Several scholars in sixteenth-century Italy investigated writing practices in the ancient Mediterranean world. To comprehend the nuances of writing technologies in the distant past, early modern scholars looked for information in a variety of texts, including the Bible.

One aspect of scribal culture in the Bible that attracted Italian naturalists such as Ulisse Aldrovandi and his peers was the provenance, cultivation, and use of papyrus. For Melchior Guilandinus, for example, the prefect of Padua’s botanical garden, papyrus became the subject of an entire book.¹ For the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, that plant assumed a prominent role in his unpublished history of ancient libraries, books, and writing technologies.² Renaissance humanists besides Guilandinus and Aldrovandi were particularly interested in paper, papyrus, and ancient forms of writing. Years ago, Charles Perrat explored how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists, mostly French and Italian, scrutinized mentions of papyrus in classical texts, collected samples of it, and flocked to libraries, museums, and botanical gardens that possessed papyrus specimens.³ More recently Anthony Grafton has written about divergences of opinion among sixteenth-century philologists on the subject of papyrus in classical texts.⁴ These contributions underscore the fascination ancient scribal culture held for humanists in Renaissance Europe.

We know less, however, about the overlapping fascination with the material aspects of ancient scribal culture and biblical natural history in early modern Europe. That fascination had roots in late antiquity. The Mishnah, which was compiled in the second century and quickly became one of rabbinic Judaism’s foundational texts, emphasizes the importance of and the magic inherent in the Bible’s writing implements. At several key points in the biblical narrative, God communicates by means of inscription, and aspects of that writing process attracted scholarly interest in late antiquity. The Mishnaic tractate Avot, for example, states that ten things were created at twilight on the eve of the Sabbath. Of those ten items, three concerned writing: writing itself, the script of the Ten Commandments, and the tablets upon which they were written.⁵ The traditional belief that the stone upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed was diaphanous and its script legible from either side was of special interest to many scholars. And not only early modern Jews, who traditionally studied tractate Avot every year between the festivals of Passover and Shavuot, were familiar with this particular rabbinic tradition; Christian scholars had access to it as well. Avot was included in Paul Fagius’s 1541 Latin translation of the Mishnah.⁶

But Aldrovandi and Guilandinus were not concerned with magic and miracles; they were interested in history and material culture. In the 1570s, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus probed the Bible for evidence of papyrus’s origins and early purposes. Their analyses of papyrus indicate a larger, more complicated intellectual project: using biblical verses, removed from their context and stripped of their liturgical and theological significance, to clarify and emend other ancient writings, in this case Pliny’s Natural History. There are numerous disputes about Pliny in the unpublished writings of Ulisse Aldrovandi and in the published, but rarely studied ones of Melchior Guilandinus. The prominent role of the Bible in those disputes illuminates connections between biblical studies and natural philosophy. For Aldrovandi and Guilandinus, using the Bible to adjudicate disputes about the Natural History’s accuracy led them to assess not only an august pagan authority but translations of the Bible itself.

In the sixteenth century, many commentaries were written on Pliny’s Natural History, an encyclopedic work from the late first century ce. In the 1570s and 1580s, papyrus and its use in the ancient world commanded the attention of several Italian naturalists. Since Pliny’s Natural History offered sixteenth-century scholars key information about papyrus, it was a fitting subject for analysis and an appropriate point of departure for a study of that plant.

Renaissance natural philosophers asked two sorts of questions about Pliny’s work: lexical and evaluative. From the late fifteenth century onward, scholars worked to edit and publish the Natural History. To do so, they had to ensure that they understood the words Pliny used and recognized the objects in nature to which they referred. They also strove to evaluate the quality and accuracy of the information Pliny provided. For example, Pliny claimed that papyrus was first cultivated at a precise point in the history of the ancient Mediterranean: during the reign of Alexander the Great (fourth century bce). Additionally, Pliny stated that paper was not commonly used until the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, in the middle of the third century bce. According to Aldrovandi and Guilandinus, Pliny was wrong on both counts. Indeed, the stated goal of Guilandinus’s book was to persuade the “stiff-necked reader” and “refute Varro,” Pliny’s original source, who proposed that nothing was written on paper before Ptolemy Philadelphus.⁷

One of the ways in which Aldrovandi and Guilandinus assessed the accuracy of statements like these was to compare Pliny’s account of papyrus’s early cultivation to that contained in the Bible. For those who were versed not only in booklore and natural philosophy but also in biblical languages, the antiquarian study of ancient writing technologies came to embrace the Bible as a source. In his Bibliologia, Aldrovandi used the Bible to write a definitive history of book culture in the ancient world. And in his commentary on Pliny, Guilandinus carefully examined scripture to gather as much information as possible about papyrus. Using the Bible in this manner meant treating it as an auxiliary text: they scrutinized its language and narrative in order to evaluate ancient pagan works of natural philosophy. When Aldrovandi and Guilandinus studied the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, their intention was not to perform biblical analysis; it was to understand Pliny’s Natural History and the ancient world it described. To write a definitive natural history of papyrus, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus needed access to the Bible in its original languages. They knew that translations, especially the Vulgate, introduced inaccuracies when rendering the natural terminology of scripture into other languages.

These investigations into the natural world of the Bible had a secondary result. They did more than help Aldrovandi and Guilandinus understand the cultivation and applications of papyrus in the ancient Mediterranean; they clarified difficult terms in the Bible itself. Discussions of Pliny’s reliability widened the scope of biblical studies and multiplied the applications of sacred learning at the end of the sixteenth century. In effect, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus helped expand the classical canon to include the Bible. They pioneered new, nontheological ways of reading scripture. In turn, the admission of biblical knowledge into scientific texts changed natural philosophy as well. It broadened the horizons of scientific writing at this time and created another venue in which biblical commentary could develop and diversify in the late Renaissance.

