A Pliny of the New World

Francisco Hernández, an accomplished medic, translated Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, a monumental work from the first century that purports to contain all knowledge about nature. In the 1570s, the king of Spain commissioned Hernández to create “a Pliny of the New World.” To do so, Hernández traveled across Mesoamerica consulting with Native herbalists, hoping to collect all Native American knowledge about nature and medicine in a single encyclopedic work. Hernández was never able to complete the monumental task: not only did he find Native American knowledge too vast and confounding to be synthesized in a single descriptive work, but his expedition was also deterred by harrowing epidemic outbreaks.

Image Source

• Pliny the Elder. Historia Natural. Translated by Francisco Hernández. Sixteenth century. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Mss/2868, XXI, fols. 47v–48r. Courtesy of the collections of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Further Reading

• Castaño Ríos, Victoria. “The Herbal of the Florentine Codex: Description and Contextualization of Paragraph V in Book XI.” Americas 75, no. 3 (2018): 463–88.
• Pardo-Tomás, José. “Francisco Hernández (1515?–1587): Medicina e Historia Natural en el Nuevo Mundo.” In Los orígenes de la ciencia moderna: Actas XI y XII, 215–44. La Orotava, Tenerife: Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2002.