(d. ca. 1159). Bernard probably taught in the cathedral school at Tours in the second third of the 12th century, where one of his students was Matthieu de Vendôme. The dedication of his longest and most important work, the Cosmographia, to Thierry of Chartres, has led some scholars to confuse him with John of Salisbury’s beloved teacher Bernard of Chartres, who would have been a generation older than Silvestris. If, as seems likely, Bernard was also trained at Tours, he would have studied under Hildebert of Lavardin.
Bernard’s earliest works are a commentary on the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneid and another, incomplete, on Martianus Capella. The commentary on Plato’s Timaeus mentioned in the Martianus commentary has not been identified. In his elegiac poem Mathematicus, Bernard discusses destiny and necessity in mathematical terms. Also at least partly his is the Experimentarius, a work taken from Arabic sources on cosmography. Two short opuscules derived from problems in Quintilian and Seneca are also usually attributed to him: respectively, De gemellis and De paupere ingrato.
The Cosmographia (ca. 1147–48) has two parts, Megacosmos and Microcosmos. In the first part, Nature approaches Nous, the personification of the divine eternal mind of God, whom she begs to improve the physical universe. Nous separates the four elements, gives matter form from divine ideas, and shapes the world soul. The new universe is described in detail. Microcosmos depicts the formation of humankind. Nature encounters Genius, and they set out to seek Urania and Physis, who will guide them through the heavens to find man’s soul and bring it back to earth. The title is explained: man is the world in little.
Though the work has multiple sources, including Boethius, Martianus Capella, and ancient and Arabic scientific sources, the basic concept is apparently original with Bernard. His poem circulated widely—over fifty copies survive in European libraries—and influenced the two most widely read 12th-century allegorical visions of nature, the world, and humanity: Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus. In the rhetorical work of Matthieu de Vendôme, he is frequently cited for his excellence of style.
Bernard Silvestris. Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke. Leiden: Brill, 1978.
——. The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Vergil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Francis Jones. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.
——. “Il ‘Dictamen’ di Bernardo Silvestre,” ed. M.Brini Savorelli. Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 20(1965): 182–230.
——. “Un manuale de geomanzia presentato da Bernardo Silvestre de Tours (XII secolo): l’Experimentarius” ed. M. Brini Savorelli. Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 14 (1959):283–341.
——. The Cosmographia, trans. Winthrop P.Wetherbee. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Stock, Brian. Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
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