Melchior Guilandinus

Melchior Wieland, or Guilandinus as he was known south of the Alps, was a botanist of international reputation. Shortly after his death, Luigi Lollino, a learned cleric of Belluno, penned a laudatory biography of him, which remains unpublished.⁸ Though many details of his life are sketchy, a few basic facts are beyond dispute.⁹ Born in Königsberg around 1520, Guilandinus began his studies in that city before moving to Rome as a young man. Eventually he relocated to Padua, where he made the acquaintance of Gabriele Fallopia, one of that university’s most accomplished physicians. Under Fallopia’s supervision, he “diligently and ingeniously made progress in all areas of learning.”¹⁰ Having earned the financial support of Marino Cavalli, a reformer of Padua’s curriculum, he traveled throughout the Near East, including Palestine and Egypt, to study botany.¹¹ During his return journey he was captured by pirates and had to be ransomed by the Venetian authorities.¹² In September 1561, he succeeded Luigi Anguillara as the director of Padua’s botanical garden. At that time he was appointed to a chair of “lecture and demonstration of medicinal herbs” at the University of Padua. Apart from a few practical inventions, including an irrigation machine that he developed in 1575, Guilandinus published very little.¹³ In 1557 a collection of letters entitled De stirpibus ... epistolae was published.¹⁴ The next year he wrote a short Apologia against Mattioli, and in 1572 he published Papyrus, a commentary on the chapters in Pliny’s Natural History that describe that plant.¹⁵ He also wrote two brief works that were published posthumously: a list of synonyms of plant names in the Paduan botanical garden and a report on the plants of the wealthy Venetian Pietro Antonio Michiel.¹⁶ Guilandinus died on 18 January 1589.

Modern evaluations of Guilandinus have not been favorable; nevertheless, his career and writings merit further study. Loris Premuda, writing in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, summed up scholarly consensus on Guilandinus when he opined that Guilandinus “left no writings of particular value.”¹⁷ Owing to the influence of comments like these, very little modern scholarship treats Guilandinus in any depth. But Guilandinus was a well-respected botanist at Italy’s leading university. Lollino’s biography of him is included in a collection of reminiscences about illustrious Paduan professors, including Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, Antonio Riccoboni, and Girolamo Mercuriale.¹⁸Furthermore, Guilandinus maintained relationships with prominent physicians such as Gabriele Fallopia and learned theologians such as Girolamo Vielmi. He discussed the natural world of the Bible with both and seamlessly integrated biblical analysis into his examinations of natural history. Guilandinus’s work is a complement to Aldrovandi’s and shows that Aldrovandi’s tendency to read the Bible alongside pagan natural philosophy was not exceptional; it was representative of a broader trend in the late Renaissance.

Aldrovandi, Guilandinus, and Pliny’s Natural History

The debate about Pliny’s Natural History that Aldrovandi and Guilandinus entered into in the 1570s and 1580s was not new. Beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, European naturalists debated the merits of Pliny’s encyclopedia and its proper application to humanist learning and medical science.¹⁹ In the fifteenth century the Natural History was known as a text valuable for its many Latin words: because of its immense topical range, it provided rich vocabulary for Renaissance humanists to assimilate into their writings. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, scholars tried to establish its scientific accuracy, or lack thereof. Nearly everybody agreed that new and more reliable editions of Pliny were needed. But they disagreed on the problem with existing texts. Some thought generations of editors and copyists had distorted Pliny’s original intention.²⁰ Others argued that Pliny himself did not understand science as well as he might have.²¹ Ultimately the debate centered on whether Pliny’s book should be understood as a linguistic or a scientific resource. Some scholars – chiefly linguists and philologists – felt that the copiousness and diversity of Natural History’s vocabulary was its chief virtue. Physicians and botanists, on the other hand, held that the book’s identification and analysis of medicinal products was its best asset. Whatever their position, scholars could agree with Guilandinus’s observation that there are “many very obscure places in Pliny” that came down to sixteenth-century scholars “not in the [true] words of Pliny but in the words of many other authors.”²² Whichever side of these battle lines a Renaissance scholar stood on, he agreed that it was necessary to draw from other works to understand Pliny.

Another point of agreement that united sixteenth-century students of Pliny was their belief that it was possible to restore the text, as Guilandinus put it, to its “old dignity.” They disagreed only on the method of doing so. Guilandinus contended that other scholars may “not without due cause substitute one [word] for another or one topic for another topic by using another Greek or Latin writer.”²³ Guilandinus’s model for doing this was Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524), a physician and philologist from Ferrara who dominated Italian medical scholarship, especially its philo-Hellenic fields, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.²⁴ Guilandinus, as well as others who attended Italian medical faculties in the 1540s and 1550s, was steeped in Leoniceno’s writings and sympathetic to his intellectual perspectives. Though he never openly acknowledged Leoniceno’s importance, Aldrovandi was one of his followers, too. Leoniceno’s influence on sixteenth-century medical scholarship, which has been duly noted and traced by historians of medicine, also extended into the realms of classical philology and biblical studies.

More than any other scholar, Niccolò Leoniceno instigated the acrimonious debate about Pliny’s reliability. In his On the Errors of Pliny and Many Others in Medicine,²⁵ he insisted that Pliny erred in his use of medicinal products for two reasons: he did not understand the Greek authors he read, and he lacked firsthand knowledge of the materials he was writing about. Ermolao Barbaro, whose position was contrary to Leoniceno’s, blamed errors in Pliny’s text on his commentators and editors, not on Pliny himself. Leoniceno’s lasting contribution to this debate was to insist that Pliny’s text should be emended with evidence from other ancient scientific texts – especially Dioscorides, Galen, and Paul of Aegina. The belief that scholars could improve their knowledge of unreliable ancient texts by consulting other, more reliable ones would have a significant impact on biblical studies. Followers of Leoniceno throughout the sixteenth century applied two of his scholarly tenets – that things are more important than words and that classical texts could reinforce each other – to their reading of the Bible. Because of Leoniceno and his influence, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus felt justified in borrowing from other classical texts to amplify the meaning of the Bible, as well as in their use of biblical passages to illuminate other ancient texts, such as Pliny’s Natural History.

