Alexander Neckam

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Alexander Neckam , also Necham or Nequam , (born September 8, 1157 in St Albans , Hertfordshire , England , † 1217 in Kempsey, Worcestershire ) was an English scientist and teacher.

It was the same night as King Richard I was born. Neckam's mother raised the prince and her son together. Neckam was taught at the Abbey School of St Alban. He began to teach as a schoolmaster in Dunstable, which was under the Abbey of St Albans. Later, from about 1175 to 1182, he lived in Petit Pons in Paris . By 1180 he was already a respected lecturer in the fine arts at Paris University .

By 1186 he was back in England, where he again held the office of schoolmaster, first in Dunstable in Bedfordshire and then until about 1195 as head of the school of St Albans. It has been said that he visited Italy with the Bishop of Worcester , but this has been questioned. The claim that he was Prior of St Nicholas, Exeter , appears to be false. However, he was certainly often at court for some time in his life. After becoming Canon of the Augustinian Canons , he was appointed abbot of Cirencester in Gloucestershire in 1213 . He died in Kempsey, Worcestershire, and was buried in Worcester.

In addition to theology , Neckam was interested in studying grammar and natural history , but above all his name is associated with nautical science . In his writings De naturis rerum and De utensilibus , (the first of which was probably written around 1180 and became well known by the end of the 12th century), Neckam left us the earliest European record of the use of the magnet as a means of navigation in seafaring. Outside of China, these records appear to be the earliest. (The Chinese encyclopedist Shen Kua gave the first clear account of suspended magnetic compasses a hundred years earlier in his book Meng ch'i pi t'an, written in 1088. ) Probably in Paris, Neckam had heard that a ship, among other items of equipment, also had a needle must have, which is attached to a magnet (in De utensilibus there is talk of a needle on a bearing pin), which rotates until it points north and shows seafarers the way in gloomy weather or on starless nights. Neckam doesn't seem to see this as an exciting novelty - he just notes what had apparently become a common practice among many seafarers of the Christian world.

The antiquarian Thomas Wright published Neckam's De utensilibus in his volume with vocabularies in 1857 and De naturis rerum and De laudibus divinae sapientiae in his Rolls series in 1863 .

Neckam also wrote Corrogationes Promethei , a biblical commentary, with an introduction to grammatical criticism; a translation of Aesop into Latin elegies (six fables of this translation are reprinted from a Parisian manuscript in Roberts Fables inedites ); as yet unpublished comments on texts by Aristotle , Martianus Capella and Ovid's Metamorphoses , and other works. Of all these, De naturis rerum , a kind of manual of scientific knowledge of the 12th century, is by far the most important. The section on magnets, was from the above mentioned, is in Book II, Chapter XCVIII ( De vi attractiva - About the attraction ) the issue of Wright. The corresponding section in De utensilibus is on p. 114 in the vocabulary volume.

Roger Bacon's remarks on Neckam as a grammarian ( in multis vera et utitia scripsit: sed ... inter auctores non potest numerari ) can be found on p. 457 of Brewer's "Rolls" series edition of Bacon's Opera inedita . See also Thomas Wright's Biographia Britannica literaria, Anglo-Norman Period, pages 449-459 (1846) (some of this was changed in the 1863 edition of De naturis rerum ); C. Raymond Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, III, pp. 508f.

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  • This article contains text from the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , which has been released into the public domain .
  • P. Hochgürtel (ed.): Alexander Neckam, Suppletio defectuum, Carmina minora. Turnhout, Brepols 2008 (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis [CCCM 221]). ISBN 978-2-503-05211-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Thomas Wright (ed.): Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo, with the poem of the same author De laudibus divinae sapientiae. London 1863.