Bernard Silvestris - Works

Works

Bernard's greatest work is the aforementioned Cosmographia, a prosimetrum on the creation of the world, told from a 12th-century Platonist perspective. The poem influenced Chaucer and others with its pioneering use of allegory to discuss metaphysical and scientific questions. Bernard also wrote the poem Mathematicus and probably the poem Experimentarius as well as some minor poems.

Among the works attributed to Bernard later in the Middle Ages were a commentary on Virgil's Aeneid (Bernard's authorship of which has been questioned by modern scholars) and a commentary on Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. The commentary on the Aeneid is the longest medieval commentary on that work, although it is incomplete, ending about two-thirds of the way through book six.

Read more about this topic:  Bernard Silvestris

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
    William James (1842–1910)

    The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
    —G.C. (Georg Christoph)

    They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)