gems, early lapidaries, Albertus Magnus, magical properties, medicine, early mineralogy, herbals

Around the middle of the thirteenth century, discourse on the three kinds of natural beings (minerals, plants, animals) took shape across a range of literary genres that conveyed both popular and scholarly knowledge of nature. Herbals, lapidaries, and many de natura rerum texts included alphabetically organized lists of things with information on their natures, properties, potentially useful virtues, and/or allegorical meanings. These works were primarily intended as sources of information for medical or broadly religious purposes. Albert the Great’s treatises on the three realms of nature (De mineralibus, De vegetabilibus, and De animalibus) were of a different order, conceived as part of his ambitious project to comment on the entire Aristotelian corpus. Notably, each of these works includes one or more books consisting of alphabetical lists of natural beings—stones, plants, animals—thus integrating disparate literary traditions of natural knowledge within the conceptual unity of an Aristotelian treatise. This unique fusion raises several questions: why did Albert find it necessary to incorporate these sequences of stones, plants, and animals? Did the inclusion of alphabetical material in his works on minerals, plants, and animals reflect his conception of proper procedure in scientia naturalis? And how did he handle his sources—treatises on the nature of things, lapidaries, and medical works?