“Bartholomew's World” (BW) is comprised of articles, lessons, and exercises. There are articles on medieval authors and on topics treated by medieval authors. The topical articles are divided into lessons. Each lesson is based on a text by a medieval author and includes a variety of exercises. BW currently exists in two places: the public website containing our finished texts, and our own shared online collection of documents under preparation. The website contains approximately one-tenth of the texts under preparation; all of the posted texts are coordinated with exercises.

Exercises

The exercises designed to accompany each text are of two basic types, namely etymology and grammar exercises. The etymology exercises are designed to challenge a variety of skills, including familiarizing students with Latin prepositional prefixes, finding the root of a Latin word, and finding relationships between words in our Latin texts and their English derivatives. Such exercises are probably of particular interest to high-school students preparing for college entrance exams.

The grammar exercises range from relatively simple topics like noun-adjective agreement to more advanced grammatical topics like gerundives and the use of the subjunctive, as well as challenging reading-comprehension and translation exercises.

Lessons

Many of the lessons have already been supplied with introductions meant to contextualize the material in the text for students, and all will eventually have such introductions. For example, the introduction to “William of Auvergne on the Music of the Spheres” introduces students to Plato's cosmological theory, and then discusses both Plato's influence on William and the places in which William's theory diverges from Plato's. This complementary material allows students to encounter a whole world of medieval thinking about the natural and divine worlds, not just isolated texts.

Lessons can be approached by topic from the introductory page; that is, a reader can choose “Natural Science” > “Reptiles” > “Bart on the Asp”. This is probably the most natural approach for the student reader or casual explorer of the site.

Since it is important for students to understand how historical sources are prepared and presented by modern scholars, we have also included short paleography exercises with each lesson. These exercises are meant to introduce students to the fun and challenges of reading old documents while emphasizing the difficulties scholars face in preparing critical editions of such texts. These exercises presented without an order, although some are more challenging than others. There will soon be an index of paleography lessons by topic similar to the grammar index.

Please see the Lesson Ratings System for more information about lesson difficulty.

Indices and Glossaries

In order to help teachers and others interested specifically in the exercises, there is also an index of etymology topics and one of grammar topics which can be reached from the introductory page as well. By choosing those routes, the teacher can find lessons designed to teach particular topics, for example “Case Usage” > “Dative with Compound Verbs.” These indices are largely complete and linked to the lessons they represent; naturally they will grow along with the exercise sets.

There is also an “Subject Index (Index Rerum),” which indexes the information from the historical introductions to the subjects under discussion and the biographical introductions to our authors. This index is text-searchable as well as browseable alphabetically or by category. For example, a reader can choose “Controversies” from the list of categories, and will then find links to “Franciscan poverty controversy” and “Mendicant controversy,” both from the biography of Bonaventure. This feature should prove very helpful to teachers interested in the historical contents of the site, as it will allow them to find quickly information relevant to a topic of interest.

Another useful tool is the paleography terms glossary, which provides definitions of words that are used in the paleography discipline as well as links to exercises that explain those terms when applicable. This glossary is still in its early stages and only contains about ten words so far.

Finally, there is an index of works cited. Our encyclopedic authors often draw on earlier works from Aristotle to Isidore of Seville, and we have provided notes in the text directing the reader to the relevant passages from those works. The works cited index is designed to allow readers to find those texts, in book form or online, and translations where possible. Both the Index Rerum and the Works Cited are currently in the early stages of completion; the organizational and indexing schemes have been finalized, but much information remains to be entered into the databases. This task should advance more rapidly over the next few months.

What's Coming

The lessons which have yet to be posted are in various stages of completion.

• Texts by Bartholomew (about one-third of the total texts) are nearly all ready and translated.
• Texts by Eckhart (about 3% of the total texts) are mostly complete and translated.
• Texts by Albert (about 2% of the total texts) are complete and translated, and have introductions in German.
• Texts by Averroes (about 3% of the total texts) are complete and have their introductions, but the translation is incomplete.
• Texts by Bonaventure (about 3% of the total texts) are complete and translated, and awaiting their introductions.
• Texts by Hildegard (about 8% of the total texts) are complete and translated, but do not yet have their introductions.
• Texts by Grosseteste (about 5% of the total) are awaiting both translations and introductions.
• The text by Richard Rufus is complete, translated, and introduced.

• Texts by Thomas Aquinas (about 3% of the total) are complete, translated, and introduced.
• Texts by William of Auvergne (about 5% of the total texts) are complete, translated, and have introductions written.

In short, the majority of the texts are complete or near completion, and we are in the process of preparing exercises for them. The contents of the public website are a comparatively small proportion of the total supply of texts.