In the nineteenth century, it was assumed that Bernardus was the same person as Bernard of Chartres, but the scholarly consensus is now that the two were different people.
[3] There is some evidence that Bernardus was connected to Spanish schools of philosophy,[citation needed] but it seems likely that he was born and taught in Tours, because of the intimate descriptions of the city and the surrounding area found in the Cosmographia.
[7] E. R. Smits, like André Vernet (1938), hypothesizes that Carnotensis (the pen-name of the commentary) is Bernard of Chartres – the individual who Silvestris is most confused with.
Smits and Vernet attribute Bernard of Chartres's authorship of the Aeneid commentary to a number of similarities and differences between this work and other texts.
Theodore Silverstein praises Silvestris' works for their imaginative prose, as well as for positioning himself well in literature based on the time and place—particularly in the writing of the Cosmographia during the 12th-century controversies of evolution.
[9] There is evidence of influence in the works of medieval and renaissance authors, including Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bonaventure,[10] Vincent of Beauvais, Dante, Chaucer, Nicolas of Cusa, and Boccaccio.