Lieu : University of Binghamton, New York, USA
Dates : 27-29 octobre 2023
Date limite pour soumettre une candidature : 31 mars, 2023
At the bi-millennium of the birth of the Latin author–administrator–statesman–soldier Pliny the Elder, we are reminded that the elder Pliny and his Natural History represent an important opportunity for the study of not only the man and his work, but also the craft and intellectual milieu with which he was engaged. One of Pliny’s key aims was to gather and synthesize other people’s collected knowledge, which may well have been lost altogether without him. His importance both in the arc of writing “natural histories” and in encyclopedism is observable in the reception and transmission of the Natural History in the later Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the spirit of Pliny’s endeavor, this conference aims to explore the traditions that guided the study of the natural world across the first millennium CE and beyond, along with the ways in which “natural historians” carried out their work, and how contemporary scholars approach and utilize the bounty of information his text contains. The conference seeks to bring together researchers interested not only in the Roman author himself, but also in the legacy of the Natural History or the contours of natural philosophical inquiry in premodern societies. Given the persistence of “Dark-Age” stereotypes with regard to scientific inquiry, we hope to focus on connections between Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages in Byzantine, Islamic, and European cultures, as well as on global approaches that highlight comparisons between the Natural History and texts with similar objectives produced in East or South Asia.
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