PLINY.

From the library of, and annotated by, Bartholomew Dodington (1535-95), Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge (1562-85) of Trinity College, previously a fellow of St John’s. He edited Demosthenes in 1571, and wrote orations for Elizabeth I’s visit at the university in 1561. The remaining names illustrate how university textbooks circulated for years or even decades among the student community. William Brocke, from Staffordshire, and Edward Hancock, from Devon, who gave him the book, both matriculated at Trinity in 1578; Brocke signed himself ‘et Amicorum’, suggesting he circulated the book among his fellow students. An Edward Griffin matriculated at King’s in 1588. Several William Cooks are present in the 1570s-80s, perhaps some of Dodington’s students.

Dodington was interested in a variety of passages, many of them relating to the natural world, e.g., stars, longitude, or meteorology. He also referenced other authors, such as Aristotle. A note mentions what may be a reference to an epistolary interpretation and emendation by Critton, apparently dated June 14. This is likely the Scottish philologist George Crichton (1555-1611), professor at the Royal College of France from 1590. A late C17 ms note points to Edward Halley’s article ‘Emendationes & Notae in Tria Loca Vitiose Edita in Textu Vulgato Naturalis Historiae C. Plinii’, published in the transactions of the Royal Society in 1686, thanks to D.J. Hoskyns. In that article, Halley applied the ‘saros’, a Chaldaean astronomical concept, to eclipses for the first time.

Pliny the Elder (23-79AD) was an administrator for Emperor Vespasian and a prolific author. The ‘Historia’ is a masterful encyclopaedia of theoretical and applied natural sciences detailing all that was known in these fields in the first century AD. Based on hundreds of Greek and Latin sources clearly marked in this edition, its ten books introduce the reader to astronomical questions like the nature of the moon and its distance from the earth; pharmacopoeia, ointments and herbal remedies; natural phenomena including rains of stones; world geography and the ethnographic study of remote ‘gentes mirabiles’; descriptions of all animal and tree species, wild and domesticated; horticulture from cultivation to the treatment of plant mutations and illnesses; metals and gold mining; mineralogy and pigments for painting. Thanks to a wide and intense manuscript circulation, ‘the “Historia” soon became a standard book of reference: abstracts and abridgements appeared by the third century. Bede owned a copy, Alcuin sent the early books to Charlemagne […]. It was the basis of Isidore’s “Etymologiae” and such medieval encyclopaedias as the “Speculum Majus” of Vincent of Beauvais’ (PMM 5). Renaissance humanists considered the ‘Historia’ a mine of ancient knowledge.