For Leoniceno, to study ancient botany, and natural science more broadly, was to focus on things rather than on words. “To philosophize truthfully seems to me,” Leoniceno intoned, “to battle with barbarians not on the subject of words but on things that pertain to the health of many men.”²⁶ Peter Dilg has articulated how Leoniceno’s primary goal was not to restore the text of Pliny to a pristine, uncorrupted state but rather to discover the truth about actual substances used by ancient physicians.²⁷ That was a sentiment that Aldrovandi and Guilandinus could embrace. In fact, Guilandinus went so far as to say that he rejected and dismissed quibbles about “vain opinions” and instead preferred to “seek the truth about things.” And one of Leoniceno’s later followers, the French physician Jacques Daléchamps, gave voice to this sentiment in his 1587 introduction to Pliny’s Natural History:

Throughout this debate, and especially in the language that Leoniceno and his followers used, the word res, or things, echoes in readers’ ears.²⁹

The emphasis of Leoniceno and his followers on res as opposed to verba is important in and of itself. But equally if not more important was his belief that the sorts of investigations he undertook should be applied to other fields of study. “It would not be an arduous task,” Leoniceno insisted in his work on Pliny, if “known things [familiaria] were applied not only to medicine but to some other uses as well.”³⁰ And, in fact, those “familiaria,” or things known to be true, do really exist; they are not irretrievable ghosts of a distant past. “Things that exist in nature,” Leoniceno’s follower Guilandinus reflected, “are not employed by means of incantation, or set loose by speech, fable, or fiction, but exist according to faith in history, and, as such, may be employed.”³¹ Guilandinus insisted that the natural products that Pliny and his contemporaries wrote about could be identified and used in the medical practice of his own day.

Given this emphasis on the medical application of Pliny’s writings, Leoniceno’s quest to understand the Roman natural philosopher was not an empty intellectual exercise; it was a pressing concern undertaken for the benefit of others. Guilandinus said as much when he gushed that he was “extremely desirous for the public good.”³² Because the Natural History mentioned scores of medicinal products, it was advantageous for doctors to read Pliny closely.³³ Long before Guilandinus took up the topic, Leoniceno lamented that “there are very few who read Pliny for his medical teachings; more read him for his vocabulary and – it cannot be denied – his divine eloquence.”³⁴ Since doctors prescribed items listed in Pliny’s book without knowing the text, it was of utmost importance that they know which medicaments the author actually referred to. “It is not without great danger,” Leoniceno wrote, that doctors prescribe medical products from ancient writings without knowing precisely what they are. To have full control over those products, many doctors grew herbs in their own botanical gardens. As Leoniceno put it, “There is no one who does not have [those drugs] in their botanical garden, and who does not use them frequently.”³⁵ Pliny’s text had clear medical applications, and those applications demanded precise identification of its terminology.

For Leoniceno, in order to correct Pliny it was necessary to seek out other classical texts. Leoniceno believed that, because Pliny was a venerated writer, the stakes were high in criticizing him. Writing to Angelo Poliziano, the dedicatee of his De Plinii ... in medicina erroribus opus, he noted that he did not approach Pliny “with rash judgment” but rather with “most firm reasons.”³⁶ And he insisted in a letter to Poliziano that the way to do this properly was to find complementary passages in other classical authors. Leoniceno explained that Pliny was often mistaken, as he was in his description of marubio.³⁷ “Dioscorides, Galen, and Paul,” Leoniceno observed, “wrote about many herbs and stalks with leaves similar to marubio, which Pliny rendered [incorrectly] as prasso rather than prassio.”³⁸ Elsewhere Leoniceno bemoaned the fact that “many [things] lie hidden from us, and if we thus endeavor to read the books of the ancients ... in this manner, we ought not to ignore other authors who show much ostentation but little utility.”³⁹ In other words, even when a topic seemed irrelevant, it was important for Niccolò Leoniceno to seek out other authors who might amplify his understanding of a given topic, regardless of their other merits or demerits. For example, Leoniceno lambasted Pliny for confusing the plants hedera and cithon. In his remarks on hedera, Pliny distinguished between the male and female forms of the plant and stated that both had a flower “like a wild rose.” That description of hedera did not correspond to the works of “Theophrastus, Dioscorides, or any man of weighty authority.” But, Leoniceno argued, that distinction did apply to cithon. Pliny erred because the Greek words for hedera and cithon (kissos and kisthos, respectively) were so similar that the Roman naturalist simply mixed them up.⁴⁰ Leoniceno used his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient botanical texts, and his skills as a Hellenist, to point out one of Pliny’s egregious mistakes.

For Leoniceno and his followers, a reliable way to ensure accuracy in reading Pliny was to be an expert in Greek philology, especially that branch concerned with medicine. Since Pliny had borrowed many terms from Greek texts, it was essential for the student of Pliny to know the sources from which he drew. Vivian Nutton has described the crucial importance Leoniceno assigned to Greek, and Daniela Mugnai Carrara has documented the many Greek manuscripts in Leoniceno’s library.⁴¹ Leoniceno insisted that one had to know Greek in order to study Pliny:

Insistence on the importance of Greek underlay not only Leoniceno’s work but that of Melchior Guilandinus and Ulisse Aldrovandi.

From Pliny to the Bible: Leoniceno’s Legacy in the Later Sixteenth Century

By the end of the sixteenth century, finding complementary passages to supplement an understanding of Pliny meant not only seeking out other texts of pagan origin but also exploring the Bible as well as patristic and rabbinic literature. Melchior Guilandinus’s work on Pliny provides a good example of this tendency. At one point in his Papyrus, Guilandinus cites passages in Cicero and Livy concerning the use of writing implements in the classical world. And then, seamlessly, Guilandinus quotes the Deuterocanonical Bible: “In the first book of Maccabees, in chapters 8 and 14, we read that he rewrote [the epistle] on brass tablets, first to the Romans and then to the Spartiates, which they sent to Jerusalem in order to establish friendship and fellowship with them.”⁴³ For Guilandinus, the canon of classical sources included the Bible: he commented on biblical paraphernalia as comfortably as he did on pagan writing implements. Moreover, Guilandinus invoked the Bible not as an inerrant authority that stood apart from and above the rest of classical literature but as a source simultaneously sacred and historical that could confirm his contention about the antiquity of writing.

Italian natural philosophers who sought out biblical support for their arguments were not satisfied to quote the Latin Bible; they consistently reached for Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic versions. Melchior Guilandinus and Ulisse Aldrovandi personify this tendency to reach past the Vulgate and toward the Septuagint and the Hebrew original when they looked for biblical proof texts. Though not a Hebraist, Guilandinus in his discussion of the word byblus sought out a Greek word and a rabbinic interpretation to understand a biblical verse, which in this case has nothing to do with the topic of books or writing. “We read in Ezekiel chapter 8,” Guilandinus noted, “‘Behold, the women sat there crying for Adonidis.’ [Scripture] wants to say that it was idolatry celebrated in honor of Adonidis. For Adonidis, the Septuagint has Thammous, which is a Hebrew term.” Guilandinus sought out a Greek version of scripture to understand the particulars of this biblical verse. But he was not content to know that Thammous was a Hebrew term; he wished to know what its precise associations were. So he turned to Maimonides. “Rabbi Moses of Corduba” informed Guilandinus that Thammous was a prophet of the Zabites.⁴⁴ Recourse to a Greek Bible translation and then to a medieval Jewish commentator helped Guilandinus understand a biblical verse with greater accuracy.

