Bernard Silvestris - Works

Works

Bernard's greatest work is the aforementioned Cosmographia, a prosimetrum on the creation of the world, told from a 12th-century Platonist perspective. The poem influenced Chaucer and others with its pioneering use of allegory to discuss metaphysical and scientific questions. 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. 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.

Read more about this topic:  Bernard Silvestris

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge—they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
    Vissarion Belinsky (1810–1848)

    ... no one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community, can have any idea of its abominations.... even were slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my last energies and latest breath.
    Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)

    ...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?
    Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)