In this collection of essays, edited by Catherine M. Chin and Moulie Vidas, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the activity of knowing in late antiquity by focusing on thirteen major concepts from the intellectual, social, political, and cultural history of the period. They ask two questions about each of these concepts: what did late ancient people know about them, and how was that knowledge expressed in people’s actions? Each chapter treats its main concept as a problem both of knowledge and of practice or behavior. The result is a richly imagined description of how people of this time understood and navigated their world, from travel through the countryside and encounters with demons to philosophical medicine and the etiquette of imperial courts.
“In the chapter on medicine, Heidi Marx-Wolf documents the transdisciplinary nature of late ancient medical inquiry; she concludes that Porpyhry’s tractate ‘on the fetus ‘participates on in a very broad, flexible, universal, even totalizing understanding of scientia’ that renders philosophical and medical knowledge indistinguishable (Introduction, p.6).”
The Book was published in May 2015 by University of California Press
Tanja Hidde
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