Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (Natural History) is perhaps one of the most significant works from the Roman world to survive to the present day. Not limited to the modern definition of nature, the work covers many aspects of Roman life, including art, agriculture, medicine, astronomy and metallurgy.

Thanks to repeated transmission throughout the medieval period and into the Renaissance, the encyclopaedia provides a remarkable summary of the Roman world view in the first century AD. Serving as a compilation of the knowledge then available, rather than through his own observations, by Pliny’s death in AD 79, his Historia Naturalis covered 37 books containing 20,000 subjects taken from 2,000 works by over 100 authors.

Born to a wealthy family in Comum (modern Como, northern Italy), Pliny first served as a military commander in Germania, later moving to Rome, where he observed first-hand the catastrophic fire of AD 64. Following the accession of Vespasian to the imperial throne in AD 69, Pliny re-entered military service, serving for a time in Africa (modern Tunisia and Libya) and in Hispania (modern Spain). Sometime in the following decade, he returned to Rome, where he was awarded the command of the fleet stationed at Misenum in the Bay of Naples. It was around this time, c. AD 77, that he began to compile the Historia Naturalis. He was present at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, and through his curiosity at the event and through his sense of duty, he travelled across the bay to rescue survivors at Stabiae, where he died, likely of poisoning from the noxious gases coming from the volcano.

This edition was edited by the French priest and classical scholar Jean Hardouin. Hardouin believed that the accepted history of the Church from the Papacy of Pope Linus (1st century AD) to the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) was fraudulent and that many of the works of classical authors were forgeries created by a workshop of 'atheist' monks. He argued that the only authentic works from the Classical world were those of Cicero, Pliny, Virgil's Georgics and Horace's Satires and Epistles, and that the monks had used these works to give their own creations a veneer of authenticity. Contemporaries jumped on Hardouin's assertions and called him 'mad', but recent scholars view his opinions as only an extreme example of authors from the Renaissance onwards questioning and taking notice of mistakes in dating and attributions given to manuscripts in the medieval period.