The naturalist in Britain. A social history

editors for at least seven years. A valuable side-product of this concentrated editorial activity has been the stream of theses and articles produced by the team during the period of their labours. The editors properly distinguish their edition as "critical" because, as they point out, "the absence of any Trevisa holograph ... the loss of his latin copy-text, some unresolved cruces and ambiguities of syntax and synonyms ... impose at every turn a need for editorial discrimination and so make textual finality impossible". There are, of course, Latin manuscript texts extant which derive, at some remove, from the copy-text, and there are also the early printed editions. The student has a convenient 1964 German reprint of the Frankfort printed Latin edition of 1601. A third volume to complete the edition under review is promised "about 1978". This will contain Introduction, Commentary and Glossary. What does this edition provide for the student of medieval science? That the language is Middle English is less of a hindrance for the non-philologist than might be supposed. The format is one which will be familiar to anyone who has used recent editions published for the Early English Text Society. Three or four letters peculiar to medieval English will give trouble for the first few minutes only. Even in the interim before the promised Glossary appears there is very little in the vocabulary to cause difficulty, provided due caution is observed. Readers with a smattering of Latin will find most of their problems resolved by a glance at a text in that language. Here, at last, is a reasonably accessible, comprehensive, reference tool on most of the topics relating to the natural world which exercised the mind of medieval man, or at least the minds of that tiny sub-species of medieval man which inhabited the universities and centres of learning. Of the nineteen books into which Ofthe properties of things is divided, seventeen deal with subjects falling within the domains of medicine and science. The other two, appropriately at the beginning, pass in rapid review the more metaphysical parts of theology concerned with the nature of God and of those "creatures" (e.g. angels) higher up the chain of being than man. Other books describe the Soul which (according to medieval ideas) has psychological and biological dimensions as well as theological ones; the human body, its attributes and ills; the universe; times and seasons; and the "matter …