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The volume collects papers presented at the International Conference "Greek Medical Papyri - Text, Context, Hypertext" held at the University of Parma on November 2-4, 2016, as the final event of the ERC project DIGMEDTEXT, aimed primarily at creating an online textual database of the Greek papyri dealing with medicine. The contributions, authored by outstanding papyrologists and historians of the ancient medicine, deal with a variety of topics focused on the papyrological evidence of ancient medical texts and contexts. The first part, devoted to "medical texts", contains some new reflections on important sources such as the Anonymus Londinensis and the Hippocratic corpus, as well as on spec...
Building on Calvino’s observations on Exactitude in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the present book elucidates on the possible definitions of exactitude, the endeavor of reaching exactitude, and the undeniable limits to the achievement of this ambitious milestone. The eighteen essays in this interdisciplinary volume show how ancient and medieval authors have been dealing with the problem of exactitude vs. inexactitude and have been able to exploit the ambiguities related to these two concepts to various ends. The articles focus on rhetoric and historiography (section I), exact sciences and technical disciplines (II), the peculiarity of quotations (III), cases of programmatic inexactitu...
Science in Byzantium has rarely been systematically explored. A first of its kind, this collection of essays highlights the disciplines, achievements, and contexts of Byzantine science across the eleven centuries of the Byzantine empire. After an introduction on science in Byzantium and the 21st century, and a study of Christianization and the teaching of science in Byzantium, it offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the scientific disciplines cultivated in Byzantium, from the exact to the natural sciences, medicine, polemology, and the occult sciences. The volume showcases the diversity and vivacity of the varied scientific endeavours in the Byzantine world across its long history, and aims to bring the field into broader conversations within Byzantine studies, medieval studies, and history of science. Contributors are Fabio Acerbi, Anne-Laurence Caudano, Gonzalo Andreotti Cruz, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Herve Inglebert, Stavros Lazaris, Divna Manolova, Maria K. Papathanassiou, Inmaculada Pérez Martín, Thomas Salmon, Ioannis Telelis, Anne Tihon, Alain Touwaide, Arnaud Zucker.
This volume unites scholars of classical epigraphy, papyrology, and literature to analyze the documentary habit in the Roman Empire. Texts like inscriptions and letters have gained importance in classical scholarship, but there has been limited analysis of the imaginative and sociological dimensions of the ancient document. Individual chapters investigate the definition of the document in ancient thought, and how modern understandings of documentation may (mis)shape scholarly approaches to documentary sources in antiquity. Contributors reexamine familiar categories of ancient documents through the lenses of perception and function, and reveal where the modern understanding of the document de...
Coptic emerged as the written form of the Egyptian language in the third century, when Greek was still the official language in Egypt. By the time of the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641, Coptic had almost achieved official status, but only after an unusually prolonged period of stagnation. Jean-Luc Fournet traces this complex history, showing how the rise of Coptic took place amid profound cultural, religious, and political changes in late antiquity. For some three hundred years after its introduction into the written culture of Egypt, Coptic was limited to biblical translation and private and monastic correspondence, while Greek retained its monopoly on administrative, legal, and literary wri...
In this book Sadi Maréchal examines the survival, transformation and eventual decline of Roman public baths and bathing habits in Italy, North Africa and Palestine during Late Antiquity. Through the analysis of archaeological remains, ancient literature, inscriptions and papyri, the continued importance of bathhouses as social hubs within the urban fabric is demonstrated, thus radically altering common misconceptions of their decline through the rise of Christianity and elite seclusion. Persistent ideas about health and hygiene, as well as perpetuating ideas of civic self-esteem, drove people to build, restore and praise these focal points of daily life when other classical buildings were left to crumble.
This volume is the first in a new series of editions of Coptic-language "magical" manuscripts from Egypt, written on papyrus, ostraca, parchment, and paper, and dating to between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE. Their texts attest to non-institutional rituals intended to bring about changes in the lives of those who used them – heal disease, curse enemies, bring about love or hatred, or see into the future. These manuscripts represent rich sources of information on daily life and lived religion of Egypt in the last centuries of Roman rule and the first centuries after the Arab conquest, giving us glimpses of the hopes and fears of people of this time, their conflicts and problems, and their vision of the human and superhuman worlds. This volume presents 37 new editions and descriptions of manuscripts, focusing on formularies or "handbooks", those texts containing instructions for the performance of rituals. Each of these is accompanied by a history of its acquisition, a material description, and presented with facing text and translations, tracings of accompanying images, and explanatory notes to aid in understanding the text.
Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).
Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World explores what it meant to be a child in the Roman world - what were children’s concerns, interests and beliefs - and whether we can find traces of children’s own cultures. By combining different theoretical approaches and source materials, the contributors explore the environments in which children lived, their experience of everyday life, and what the limits were for their agency. The volume brings together scholars of archaeology and material culture, classicists, ancient historians, theologians, and scholars of early Christianity and Judaism, all of whom have long been involved in the study of the social and cultural history of children. The topics discussed include children's living environments; clothing; childhood care; social relations; leisure and play; health and disability; upbringing and schooling; and children's experiences of death. While the main focus of the volume is on Late Antiquity its coverage begins with the early Roman Empire, and extends to the early ninth century CE. The result is the first book-length scrutiny of the agency and experience of pre-modern children.
This volume provides a set of in-depth case studies about the role of questions and answers (Q&A) in ancient Greek medical writing from its Hippocratic beginnings up to, and including, Late Antiquity. The use of Q&A formulas is widely attested in ancient Greek medical texts, casting an intriguing light on its relevance for the medical art at large, and for ancient medical practice, education, and research in specific (diagnostics, didactics, dialectics). The book aims to break new grounds by exploring, for the first time, the wide complexity of this phenomenon while introducing a coherent approach. In so doing, it not only covers highly specialized medical treatises but also non-canonical authors and texts, including anonymous papyrus fragments and collections of problems.