Names and Things: Latin and German Mining Terminology in Georgius Agricola’s Bermannus

Abstract

The natural sciences of the early and mid-sixteenth century are characterised, on the one hand, by a thorough study of ancient texts that were partly re-discovered and often translated for the first time from Greek into Latin; and on the other hand, by the diligent observation of natural phenomena and objects. These two sources of knowledge – the ancient texts and the observation of nature – were at times hard to combine. Be it, that there was no word to describe a newly found phenomenon or object, or that there was an item mentioned in an ancient text that had become unknown. Moreover, the inherited texts often conflicted with new observations that proved the ancient sources to be incomplete or simply wrong. Georgius Agricola’s dialogue Bermannus on mining and minerals (res metallica) provides an insight into how these challenges were perceived and addressed in the first half of the sixteenth century.1 After a short overview of Agricola’s life and the content of the Bermannus, this article will discuss the problem of connecting res and verba that was perceived, as Agricola’s introduction to the dialogue shows, as a crucial challenge of early modern medicine, and motivated Agricola to write the Bermannus. While this difficulty was also addressed by other authors and in a variety of disciplines, it is a special feature of the Bermannus that it does not only deal with Latin, Greek, and Arabic words, but also with a (mostly oral) German terminology of mining operations and minerals. Although this is not highlighted by Agricola and his contemporary readers, it is Agricola’s rendering of German terms into Latin that is most inventive and peculiar. This article therefore focusses on different strategies used by Agricola as he tried to translate German terms into Latin while retaining the concepts behind them.