Guilandinus’s colleague Ulisse Aldrovandi was even more explicit about the problems inherent in consulting the Latin Bible. The Bible was “finally translated into the Latin language much later,” Aldrovandi reminded his readers. He also informed them that Latin was the least elevated of the ancient tongues.⁴⁵ When studying scripture, he suggested, it was best to go back to Greek and Hebrew if at all possible. In order to truly know what the Bible said, it was imperative to read it in its original languages. Aldrovandi often sent his readers back to the Hebrew and Greek versions of scripture, as he did in a passage in which he wanted to emphasize that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses on stone tablets.⁴⁶ And in a related comment about engraving and writing, Aldrovandi quoted the book of Job [19:23], which mentions books “sculpted in stone.” The Vulgate Bible has “flint” for stone, but Aldrovandi quoted the Greek, which has “lead or stone”– a more faithful rendering to Aldrovandi’s mind.⁴⁷ Emphasizing that the Vulgate did not accurately convey the true meaning of the biblical verse, Aldrovandi quoted the Septuagint to support his point about engraving practices in the ancient world.

It was a short jump from bypassing the Vulgate and seeking out earlier, more authoritative versions of scripture to criticizing the Vulgate’s translator, Jerome. Indeed, for Aldrovandi and Guilandinus, as well as for scholars who desired accuracy in their reading of the Bible, Jerome’s Vulgate translation did not suffice. It was not that Jerome was always wrong; on the contrary, Aldrovandi occasionally praised him. In an extended essay on papyrus, he approvingly cited Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew term “in the reeds” (betoch hasuph) as “in papyrus.” In that particular instance, the Greek text was less helpful: the Septuagint had “in the swamp” (en to helei).⁴⁸ But commendation of Jerome was frequently paired with criticism of his translation of the Bible’s naturalistic language. In an essay entitled “De volumine,” Aldrovandi remarks, “In Exodus chapter 22 [sic: 24:7] Jerome translates volumen federis [volume of the covenant] where the Hebrew text has the word sepher, which means book. Almost everywhere else he translates this word as book [liber] but here he translates it as volumen.”⁴⁹ Significantly, the portion of this phrase that mentioned “covenant” was less important to Aldrovandi than the part that mentioned “book”; his interest lay in the realm of physical bibliography rather than theology.

Aldrovandi’s keen interest in ancient scribal culture drew him to passages in the Bible that mentioned writing implements and the materials from which they were made. Upon examining those biblical verses, Aldrovandi recognized Jerome’s limitations as a translator and his inability to depict the Bible’s natural world with accuracy. He reflected that

If Aldrovandi admits that Jerome was correct to translate suph in the book of Jonah as simply “the deep sea” and not “algae,” there is a subtler point here: Jerome was mistaken about the name and nature of the Sea of Reeds. A few lines later, Aldrovandi adds, “For suph Jerome says red.”⁵¹ Because of Jerome’s rendering in the Vulgate, centuries of readers had understood the Sea of Reeds to be the Red Sea. By comparing different uses of the word suph, Aldrovandi showed that while the term had a figurative meaning in the book of Jonah, its meaning in Exodus was unambiguous: it meant reed.

And Aldrovandi was not alone in his criticism of Jerome. Guilandinus also maintained that the Vulgate could not supply the precision he was looking for. In a letter to the Polish botanist Stanislao Rosario, who was then employed in the botanical garden in Padua, Guilandinus wrote that in Genesis 6 God commanded Noah to build an ark from gopher wood. For Guilandinus, gopher, an ambiguous Hebrew term, should be translated as cedar. The Vulgate, incorrectly, had it as pine.⁵²Though Guilandinus does not explicitly state that the Vulgate erred, the implication is clear: the Vulgate, at least in its references to natural phenomena, is an unreliable source for one who desires an accurate rendering of scripture. For all his learning, Jerome did not possess the expertise of Pliny in matters of natural philosophy.

In spite of this considerable skepticism regarding the Vulgate’s accuracy, natural philosophers believed that knowledge of the geographic and naturalistic details of scripture was possible. As Guilandinus assured his readers, “I shall state [matters] in the most accurate Greek, Latin, and Hebrew words, so that the reader might understand that nothing is about to be pronounced rashly regarding the names that pertain to geography in the Old Testament.”⁵³ And for scholars such as Guilandinus and Aldrovandi, accurately defining biblical terms was not a theological challenge. They sought to use biblical words and phrases as elements in their natural historical arguments. When its precise meaning was accurately understood, the Bible was a text that could furnish historical proof.

One reason the Bible was valued as a historical source was its antiquity. In his work Papyrus, Guilandinus attempted to identify the biblical city Tanis. His sources were the biblical books Psalms, Isaiah, and Numbers, as well as Josephus’s Antiquities. Since Moses lived six hundred years before Homer, Guilandinus asked rhetorically, why turn to Homer for geographic data about biblical cities when the Bible itself provides it?⁵⁴ Guilandinus informed his readers that biblical information is more reliable than Greek wisdom primarily because it is older. His stated source for this notion was Josephus. The Greeks’ knowledge of antiquity is “to be laughed at,” Guilandinus intoned, citing Josephus’s Against Apion. Josephus, Guilandinus explained, taught that “historical knowledge of ancient things is to be sought not from the Greeks but from the Egyptians and Chaldeans.” Even though the Greeks have a reputation for their historical prowess, they should be considered “adolescents” and not “adults” in world history. Guilandinus accepted Josephus’s argument: the further back one could go, and the farther east one could reach, the more accurate the knowledge one could obtain.⁵⁵ Guilandinus stated the maxim with even greater clarity when he suggested that “he who desires to know the truth of ancient history ... should inquire into [the works of] the Egyptians, Tyrians, and Chaldeans.”⁵⁶

