The Dominican Botanical Culture: the Rehabilitation of Curiositas in Albert the Great's ‘De vegetabilibus' and in Vincent of Beauvais' ‘Speculum naturale'

The notion of curiositas within the medieval philosophical tradition may be approached in different ways. One of these is to investigate it as an explicative term that is able to shed light on the linkage between intellectual history and political as well as institutional developments. Thus, the idea of curiositas, conceived as the intention to focus on neglected fields of knowledge, may be considered the driving force of a certain ideological intent. The history of the term curiositas may be studied by taking its dichotomy with the history of bans, prohibitions and censorship into account. Consequently, the interpretation of the idea of curiosity might have a precise political and moral meaning, which is dependent on the dominant ideology. The first half of the thirteenth century was indeed a time during which the attitude towards knowledge, and therefore towards curiosity, was ambivalent: on the one hand, the phenomenon of the translatio studii led to the circulation of a great amount of texts, and thus to the possibility for the Latin West to gain access to kinds of knowledge previously unapproachable; on the other hand, precisely due to this large number of new texts, the study of them was regulated and controlled through several prohibitions. In this sense, the historical reconstruction of an idea such as curiositas should be put into the historical context of cultural institutions, such as the University of Paris and the studia of the Dominican Order. The time between 1215 and 1259 represents a turning point in the history of philosophy: this period encompasses the first statutes of the University of Paris, which prohibited the study of natural philosophy and of Aristotelian writings, as well as the new statutes of 1255, which, on the contrary, made this kind of study within the faculty of arts mandatory. Further, the Dominican General Chapter of Valenciennes, which took place in 1259 and resulted in the reformulation of the ratio studiorum of the Dominican Order, officially institutionalizing the studia artium, falls within this period. Within this context, the case of the scientia plantarum is peculiar, as it experienced a radical change between the 12th and 13th centuries: its rehabilitation somehow seems to coincide with the rehabilitation of curiositas itself, and it is included in the process of institutionalizing the philosophia naturalis.