Like one who stands at the bus stop for hours and then sees two buses arrive together, Bede's treatise De natura rerum, one of his earliest compositions, has waited over a millennium to be translated from the Latin, and now in short space two translations have appeared: the book under review, T.'s Italian rendering of Bede's text, and the English translation by C. Kendall and F. Wallis (Bede. On the Nature of Things and On Times [2010]). Anglophone readers might wonder why there should be any need to take note of the former when the latter, produced by two highly-skilled experts, is available, but these books have different perspectives and each confers its own benefits, as this review will try to show. I am grateful for the insights gained from T., and would recommend the book, with a few caveats.

First some comparisons: Kendall and Wallis bundle De natura rerum with its companion treatise, Bede's De temporibus, his first foray into computus, and their introduction discusses the unified conception behind the two works and the development of Bede's scientific thought; detailed notes and commentary accompany every chapter of the treatises, and overall the book, valuable also for its inventory of manuscripts and early editions of the two texts, is ideal for readers whose interest is primarily Bede and his context, and for historians of science. T., on the other hand, usefully puts her translation face to face with Bede's Latin, reproducing the edition made by C. Jones for Brepols (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 123A [1975], reprinted in a paperback ‘Scholars Version’ in 2003), with just one change to the text, to adopt a variant reading (also adopted by Kendall and Wallis). She drops Jones's critical apparatus and thins out his apparatus fontium to produce an elegantly spacious text, though it is a pity that these pages' comeliness sacrifices giving an immediately visible impression of how much material Bede borrowed, often verbatim, from his sources, conveyed with italicisation by Jones and also in the Kendall and Wallis translation. T.'s translation has sparse footnotes, followed by a ‘commentario tematico’; this proceeds chapter-by-chapter but does not deal systematically with every section of the work, though the introduction incorporates much detailed discussion. T. also appends a useful alphabetic glossary of Bede's key terms (‘air’, ‘tide’, ‘element’ and so on, but also less familiar concepts, like ‘apsis’ and ‘gnomon’). It should be noted that overall T.'s commentary is slighter than that of Kendall and Wallis, perhaps because for her Bede is to some degree secondary to the tradition he transmitted.

As befits the title of the series, ‘Library of the Classical Tradition’, much of T.'s fifty-page introduction discusses Bede's interaction with his sources, principally Pliny's Naturalis historia, Isidore of Seville's De natura rerum, various works by Augustine and the anonymous Liber de ordine creaturarum, from seventh-century Ireland. Of interest to readers of the present journal will be T.'s examination of Bede's attitude towards Pliny's work, which he later called an ‘opus pulcherrimum’ (De temporum ratione 27). She offers a stimulating comparison of the two authors' concept of natura, on the one hand an all-comprehending numen (Pliny), on the other a property of things, observable in plurality, as is made clear by the verses at the head of Bede's treatise: naturas rerum uarias … perstrinxi. Isidore's seventh-century De natura rerum was the starting point for Bede's own work, which reframed his predecessor's strongly allegorical account of the cosmos, partly with the aim of increasing its practical value. And it is Pliny that Bede used to supplement Isidore, but never, as T. shows, uncritically; for example, she highlights how Bede eliminated Pliny's presentation of exceptions or irregularities in nature, to avoid disturbing the coherent linear progress of the operatio diuina quae secula creauit (De natura rerum 1). She describes Bede's treatment of Naturalis historia as ‘parcelisation’, even ‘pulverisation’, reducing it to skilfully-interwoven nuggets. None the less, in her view, Bede attached sufficient authority to his pagan source that the science of De natura rerum bears ‘l'indubitabile impronta pliniana’.

T.'s concern is with how Bede adapted Pliny and the other sources, and the distinctiveness of his approach to the subject matter, rather than with the practicalities of those works' transmission to Northumbria, which she leaves almost entirely aside. Here, in the case of Isidore's De natura rerum, Kendall and Wallis have much to say that is of great interest. Neither book, however, discusses the transmission of Pliny's work, a story made all the more intriguing for the survival of parts of Books 2–6 of Naturalis historia in a manuscript written in Northumbria during the early eighth century (Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. Lat. F.4, fos. 4–33). Since it is Pliny's Book 2, on astronomy, meteorology and geography, that is laid most heavily under contribution in De natura rerum, it would thus have been interesting to hear T.'s views on the theory advanced by some scholars that the Leiden Pliny could have been Bede's copy. T. contributed an article on Bede and Pliny to the previous volume in the Bari series, though again leaving aside textual transmission (‘La Naturalis Historia di Plinio nel De natura rerum di Beda il Venerabile’, in V. Maraglino [ed.], La Naturalis Historia di Plinio nella tradizione medievale e umanistica [2012], pp. 77–105).

A non-source for Bede, Lucretius' De rerum natura, is the focus of T.'s second appendix; Kendall and Wallis also have a section entitled ‘Bede and Lucretius’, dispatched in a page and half, as opposed to T.'s ten. At Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Bede was blessed with one of Anglo-Saxon England's richest book collections, but one whose main weakness was in Classical Latin texts. Hence it is worth taking time to ask whether Bede's treatise shows any sign of the influence of Lucretius; M. Reeve's account of the medieval reception of De rerum natura, in the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, can begin, by reason of the evidence, only in the ninth century (S. Gillespie and P. Hardie [edd.] [2007], pp. 205–13). Facing the questions of whether Bede knew Lucretius' work or made any use of it, T. ends up at the same point as Kendall and Wallis, who write ‘The short answers are, he did not and none’. She draws her conclusion, however, only after detailed analysis of specific parallel passages in Bede's treatise and Lucretius' poem, highlighting two striking correspondences of phrasing and one match of ideas not attributable to any known intermediary. Ultimately T. has to observe that these correspondences are statistically too insignificant to make the case, and she can only offer the conjecture, with little enthusiasm, that there could have been a florilegium which contained Lucretian extracts, but which has left no trace of its existence. Yet the details of her initial analysis are stimulating reading.

Given T.'s focus on the Classical tradition it is a shame – though only a minor point – that she chose not to pick up on Virgilian quotations unnoticed by Jones but caught by Kendall and Wallis (whose book she includes in her bibliography), one from the Aeneid and two from the Georgics. Though fleeting phrases, they are none the less characteristic of the way that his training in poetics ran deep with Bede, so that as he wrote, Virgilian quotations emerged from his memory in sometimes surprising places.

It would be presumptuous for a non-Italian to pass judgement on a native speaker's translation from Latin: T.'s rendering of Bede's text seems fluent and accurate. My very rare niggles are only pedantry; for example, in Chapter 14 Bede writes De quibus si plenius scire uelis, lege Plinium Secudum ex quo et ista nos excerpsimus, where I assume by et ista Bede means ‘these things too’; T. translates ‘si legga Plinio Secondo, dalla cui opera anche noi abbiamo ricavato questi astratti’, which at least to me (and I am open to correction on the use of ‘anche’ in Italian) seems to throw the emphasis on to ‘nos’ – ‘we too’, as if Bede has other users of Pliny in mind. Overall, though, the translation serves admirably to open up De natura rerum to Italian readers. Of value to a wider audience will be T.'s detailed assessment of Bede's own reading.