. A hugely popular didactic poem by the otherwise unknown Gossuin (or Gautier) de Metz; the dialect is that of Lorraine. It exists in three redactions of various lengths (from 6,600 to over 10,000 octosyllabic lines), of which the first and shortest, supposedly offered in 1246 to Robert d’Artois, brother of St. Louis, was by far the most widely known (sixty-seven manuscripts). The work is divided into three sections: an introduction to science (twenty-one chapters, including twenty-eight illustrations), geography and meteorology (nineteen chapters, nine illustrations), and astronomy (twenty-eight chapters, nine illustrations).
Principal sources are Honorius of Autun’s Imago mundi, Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolymitana, Alexander Neckham’s De naturis rerum, and Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus. Like other encyclopedists of the period, the author treats such diverse subjects as the Seven Liberal Arts, the four elements, the shape of the earth (round), and celestial and terrestrial geography. His influence can be found in Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor, in the prose Sidrac, and in Jehan Bonnet’s Placides et Timeo.
Langlois, Charles-Victor. La vie en France au moyen âge, du XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1925–28, Vol. 3: La connaissance de la nature et du monde, pp. 135–97.
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