Visualizing Elemental Ontology in the Livre des propriétés des choses

Sunderland, Luke

doi:10.1215/00358118-8007978

Visualizing Elemental Ontology in the Livre des propriétés des choses

Sunderland, Luke

Authors

Professor Luke Sunderland luke.sunderland@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This essay offers an encounter with Bruno Latour’s account of ontological pluralism by way of a close reading of the Livre des propriétés des choses, Jean Corbechon’s fourteenth-century French translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedia. Engagement with Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence enables a new reading of medieval encyclopedias that takes seriously Latour’s suggestion that premodern cosmologies retain importance for modern ecological thought while simultaneously challenging his arguments about the rigidity of ontologies based on ideas of nature, substance, and matter. This essay argues that the Livre deploys precisely such an ontology in dynamic and flexible ways. The varying visual programs in Livre manuscripts each configure the encyclopedia’s ontology differently, either making humans privileged observers of nature or positioning them as subject to its laws while adopting varying solutions for communicating ontological contentions to readers.

Citation

Sunderland, L. (2020). Visualizing Elemental Ontology in the Livre des propriétés des choses. Romanic Review, 111(1), 106-127. https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-8007978

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	May 1, 2020
Deposit Date	Apr 11, 2019
Publicly Available Date	May 21, 2020
Journal	The Romanic review.
Print ISSN	0035-8118
Electronic ISSN	2688-5220
Publisher	Duke University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	111
Issue	1
Pages	106-127
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-8007978