Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing

Marco Formisano · Philip van der Eijk

04/2017 · Cambridge University Press

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The relationship between theory and practice, in other words between norms indicated in a text and their extra-textual application, is one of the most fascinating issues in the history and theory of science. Yet this aspect has often been taken for granted and never explored in depth. The essays contained in this volume provide a complex and nuanced discussion of this relationship as it emerges in ancient Greek and Roman culture in a number of fields, such as agriculture, architecture, the art of love, astronomy, ethics, mechanics, medicine, pharmacology. The main focus is on the textuality of processes of the transmission of knowledge and its application in various fields. Given that a text always contains complex and destabilising aspects that cannot be reduced to the specific subject matter it discusses, to what extent can and do ancient texts support extra-textual applicability?

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Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin Literature at Universiteit Gent, Belgium. He has published extensively on ancient technical and scientific writing. His first monograph, Tecnica e scrittura (2001), was dedicated to late Latin scientific texts. He has studied the ancient art of war as a literary genre and its tradition (Vegezio: Arte della guerra romana, 2003 and War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz, coedited with H. Böhme, 2012) as well as Vitruvius (Vitruvius in the Round, co-edited with S. Cuomo, special issue of Arethusa, 2016). He is the editor of The Library of the Other Antiquity, a series devoted to late antique literature.

Philip van der Eijk is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Classics and History of Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has published on ancient medicine, philosophy and science, comparative literature and patristics. He is the author of Aristoteles: De insomniis, De divinatione per somnum (1994), Diocles of Carystus (2000–1), Philoponus on Aristotle on the Soul 1 (2005–6), Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (2005); and Nemesius: On the Nature of Man (with R. W. Sharples, 2008). He has edited Ancient Histories of Medicine (1999) and Hippocrates in Context (2005), and co-edited Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context (with H. F. J. Horstmanshoff and P. H. Schrijvers, 1995).