Dominique Brancher : "L'admirable greffier de nature"

While the humanists of the Renaissance took a fresh look at nature, their writings remained largely subject to the authorities of antiquity. Among these authorities, Pliny occupies a special place. His work raises a number of issues, whether in terms of the philological and terminological challenges it poses to editors and translators, the breadth of knowledge it requires, the confrontation it stimulates between ancient textual knowledge and the wonders of the natural world as perceived by modern witnesses, the tensions that run through it between a spirit of classification and a collection of fabulous stories, or the instrumentalisation it lends itself to for ideological purposes. The various uses to which Pliny was put throughout the XVIth century meant that his very status as a scholar was contested: was he a liar, an ignoramus or a novelist? The contributions collected here seek to clarify certain aspects of a legacy that is as inescapable as it is cumbersome.