Specialist readings: art and medicine from the <span class='italic'>Natural History</span>

Aude Doody

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511676222.006

4 - Specialist readings: art and medicine from the Natural History

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010

Aude Doody

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Aude Doody: Affiliation:
University College Dublin

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Summary

Pliny's data have remained alluring, although the questions asked of them and the analysis applied to them have changed dramatically. To a large extent, the history of scholarship on Pliny is a history of specialist readings of particular segments of his text: Pliny's zoology, Pliny's astrology, Pliny's geography have all received their fair share of criticism, often in isolation from any substantial consideration of the work as a whole. Recent specialist accounts of Pliny's art history and science do discuss the overall encyclopedic aims of the work, but still focus on its place in a wider discourse outside the text, rather than on its context within the text itself. Perhaps the fact that for many subjects, Pliny is our best, sometimes our only, source for the period allows for its easy passage into the general set of information on a topic, with minimal concern for Pliny's literary ambitions. Perhaps it is its encyclopedic organisation and authorial opacity that suggest that sections can stand alone, designed to be read in isolation. The Natural History is an unwieldy book, and reading it subject by subject remains a practical and persuasive approach to its array of information. But in the wake of scholarship that insists on overarching agendas in Pliny's work, we need to consider: what do we lose by reading the Natural History as the sum of its specialisms?

Type: Chapter
Information: Pliny's Encyclopedia
The Reception of the Natural History
, pp. 132 - 172

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511676222.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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