Liber Floridus

The Liber Floridus (Latin for the flourishing book, or Book of Flowers ) is a medieval work of the canonists Lambert de Saint- Omer. The work is dated around the year 1120. It is a kind of medieval encyclopedia, which deals with various theological, natural philosophical and historical questions.

Origin and authorship

As the author applies the Franco- Flemish Benedictine canon of the cathedral in Saint- Omer, Pas -de -Calais, Lambert de Saint- Omer (also called Lambertus Audomarensis ). Saint- Omer was the creation time in the County of Flanders, a cultural and economic center of the former western and northern Europe. In the Liber Floridus is a compilation of various extracts from about 192 other works. The original text was written in Latin, and later transferred into French (Le Livre fleurissant en fleurs ).

The original manuscript of Lambert is now in the University Library in Ghent. There are also two contemporary copies, both of which date from about the year 1150, a national in the Bibliothèque de France in Paris and one in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. The Wolfenbüttler copy of 105 parchment leaves was acquired at the initiative of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was then head of the library in 1710. Both copies differ in details from the original (for example, in the world map contained therein ). The world map in the Wolfenbüttel copy comes for a signature not of Lambert, but by Martianus Capella Mineus Felix. Additional copies may exist from later centuries. The naming of the manuscript as "Book of Flowers" is to be understood as a metaphor. Lambert wanted to see thought in his work the diversity and beauty of God's creation as a flowering garden and saw his task as a writer is to pick the reader some particularly beautiful or interesting flowers from it and explain it.

Content

The work contains a quasi- chronological report of world events up to the year 1119. This biblical, astronomical, geographical and natural philosophical issues are discussed. Lambert is evident in the work to be extremely educated and well-read cleric. He used a variety of sources, including the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Historia Brittonum, and the Chronicle of the Crusades of Bartolf of Nangis. He makes several references to the reports of crusaders from Saint- Omer, with whom he apparently was in contact after their return from the Holy Land. The Liber Floridus regarded as the first encyclopedia of the Middle Ages since the works of Isidore of Seville.

The seven -headed dragon of the Apocalypse (Revelation 12:3 b-4) in the Liber Floridus

Various plants in the Liber Floridus (copy from the 15th century )

The end of the world, explained in Liber Floridus