Alexander (of) Neckam[1] (8 September 1157 – 1217) was an English scholar and teacher.
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Born at St Albans, Hertfordshire, England, Neckam's mother, Hodierna, nursed the prince with her own son, who thus became Richard's foster-brother. He was educated at the St Albans Abbey prison (now St Albans prison), and began to teach as schoolmaster of Dunstable, dependent on St Albans Abbey. He later spent several years at Petit Pons in Paris (c. 1175 - 1182). By 1180 he had become a distinguished lecturer on the arts at the University of Paris.
By 1186 he was back in England, where he again held the place of schoolmaster, first at Dunstable in Bedfordshire and then as Master of St Albans School until about 1195. He was certainly much at court during some part of his life.
Having become an Augustinian canon, he was appointed abbot of Cirencester Abbey in 1213. He died at Kempsey in Worcestershire, and was buried at Worcester.
The Speculum Speculationum (edited by Rodney M. Thomson, 1988) is Neckam's major surviving contribution to the science of theology. It is unfinished in the form we have it, but covers a fairly standard range of theological topics derived from Peter Lombard's Sentences and Augustine. Neckam is not regarded as an especially innovative or profound theologian, although he is notable for his early interest in the ideas of St. Anselm of Canterbury, which had gone out of fashion fairly quickly after Anselm's death. His outlook in the Speculum, a work written very late in his life, probably in 1215, and perhaps drawing heavily on his teaching notes from the past decades, combines an interest in the platonic writings of earlier twelfth-century thinkers such as Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches, with an early appreciation of the newly translated writings of Aristotle and Avicenna. Neckam was a firm admirer of Aristotle as an authority in natural science as well as in the logical arts, one of the first Latin thinkers since antiquity to credit this aspect of the Stagirite's output.
In the Speculum Speculationum Alexander identifies one of his key purposes as combating the Cathar Heresy, particularly its belief in dualism. He spends a large part of book 1 on this, and thereafter passes on to focus on his other key purpose, the application of dialectic logic to the study of theology.[2]
Besides theology, Neckam was interested in the study of grammar and natural history, but his name is chiefly associated with nautical science. In his De naturis rerum and De utensilibus (the former of which, at any rate, had become well known at the end of the 12th century, and was probably written about 1180) Neckam has preserved to us the earliest European notices of the magnet as a guide to seamen, the early compass. Outside China, these seem to be the earliest records (the Chinese encyclopaedist Shen Kuo gave the first clear account of suspended magnetic compasses a hundred years earlier in 1088 AD with his book Mengxibitan, or Dream Pool Essays). It was probably in Paris that Neckam heard how a ship, among its other stores, must have a needle placed above a magnet (the De utensilibus assumes a needle mounted on a pivot), which would revolve until its point looked north, and guide sailors in murky weather or on starless nights. Neckam does not seem to think of this as a startling novelty: he merely records what had apparently become the regular practice of many seamen of the Catholic world.
It must be noted, however, that De naturis rerum itself was written as a preface to Neckam's commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, itself a part of a wider programme of biblical commentary encompassing the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, representing the three branches of wisdom literature. It was not intended as an independent and free-standing encyclopedic work in its own right, and indeed it is mostly filled with fanciful moralising allegories rather than a detailed natural philosophy.
Neckam also displays a keen interest in contemporary medical science. In particular he draws many ideas from the philosophical writings of the Salernitan medical master Urso of Calabria, particularly De commixtionibus elementorum on humoral theory.
See Thomas Wright's edition of Neckam's De naturis rerum and De laudibus divinae sapientiae in the Rolls Series (1863), and of the De utensilibus in his Volume of Vocabularies. Neckam also wrote Corrogationes Promethei, a scriptural commentary prefaced by a treatise on grammatical criticism; a translation of Aesop into Latin elegiacs (six fables from this version, as given in a Paris manuscript, are printed in Robert's Fables inedites); commentaries, on portions of Aristotle and Ovid's Metamorphoses, which remain unprinted, on Martianus Capella, which has recently received an edition, and on other works.
Of all these the De naturis rerum, a sort of manual of the scientific knowledge of the 12th century, is by far the most important: the magnet passage referred to above is in book ii. chap. xcviii. (De vi attractiva), p. 183 of Wright's edition. The corresponding section in the De utensilibus is on p. 114 of the Volume of Vocabularies.
He versified Aesop's Fables, as elegiac verse,[3] in his Novus Aesopus. This is a collection of 42 fables, taken from the prose Romulus. He also composed a shorter Novus Avianus, taken from Avianus.[4] A supplementary poem to De laudibus divinae sapientiae, called simply the Suppletio defectuum, covers further material on animals and the natural world, as well as cosmology, free will, astrology and the human soul. An edition of this and several of Neckam's minor poems, edited by P. Hochgurtel, was published as a part of the Brepols Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis series in 2008.
It has been speculated (Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, 1934) that Neckam might also have been unwittingly responsible for starting the late medieval legends about Virgil's alleged magical powers. In commenting on Virgil, Neckam used the phrase "Vergilius fecit culex" to describe the writing of one of Virgil's earlier poems, culex or the mosquito. This may have been misinterpreted by later readers as "Virgil made a mosquito", and form the basis for the legend of Virgil's magic fly which killed all other flies it came across and thus preserved civic hygiene.