Isabelle Draelants, Aristote, Pline, Thomas de Cantimpré, Albert le Grand entomologistes. Identifier chenilles, papillons et ver à soie parmi les vermes - p. 37
In the field of insect studies, the Middle Ages are a terra incognita. Any assumption that the ancient heritage takes precedence must be weighed against possible medieval innovations. As a first exploratory step, this chapter compares the entomological material of Aristotle, Pliny the Elder and Albert the Great (d. 1280). The first part describes the nature and extent of the relevant information and sheds light on the notion of the insect in each of the authors, while the second examines the records for the caterpillar, butterfly and silkworm. This approach reveals what the Dominican Albert the Great and his contemporaries, who were particularly concerned with the ‘nature of things’, retained from the ancient heritage and what they added to it. Albert the Great commented on Aristotle’s Zoology in his De animalibus but did not read Pliny’s Historia naturalis, although some of this material percolated through other authors he had been using, such as Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and above all Thomas of Cantimpré (d. 1270). At the end of his De animalibus, his history of the ‘ringed animals’ (annulosa, an Arabic-Latin translation by Michel Scotus c. 1210 to translate Aristotle’s entoma) is strongly marked by Aristotle’s explicative method on the generation of insects and their imperfect (unfinished) nature, but his reading of Avicenna (d. 1037) allows him to deepen the question of the milieu of emergence (decomposing matter) and of spontaneous generation (for bees, lice and fleas, among others) and to develop a theory of double generation in butterflies, in order to ‘save nature’ which must go from the similar to the similar. This survey highlights the medieval disappearance of the term insecta, the use of typically medieval vocabulary (annulosa, rugosa – ‘folded animals’) and even the use of some neologisms (e.g. lanificus for a sort of silkworm, verviscella for a butterfly, gusanes for the larvae).
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3_draelants.pdf