Lapidary (text)

A lapidary is a text, often a whole book, giving "information about the properties and virtues of precious and semi-precious stones", that is to say a work on gemology. Lapidaries were very popular in the Middle Ages, when belief in the inherent power of gems for various purposes was widely held, and among the wealthy collecting jewels was often an obsession, as well as a popular way to store and transport capital.

The medieval world had little systematic geological knowledge, and found it difficult to distinguish between many stones with similar colours, or the same stone found in a variety of colours. Lapidaries are often found in conjunction with herbals, and as part of larger encyclopedic works. Belief in the powers of particular types of jewel to achieve effects such as protecting the wearer against diseases or other kinds of harm was strong in the Middle Ages, and explaining these formed much of the material in lapidaries. In the Middle Ages, scholars often distinguish "three different kinds of lapidaries: 1. the scientific lapidary 2. the magical or astrological lapidary and 3. the Christian symbolic lapidary", although contemporary readers would have regarded both the first two categories as representing scientific treatments.

The objects regarded as "stones" in the classical, medieval Renaissance periods included many now classified as metallic compounds such as cinnabar, haemetite, calamine, or organic or fossil substances including pearl, coral, amber, and the mythical lyngurium described below.

There were traditions of lapidary texts outside Europe, in the Islamic world as well as East Asia. The Chinese tradition was for long essentially concerned with the aesthetic qualities of stones, but by the later Middle Ages were influenced by the classical Western tradition, as transmitted through Islamic texts.

The tradition goes back to ancient Mesopotamia with books like Abnu šikinšu. Theophrastus (died c. 287 BC) treated rocks and other minerals as well as gems, and remained a significant indirect source for the scientific tradition; he was all but unknown in Europe in the Middle Ages, and not translated into Latin until the 15th century. He attempted to fill out with specifics the general remarks on minerals of Aristotle, and took an approach more compatible with modern concepts of mineralogy than any other writer of a full-length treatise on the subject until Georgius Agricola in the 16th century, widely recognised as the "father" of modern mineralogy. Both concentrated on the appearance of a wide range of minerals, where they came from, and how they were extracted and used. While Pliny and others wrote on how to detect fake or imitation gems, some, like Jean d'Outremeuse (d. 1400), described how to make them in coloured glass, which by the Late Middle Ages was recommended for use in church metalwork.

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