Medical amulets identified within Pliny the Elder's "Naturalis historia" (Natural History), their nature, and context.

This dataset was created for a digital humanities project which sought to take an archaeological approach in which every medical amulet described by Pliny the Elder in “Naturalis historia” (Natural History) was identified and treated as a discrete item of intangible heritage found within the context of the literary work. The data identifies and labels 263 medical amulets and provides quantifiable information relating to where in the text they were described, their style, nature, what they treated, any accompanying rituals or magical logic, how Pliny referred to them, and what source he ascribed to them if any. Additional data is provided to allow an analysis of how Pliny referred to these compared to his use of similar language elsewhere in his text. This dataset was not created for a philological or linguistic approach to Pliny’s work.