Guilandinus’s faith in the Bible’s ability to provide accurate information concerning natural knowledge was strong. It was so strong, in fact, that he took it upon himself to correct other biblical translations in addition to the Vulgate. In a notable display of bravado, Guilandinus went so far as to propose a correction to the Septuagint text. The basis for his dissatisfaction was not textual corruption or philological proof; it was natural knowledge. In his discussion of a passage in Isaiah 18 (18:2), which mentions ships made of papyrus transversing water, he notes that the Vulgate has “papyrus vessels” for these ships. Upon examination, the Septuagint’s text was even less helpful. Guilandinus told his readers that “for ‘papyrus vessels’ the Septuagint has epistolas biblinas, whereas I might translate it as entolas biblinas, that is, sent forth on paper.”⁵⁷

But the most compelling reason to use the Bible as a historical document was that it debunked Pliny’s and Varro’s theory about the history of papyrus cultivation in the ancient Mediterranean. For both Aldrovandi and Guilandinus, the Bible contained numerous passages that testified to the cultivation and use of papyrus long before Hellenistic times, the period to which Varro, and subsequently Pliny, dated papyrus’s emergence. For example, quoting both the Vulgate and the Septuagint, Guilandinus observed that Moses was placed in the Nile protected by a “papyrus basket.” Guilandinus observed that the Hebrew word here is gome, which he knew meant papyrus. He supplemented his assertion by quoting David Kimḥi, the twelfth-century Jewish exegete and lexicographer, who, Guilandinus pointed out, explained that gome was a “very light plant, from which ships were made.”⁵⁸ And Ulisse Aldrovandi was even more explicit in connecting the Bible’s statements about papyrus to Pliny’s argument about its recent cultivation. “On the strength of Varro’s statement,” Aldrovandi explained, “Pliny says that paper was found during the victory of Alexander the Great.... But in truth it seems to me that Marcus Varro greatly deceives us, since paper was used before Alexander the Great.” In fact, Aldrovandi continued, “the use of paper or papyrus is much older than what Varro says, for here [Isaiah 18] one should understand papyrus vessels to mean ships or, more precisely, an oblong galley ship.” For Aldrovandi, the Aramaic paraphrase of this portion of scripture made the association between “papyrus vessels” and ships explicit.⁵⁹

As enthusiastic as Aldrovandi and Guilandinus were about biblical sources, they were just as enthralled with other ancient Jewish writings, notably Philo and Josephus. The two sixteenth-century naturalists liberally drew on those Greek Jewish thinkers and used their writings to debate Pliny’s merits and demerits. Even though neither Philo nor Josephus was a contemporary witness to biblical events, and neither was reputed to be an expert on Near Eastern flora, their exposition of the Bible was of considerable interest to Aldrovandi and Guilandinus. In their quest to understand the natural terminology of the Bible, and to use that terminology to clarify other ancient texts, Philo and Josephus were trusted authorities.

Josephus was especially popular in the sixteenth century.⁶⁰ Guilandinus turned to his Antiquities when he wanted to know more about the basket Moses’ mother used to place him in the Nile. “In book 2, chapter 5, of the Antiquities Josephus describes the basket in which Moses was deposited into the Nile. And he calls it plegma biblinon empheres tei kata skeuei koitidi, that is, papyrus material similar to that which is used to bind together birds’ nests.” Guilandinus, often prone to quibble with translations, pointed out that Gelenius’s rendering of this passage “was hardly competent.”⁶¹ And Aldrovandi referred to Josephus, too. On the subject of the material on which the translators of the Septuagint wrote, Aldrovandi noted that “we have, on the testimony of Josephus in book 12 of the Antiquities that the books of the Jews which Eleazar sent to Ptolemy were written on vellum.”⁶²

Though not as well known to sixteenth-century scholars, Philo was an important source, too.⁶³ Although the Biblical Antiquities had been falsely attributed to Philo, as Guillaume Budé showed in the sixteenth century, many scholars, Jewish and Christian alike, read that work and considered it authentic.⁶⁴ The Pseudo-Philonic Biblical Antiquities aided Guilandinus’s investigation of gopher – a wood so mysterious that the translators of the King James Bible could not find an English equivalent. Guilandinus’s proof that gopher, the Hebrew word used in the book of Genesis, meant cedar and not pine came from Jewish sources rather than pagan or Christian ones. He wrote that “Philo Judaeus, a most serious author, wrote in his book called Biblical Antiquities, that [the ark] was ‘made from cedar.’ The most erudite of the Jews confirms this, since all of the Talmudists and the Targum[im], Rabbi Nathan [ben Yeḥiel of Rome], Rabbi Yehoshua the son of Karah [sic: Korha], and others as well, state unanimously that gopher is cedar.”⁶⁵ For Melchior Guilandinus, Talmudic rabbis provided the most important evidence that gopher should be understood as cedar and not pine.

At times, no source – Jewish, Christian, or pagan – could satisfy Guilandinus or Aldrovandi. In a telling letter to Andreas Patricius, another man affiliated with Padua’s botanical garden, Guilandinus analyzed the mysterious plant kikaion mentioned in the book of Jonah.⁶⁶ In it, Guilandinus is even more vociferous about the inaccuracy of biblical translations. This time Jewish commentators as well as Christian ones earned his disapprobation. The very title of his letter showed his dissatisfaction: “[In which] it is indicated that the Septuagint translators, Aquila, Saint Augustine, Jerome, and Rabbi Ibn Ezra were wrong. It is proved by recent discovery that kikaion is ricinus [castor oil plant], as opposed to the opinion of all interpreters of the sacred pages of the Jews.”⁶⁷ Guilandinus was sensible of the fact that he might be accused of excessive boldness in reworking this passage of Jonah. Nevertheless, he emphasized that he was “truly driven to show what the prophet of Nineveh meant when he named the plant kikai.”⁶⁸

To Guilandinus, fathers of the Western church such as Augustine and Jerome “seemed to fight” over the proper translation of this term, and they wrote “many letters [to one another] on this matter.”⁶⁹ The Septuagint translated kikaion as κολόκυνθα, which had been rendered as cucurbita [gourd] in the Vetus Latina. Augustine preferred the old Latin translation cucurbita, which Jerome used in his commentary on Jonah.⁷⁰ But in Jerome’s Vulgate he translated kikaion as hedera [ivy].⁷¹According to Guilandinus, both were wrong: kikaion “ought to be translated as neither gourd nor ivy.”⁷²Kikaion ought to be understood as ricinum, or castor oil plant.

