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Ангелы и усиархи: поэтическая космология Бернарда Сильвестра
e article is devoted to the Cosmographia written by the French poet and philoso- pher Bernard Silvestris shortly a er 1140, probably at Tours. is prosimetrum, by its content and form, is linked to the School of Chartres. It develops the Christian cosmogony and cosmology in mytho-poetic terms. Both the introduction of poe- try into a philosophical treatise and the use of elastic poetical formulas in order to give subjective emotions—fear, hope, hesitation—an appearance of philosophical objectivity led to great discoveries in literature and thought. In this, Bernard Silves- tris is no doubt representative of a great literary and philosophical tradition of the twel h-century Renaissance. The author uses a literary form that was well known in the Middle Ages: it com- bines prose and poetry and allows him to represent the most current philosophical categories and problems in the most unrestrained and suggestive form available in his time. Even his prose is rhythmicized, its poetic character gives it the necessary degree of polyvalence. He relies on a large number of ancient and medieval autho- ritative texts, from the Timaeus and hermetic Asclepius to Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Arabic astrology. He is well-acquainted with the exegetical approaches towards antique classics developed by the Chartres masters, since he, a teacher of grammar, also commented on the Eneide at school. But his achievement is his own; his use of classics is so unconstrained that we have to deal with the most original cosmology of his time. e second part of the article presents the rst poetic transla- tion of chapter III of the rst book, Megacosmus, which, in elegiac dystichs, creates a laconic encyclopaedia of the universe.