n
at Beauvais between 1184 and 1194, who died at his native place in 1264,
an insatiable glutton for books (librorum helluo), say his
contemporaries, collected and edited what he called _Bibliotheca Mundi,
Speculum majus_ (Library of the World, an enlarged Mirror), an immense
compilation, the first edition of which, published at Strasbourg in 1473,
comprises ten volumes folio, and would comprise fifty or sixty volumes
octavo. The work contains three, and, according to some manuscripts,
four parts, entitled _Speculum naturale_ (Mirror of Natural Science),
_Speculum historiale_ (Mirror of Historical Science), _Speculum
doctrinale_ (Mirror of Metaphysical Science), and _Speculum morale_
(Mirror of Moral Science). M. Daunou, in the notice he has given to it
[in the xviiith volume of the _Histoire litteraire de la France,_ begun
by the Benedictines and continued by the _Academie des Inscriptions et
Belleslettres de l'Institut,_ pp. 449-519], disputes, not without reason,
the authenticity of this last part. Each of these Specula contains a
summary, extracted from the various writings which have reference to the
subject of it, and the authors of which Vincent of Beauvais takes care to
name. M. Daunou, at the end of his learned notice, has described the
nature, the merit, and the interest of the work in the following terms:
"The writings and documents which we have to thank Vincent of Beauvais
for having preserved to us are such as pertain to veritable studies, to
doctrines, to traditions, and even to errors which obtained a certain
amount of credit or exercised a certain amount of influence in the course
of ages. . . . Whenever it is desirable to know what were in France,
about 1250, the tendency and the subjects of the most elevated studies,
what sciences were cultivated, what books, whether ancient, or, for the
time, modern, were or might have been read, what questions were in
agitation, what doctrines were prevalent in schools, monasteries,
churches, and the world, it will be to Vincent of Beauvais, above all,
that recourse must be had." There is nothing to be added to this
judicious estimate; there is no intention of entering here into any sort
of detail about the work of Vincent of Beauvais; only it is desirable to
bring some light to bear upon the intellectual aspirations and activity
of the middle ages in France previously to the new impulse which was to
be communicated to them by the glorious renaissance of Gree