The proof for this, as Guilandinus admitted, could be found in Jerome’s own description of the plant.⁷³ “The kikaion,” Jerome wrote, “is a kind of shrub, having wide leaves similar to a vine shoot. When transplanted, it soon springs up as a sapling, without the support of any stalk or shaft.” Jerome further observed that gourds and ivy do not need external support, since they “support themselves with their stem.”⁷⁴ Guilandinus knew that Jerome and Augustine were wrong not because he was a better philologist but because he was a botanist. He knew what the plants they described looked like and how they grew. His experience in Padua’s botanical garden, coupled with his deep knowledge of Pliny, helped him identify kikaion as ricinus, or castor-oil tree.

Guilandinus arrived at this identification by broad reading in botanical literature. A plant that exhibits the characteristics of kikaion – “rising up into a great shrub, supporting itself on its own stalks, requiring no external support, having leaves like a grape vine or gourd, growing very quickly to a great height, and called El Keroa in Syriac” – could be “nothing other than the castor oil plant.”⁷⁵ As sources for this information, Guilandinus cited various authorities: Ebenbithar, Avicenna, Serapion, Rhazes, and Isahac.⁷⁶ To them he added a Jewish commentator, Rabbi Samuel, whom Guilandinus read at secondhand in Sante Pagnini’s Thesaurus linguae sanctae and who equated kikaion with the Arabic Al Keroam.⁷⁷

Guilandinus censured Jewish scholars as often as he praised them. For as remiss as Augustine and Jerome were in translating kikaion, at least they attempted to do so. The same could not be said for Abraham Ibn Ezra, whom Guilandinus upbraided immediately after citing Rabbi Samuel. “I do not rashly repudiate the opinion of Rabbi Abraham, who in his commentaries dared to say that by no means may one know what sort of plant the kikaion may be.”⁷⁸ This was a generous misquotation. In the original Hebrew, Ibn Ezra’s attitude toward the kikaion is even more dismissive. He wrote that “the Spanish sages say that it is a gourd or a poppy. But there is no need to know what it is.”⁷⁹ For Ibn Ezra, it was not so much that the identity of the plant cannot be known but that there is no good reason to even try to identify it. Guilandinus was appalled.

For the German botanist there simply had to be a way to translate kikaion. And he knew that he was bucking a trend. “With great constancy and determination, I defend and protect [my translation], which, as you see, is against the opinion of all interpreters.”⁸⁰ Guilandinus supported his assertion that kikaion should be understood as the castor oil plant by relying on an authority he knew well: Pliny. In Natural History Pliny describes a plant called cici, whose behavior is similar to that of kikaion, whose name had an etymological resemblance to it, and which was “a very common tree in Egypt.”⁸¹ Furthermore, Pliny indicated that “some call it [cici] croton,” a Greek term understood as ricinum in Latin. For that Greek term, Guilandinus relied on Pliny, too.⁸² Although Guilandinus never cites Pliny, it is clear the Roman naturalist was his main source.⁸³

Guilandinus boasted about the support for his theory that he received from the famous anatomist Gabriele Fallopia, the “pillar of the Paduan Academy,” who “greatly admired my opinion about kikaion ... and embraced it with both of his arms.”⁸⁴ An endorsement for his translation from an illustrious colleague – the “prince of physicians in his time,” in the words of a seventeenth-century writer – was important to Guilandinus.⁸⁵ And the fact that more than one notable Italian botanist concurred with Guilandinus’s assessment lent his argument a patina of legitimacy.

Guilandinus’s invocation of Fallopia signals an important aspect of his intellectual project: collaboration. More than a century ago, Charles DeJob argued that the biggest difference between biblical studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance could be explained by one word: collaboration.⁸⁶ Guilandinus discussed biblical natural history with Paduan theologians in addition to natural philosophers. For example, Girolamo Vielmi’s 1575 published lectures on Genesis credit Guilandinus with helping him understand Genesis 1:11 and its mention of “seed-bearing plants.”⁸⁷ Vielmi refers to Guilandinus as “a most learned man, easily the prince of botanical matters in our time,” and relates that they discussed the matter “in casual conversations.”⁸⁸ The connection between theologians and naturalists is even more explicit in Aldrovandi’s case. Bibliologia, which contains many discussions of the Hebrew language and biblical naturalia, was undertaken at the request of a friend, Camillo Paleotti, the brother of Gabriele, Bologna’s bishop. “The first book of my Bibliologia,” Aldrovandi recollected in another context to his patron Gabriele, “which deals with the antiquity of letters ... and the use of that very noble paper made in Egypt from papyrus, was written to the illustrious Signore Camillo Paleotti, your brother.”⁸⁹ As was the case with many of his other writings, Bibliologia was dedicated to Gabriele.⁹⁰

Even though Aldrovandi undertook many of his most colorful explorations of the Bible’s natural world at the urging of two powerful clergymen in Bologna, he also indicated in side comments that a broader and more extensive group bore responsibility for Bibliologia’s genesis. “I am extremely busy and have no leisure time,” Aldrovandi lamented, “distracted on the one hand by my private and public studies, and on the other by many friends who constantly write me, and to whom I must respond and explain my opinion about many things that they ask me, in this Natural History.”⁹¹ Rather than being the result of a few friends’ quest to understand the place of nature in scripture, Aldrovandi’s writings on the Bible were the result of widespread interest.

One relationship that had special significance for Aldrovandi’s project to decipher the natural language of scripture was his friendship with Benito Arias Montano.⁹² Aldrovandi boasted that the Spanish polymath had come to see him and his museum. He remembered when “Arias Montano, that most learned theologian, extremely well versed in ten different languages, and most learned in every kind of science, came to see my museum when he was in Italy.”⁹³ Aldrovandi had many famous visitors come to his museum, but few enjoyed Arias Montano’s international reputation. And none was as renowned for their contributions to biblical studies. Comparing Arias Montano’s remarks about biblical natural history to Aldrovandi’s throws the unusual nature of Aldrovandi’s engagement with biblical realia into sharper relief. And studying the way Aldrovandi borrowed from the editor of the Antwerp Polyglot illustrates how widely admired and broadly used Arias Montano’s magnum opus was. Finally, observing how Aldrovandi moved beyond Arias Montano’s scholarship indicates the limits of theological biblicism for natural philosophers. Though Arias Montano’s Apparatus to the Antwerp Polyglot could stimulate Aldrovandi’s thinking, it could not provide him the answers he sought.

