The Grand Albert: Albertus Magnus and the fortune of his apocrypha

Albertus Magnus, a Dominican friar born in Swabia around 1200 who died in Cologne in 1280, was one of the greatest intellectuals of the Middle Ages: commentator on Aristotle, teacher of Thomas Aquinas, author of treatises on minerals, plants and animals. His very fame as an investigator of nature made him, soon after his death, the guarantor of texts he had not written, collections of secrets and marvels from which the Grand Albert was born.

Two medieval apocrypha

The modern Grand Albert rests mainly on two pseudo-Albertine works. The first is the Liber aggregationis, also known as the Experimenta Alberti, which describes the supposed virtues of herbs, stones and animals, along with some marvels of the world. The second is De secretis mulierum, a treatise on generation, conception and female nature, probably composed between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century by an author close to Albert's circle.

Both works circulated enormously. Copied in hundreds of manuscripts, they were among the first texts of natural science to be printed: from the 1470s they appeared in dozens of Latin editions and then in vernacular translations. De secretis mulierum, accompanied by commentaries, became a reference point for medical and popular culture for almost three centuries.

From learned print to popular booklets

In the eighteenth century these works, translated and reworked, flowed in France into a booklet entitled Les admirables secrets d'Albert le Grand, known simply as the Grand Albert. The editions, often with fictitious imprints, gathered the secrets of herbs and stones, doctrines on generation, notions of physiognomy and astrology, remedies and curiosities, all under the authority of the great Dominican.

The transition is significant. Texts born in Latin in university and medical circles turned into pedlar literature for a popular readership, alongside the Petit Albert, the Grand Grimoire and the almanacs. In this passage they lost their scholastic apparatus and acquired the aura of secret books, objects of suspicion and legend.

The virtues of stones and herbs

A substantial part of the Grand Albert is devoted to the virtues attributed to herbs and stones, following a tradition that goes back to ancient and medieval lapidaries, such as that of Bishop Marbod of Rennes, composed at the end of the eleventh century. Tradition credited stones with protective or moral powers; the book gathers these beliefs without distinguishing observation from legend, offering the image of a nature woven with hidden forces.

The real Albert had written a De mineralibus in which he discussed the properties of stones critically, distinguishing what he had been able to verify from what he reported on hearsay. The distance between that treatise and the secrets of the popular booklet measures well the process of simplification and legend that accompanied his fame over the centuries.

Albertus Magnus was canonised and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1931, and today he is venerated as patron of those who study the natural sciences. The Grand Albert is his popular shadow: a book that uses his name to gather centuries of beliefs. Studying its history means following the path of knowledge from the university chair to the pedlar's stall.