The shifting realities of Plutarch’s Natural problems: a note on the reception of quaestiones naturales

Abstract

The contribution at hand aims to provide a short overview of the reception of a collection of natural problems by Plutarch of Chaeronea, entitled Quaestiones naturales. The history of this work and its value for the history of science is examined against the backdrop of the reception of Ps.-Aristotle’s Problemata physica, which served as Plutarch’s model. By examining the different ways in which Plutarch’s work was excerpted, adapted, reframed and translated by later authors I try to determine how it was evaluated in later times and in which socio-intellectual milieus it circulated. Among these later authors are 1) the 11th century Byzantine polymath and ‘Chief of the Philosophers’ Michael Psellus, who incorporated several of Plutarch’s natural problems (in an adapted form) in his encyclopaedic De omnifaria doctrina, 2) the Spanish humanist and Jesuit Juan de Pineda, who also drew on Plutarch’s natural problems in his Diálogos Familiares de la Agricultura Cristiana (1589), 3) the Dutch Protestant scholar, professor and doctor Gybertus Longolius and 4) the Spanish humanist Pedro Juan Núñez, who both produced a Latin translation of the work (in 1542 and 1554 respectively).