Liber Floridus
encyclopedia by Lambert of St. Omer
Liber Floridus ("Book of Flowers") is a medieval encyclopedia that was compiled between 1090 and 1120 by Lambert, Canon of Saint-Omer. The text compiles extracts from some 192 or so different works.
Lambert's medieval encyclopedia contains a universal history, a chronological record of events to the year 1119. These are of Biblical, astronomical, geographical, philosophical and natural history subjects. Lambert wrote Liber Floridus originally in Latin, and later it was translated into French as Le Livre fleurissant en fleurs. A detailed description is in the Historia comitum Normannorum, comitum Flandriae.
The Liber Floridus was the first of the encyclopedias of the High Middle Ages that slowly superseded the work of Isidore of Seville. The original manuscript, completed in 1120 and dedicated to Saint Omer by Lambert, has been preserved in the Ghent University Library, though its latter portion has not survived. A copy is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. There is also a copy in the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Liber Floridus” as encyclopedia by Lambert of St. Omer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as encyclopedia by Lambert of St. Omer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q479629. VIAF identifies the subject as 232228095. The Library of Congress control number is nr99029844. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1090, 1120 and 1119.
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This entry incorporates text from “Liber Floridus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.