Occasionally Aldrovandi relied on Arias Montano for information about biblical terms. For example, Aldrovandi’s extended discussion of yam suph, or the Sea of Reeds, was motivated by a comment he openly acknowledged reading in one of Arias Montano’s works:

But as we have already seen, Aldrovandi’s work went far beyond Arias Montano’s; he described the gronco, or reed, at great length and specified the difference between the Hebrew term when it meant “reed” and when scripture employed it as a metonym for sea. Aldrovandi acknowledged his source so openly because both he and his readers knew that Arias Montano did not have the final word when it came to matters of natural philosophy. To Aldrovandi, Arias Montano’s Apparatus provided a stimulant to further investigation.

The same may be said for other passages throughout Aldrovandi’s writings. Aldrovandi knew that the Hebrew term [et] in the Bible means an iron writing implement because it was exclusively paired with the adjective barzel – Arias Montano pointed this out in his Apparatus.⁹⁵ Similarly, Aldrovandi could write about the etymology of sepher (book) and emphasize how it originally connoted storytelling, reporting, and narration as opposed to any specific physical property because of a helpful definition of Arias Montano’s that Aldrovandi repeated almost verbatim, yet which he did not cite.⁹⁶ Finally, Aldrovandi wrote an extended essay on the connections between writing, engraving, and drawing – arts that he considered to be variations of the same central practice, and derivative of the same verbs: grapho in Greek and khakak in Hebrew.⁹⁷ Once again Arias Montano was his most likely source for this idea.⁹⁸

Their divergent discussions of writing in the Bible provide a final example of how Aldrovandi borrowed from but did not duplicate Arias Montano’s scholarship. We have already seen how extensive Aldrovandi’s discussion of biblical writing and scribal culture is. Arias Montano’s Biblia Regia, which Aldrovandi owned and thus very likely read,⁹⁹ was much briefer and of a different character. In his Apparatus, Arias Montano defined the verb “to write” and the noun “writing” in a single entry. That entry summarizes the Spanish polyglot’s approach to a practice that was, after all, technological and cultural as opposed to merely linguistic. His entry begins with the observation that “the greatest use for writing is to communicate news of things and actions.” He also observed that “writing is a dependable way to pass on news, both to those who are absent and to posterity.” When Arias Montano turns to scripture, he provides five biblical quotations, eight from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament, that contain some form of the word “to write” or “writing.”¹⁰⁰ But he never uses biblical quotations to contribute to a freestanding history of ancient scribal culture, as Aldrovandi did. The distinction between the two biblical scholars is not evidence of Arias Montano’s shortcomings compared to Aldrovandi’s achievement; it merely underscores their different scholarly dispositions and illustrates Aldrovandi’s propensity to treat the Bible as a text that could enrich natural philosophy.

Aldrovandi and Other Contemporary Bibliologiae

Another way to understand Aldrovandi’s tendency to integrate biblical analysis with other sorts of investigations is to compare his Bibliologia to other works in that genre. By discussing scribal culture, writing implements, and book history, Aldrovandi was participating in a scholarly trend that was well established in his time. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Justus Lipsius published his De bibliothecis syntagma, a study of ancient libraries.¹⁰¹ Closer to the completion of Aldrovandi’s Bibliologia, two other Italians wrote works that addressed similar themes: Angelo Rocca, the author of Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, and Mutio Pansa, who wrote Della libraria vaticana.¹⁰² Neither dealt with the Bible as a source for the history of books and writing, but each was interested in papyrus, Hebrew literature, and the connections between them.

While Rocca’s work made little use of Jewish sources and took even less interest in papyrus,¹⁰³ Pansa discussed papyrus at length in his Della libraria vaticana. Pansa’s composition began as a history of the Vatican’s collection but grew to embrace a general history of writing. It mentions the Bible more than Rocca’s work did but far less than Aldrovandi’s. Rocca noted the “heroic acts of the Jews” and observed that Adam’s nephews, sons of Seth, created two columns, one of stone and the other of brick, on which they wrote “all arts.”¹⁰⁴ These columns, which contained a digest of Eastern wisdom, made their way to the West through Rome, by the initiative of the “early emperors.” Pansa indulged in fairly standard praise for Adam, noting that “he gave a name to all things according to their nature and their properties; no one would ever understand so perfectly the paths of the constellations and the movements of the planets and stars or know so completely the nature of herbs, plants, animals, and all other things in the world as well as he.”¹⁰⁵ Such remarks pepper Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s more popular work, too.¹⁰⁶

Pansa’s history of papyrus, contained in his first discourse on the “Use of Books and Invention of Letters,” presents a conventional account of the natural history of papyrus, and, following Varro, he dates its use to a remarkably late period, Hellenistic Egypt, after the translation of the Septuagint. He claims that after the composition of the Septuagint “a certain kind of paper was found that came from certain small trees called papiri, which is a sort of reed similar to cane. It grows in the still waters of the Nile, though Pliny says that they are also in Syria by the Euphrates River.”¹⁰⁷ Pansa also insisted that he himself had seen a sample of papyrus and noted that “it was shown to me by the excellent signor Castor Durante, my instructor of blessed memory. While he studied in the Collegio [of Rome], he obtained a sample of it from Padua by the courtesy of Signor Cortuso, very accomplished in the profession of [medicinal] simples.”¹⁰⁸ Cortuso was in charge of the botanical garden at Padua, where he succeeded Guilandinus, and he had a degree in medicine. Durante was the author of several books of botanical history. While Pansa captures the empirical and botanical spirit of inquiry, he does not think to examine other texts that testify to papyrus’s ancient origins. Surprisingly, Pansa failed to connect the fact that Durante’s sample of papyrus came from Egypt to the obvious associations between papyrus and Egypt in the early chapters of the book of Exodus. Aldrovandi did integrate Exodus into his study of papyrus. The fact that he did so is testament to his consistent interest in the Bible and his vision of that text’s central role not only as a spiritual and divine work but as one that could help scholars write more comprehensive history.

