Bernard Silvestris, also known as Bernardus Silvestris, was a Medieval Platonist philosopher and poet of the 12th century. Platonism is the Philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 2.1 Editions and translations 3 Bibliography 4 See also

Biography

Little is known about his life. André Vernet, who edited Bernard's Cosmographia, believed that he lived from 1085 to 1178; the only certain date in his life is 1147, when the Cosmographia was supposedly presented to Pope Eugene III. This is a list of fictional characters from Dan Brown 's The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on it. Cosmographia (also known as De mundi universitate) is a Latin philosophical allegory, dealing with the creation of the universe, by Pope There is some evidence that he was connected to Spanish schools of philosophy, but it seems likely that he was born in Tours, due to the intimate descriptions of the city and the surrounding area found in the Cosmographia. Spain () or the Kingdom of Spain (Reino de España is a country located mostly in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Tours is a city in France the Préfecture (capital city of the Indre-et-Loire département, on the lower reaches of the river Later medieval authors also associated him with that city.

Wherever he was born, he certainly studied and taught at Chartres, home of the most important school in western Europe until the rise of the universities later in the 12th century. Chartres is a town and commune and capital of the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France It is located 96 km southwest of Paris This article is about Western European institutions See also Medieval university (Asia and Byzantine university Medieval university In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was assumed that Bernard was the same person as Bernard of Chartres, although this identification has been challenged by more recent scholars such as Julian Ward Jones. Bernard of Chartres ( Bernardus Carnotensis) (d after 1124 was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist Philosopher, scholar and administrator Most notably, a contemporary of Bernard, John of Salisbury, who was bishop of Chartres, quotes from works attributed to Bernard but does not know the author by name. John of Salisbury (c 1120 &ndash 1180 English author diplomat and Bishop of Chartres, was born at Salisbury. He also quotes from Bernard of Chartres and knows him as a separate author.

Works

Bernard's greatest work is the aforementioned Cosmographia, a prosimetrum on the creation of the world, told from a 12th-century Platonist perspective. A prosimetrum (Latin is a literary piece that is made up of alternating passages of Prose and Poetry. The poem influenced Chaucer and others with its pioneering use of allegory to discuss metaphyscial and scientific questions. Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1343 – 25 October 1400? was an English author poet Philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and Diplomat. An allegory (from αλλος allos "other" and el αγορευειν agoreuein "to speak in public" is a figurative mode of representation Bernard also wrote the poem Mathematicus and probably the poem Experimentarius as well as some minor poems.

Among the works attributed to Bernard later in the Middle Ages were a commentary on Virgil's Aeneid (Bernard's authorship of which has been questioned by modern scholars) and a commentary on Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Publius Vergilius Maro ( October 15, 70 BCE &ndash September 21, 19 BCE later called Virgilius, and known in English as Virgil or For the group of nine Ancient Egyptian deities see Ennead. The Aeneid (əˈniːɪd in "Martianus" redirects here For the beetle Genus, see Martianus (beetle. The commentary on the Aeneid is the longest medieval commentary on that work, although it is incomplete, ending about two-thirds of the way through book six.

Editions and translations

For editions and translations of the Cosmographia, see Cosmographia (Bernard Silvestris)#Editions and translations. Cosmographia (also known as De mundi universitate) is a Latin philosophical allegory, dealing with the creation of the universe, by

• Mathematicus, ed. and trans. Deirdre M. Stone, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 63 (1996): 209–83.
• Experimentarius, ed. Charles Burnett, in "What Is the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris?: A Preliminary Survey of the Material," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 44 (1977): 62–108. Reprinted in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). ISBN 0-86078-615-3
• The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Virgil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Frances Jones (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). ISBN 0-8032-0898-7
• The Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's Aeneid, trans. Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). ISBN 0-8032-4108-9

Bibliography

• Desmond, Marilynn, "Bernardus Silvestris and the Corpus of the Aeneid," in The Classics in the Middle Ages, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990).
• Dronke, Peter, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
• Dronke, Peter, "Bernard Silvestris: Nature and Personification," in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992).
• Jeauneau, Édouard, "Bernard Silvestre," in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly reference work that was published from 1970 through 1980 2 (New York: Scribner's, 1970): 21–22. ISBN 0-684-10114-9
• Jones, Julian Ward, "The So-Called Silvestris Commentary on the Aeneid and Two Other Interpretations," Speculum 64 (1989): 838-48.
• Stock, Brian, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). ISBN 0-691-05201-8
• Wetherbee, Winthrop, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). ISBN 0-691-06219-6

See also

• Allegory in the Middle Ages

Allegory in the Middle Ages was a vital element in the Synthesis of Biblical and Classical traditions into what would become recognizable as Medieval culture

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