the phantasmata stored in the learned master’s mind.