Clearly, Guilandinus and Aldrovandi studied the Bible and did so in unusual ways. To answer lexical questions, such as the meaning of papyrus in the ancient world, and evaluative ones, such as when it was first cultivated and used by humans, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus turned to scripture. They were not concerned with or qualified to comment on the history of biblical texts and translations – issues that deeply engaged contemporary theologians and classicists. In fact, Guilandinus was sharply ridiculed for his alleged incompetence. While he was still alive, shortly after his Papyrus was published, the classical scholar and polymath Joseph Scaliger wrote a blistering rejoinder to it that Anthony Grafton has described in detail.¹⁰⁹ According to Scaliger, Guilandinus was simply not fit to comment on philological matters, especially those pertinent to the Bible. For example, Guilandinus made a rash error when he wrote about the Septuagint translators that, “inspired by the holy spirit, they rendered the sacred volumes of the Hebrews from Chaldean into Greek.”¹¹⁰ The Septuagint was translated from Hebrew, not Aramaic, to Greek, and to Scaliger the misstatement was unconscionable. He retorted that the Septuagint translators “who so ineptly translated the sacred scriptures were inspired by no holy spirit. Furthermore [they translated] from Hebrew, not Aramaic.”¹¹¹ Isaac Casaubon had an even more scathing remark about Guilandinus’s poor linguistic skills. In a dedicatory letter to a collection of Scaliger’s minor works, Casaubon quipped about Guilandinus that “in Greek he is completely dependent on his dictionary. This he himself admits, and it is in any case obvious.”¹¹²

There is some truth to what Scaliger and Casaubon alleged: Guilandinus did in fact make mistakes. But it is important to emphasize that Guilandinus was not an editor of texts; he was a natural philosopher. His task was not to establish accurate and readable editions of classical works but rather, in the spirit of Leoniceno, to figure out what Pliny meant. And that intellectual project had practical goals that Scaliger and Casaubon were bound by neither occupation nor inclination to pursue. Those two great Calvinist scholars put the Bible at the center of their historical and antiquarian endeavors: they were involved in interconfessional polemic, which they prosecuted with philological precision. Aldrovandi and Guilandinus did not study the Bible to establish accurate texts, involve themselves in religious conflict, or uphold the truth of any particular confessional perspective. When asked by friends and religious authorities to bring their natural philosophical expertise to bear on the Bible, they obliged. When left to their own devices, they ushered the Bible into an expanding classical canon and used it to supplement their explorations in ancient natural philosophy.

To do so carried risks. Since Aldrovandi and Guilandinus made extensive use of the Bible – and explicitly criticized the Vulgate – they took precautions against attracting unwanted attention from the Inquisition. Gabriele Paleotti acted as Aldrovandi’s protector.¹¹³ Either Guilandinus or his publisher thought it prudent to voluntarily submit Papyrus to the church authorities for prepublication censorship. Such ecclesiastical prepublication censorship was stipulated by the Tridentine Index in 1564.¹¹⁴ As Paul Grendler has argued, from the mid-1560s onward “all authors became careful self-censors.”¹¹⁵ Evidence of Guilandinus’s fidelity to this policy may be found in the form of a printed note prefixed to the 1572 edition of Papyrus, which explains Guilandinus’s actions to readers and assures them the work they are about to read contains nothing offensive to “good morals,” the Catholic faith, or its representatives.¹¹⁶ Given how frequently he quoted the Bible, and how freely he rendered biblical phrases, it is not surprising that Guilandinus or his publisher would have taken this vigilant action.

Aldrovandi drew attention from the Inquisition, too. As a young man, he was arrested in 1549 for suspicion of heresy and was placed under house arrest in Rome for almost a year.¹¹⁷ He abjured in Bologna’s cathedral in September of that year. His specific infraction was fraternization with presumed Protestants. A deposition from 1550 against Francesco Linguardo, a notorious bookseller in Bologna known to have Protestant sympathies, implicates Aldrovandi as a member of his circle.¹¹⁸ The naturalist’s name was cleared, but allegations against his fidelity to the Holy See would resurface throughout his life. He was once again in trouble with the Inquisition in the 1570s.¹¹⁹ This time the charges were similar. On 14 July 1571 Antonio Balducci, the inquisitor of Bologna, wrote to Scipione Rebiba, cardinal of Pisa, and insisted that “since 1548 Aldrovandi had [participated] in a circle where there were Lutheran readings.”¹²⁰ Five months earlier Balducci had written to Rebiba and denounced Aldrovandi with stinging language: he called him a “most perfidious heretic.”¹²¹

But Aldrovandi did not lack defenders. An anonymous, undated, and unpublished testimony of Aldrovandi’s activities and his value to the larger community of clergymen was sent to the pope. It lucidly articulates Aldrovandi’s reputation for sacred studies. “In his histories,” the authors write,

In a similar vein, his powerful friend and patron Gabriele Paleotti wrote to the Roman Inquisition to assure it that he had read Aldrovandi’s work on biblical natural philosophy, Theatrum biblicum naturale, and that it contained nothing offensive:

Paleotti went on to explain that though Aldrovandi wished to have his work printed, and that he was urged to do so by others, he could not accomplish this without the approval of the Holy Office. To that end he humbly submitted that the recipients of his letter would do him the honor of allowing Aldrovandi’s work to be printed since it would be for the great benefit of the public.¹²⁴ Paleotti’s letter, like the advance presentation of Guilandinus’s work to inquisitors, was a farsighted attempt to secure advance approval from church authorities.

In sixteenth-century Italy, laymen who wrote about the Bible, even its natural imagery and terminology, could raise suspicions. Apart from Aldrovandi’s brief period of house arrest in Rome as a young man – long before he wrote about the Bible – neither he nor Guilandinus was ever convicted of any crime against the Catholic Church or punished for any theologically offensive utterance. But these two naturalists, who steered clear of confessional polemics and focused on scientific and antiquarian matters, still piqued curiosity and possessed the power to generate controversy. They lived in a world in which one needed to seek ecclesiastical approval to print a book on any topic concerning religion or morals.

Conclusion

Ulisse Aldrovandi integrated the Bible into his study of ancient booklore much more thoroughly than his contemporaries did. His scientific training, interest in Hebrew, and diligent examination of the Bible enabled him to put that sacred text to new and creative uses. Among them was his tendency to use the Bible as a historical rather than a theological source. And a roiling debate concerning Pliny’s Natural History gave him and his colleague Melchior Guilandinus an opportunity to combine biblical studies and natural philosophy to an unprecedented degree. Rather than folding their scientific learning into their biblical commentaries, as many of their contemporaries did, Aldrovandi and Guilandinus folded their biblical learning into their scientific commentaries. The result was a new approach to the Bible that considered scripture as more than an inerrant source for religious doctrine: it became a mine for valuable scientific and historical material as well.