Writing Science : Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece

Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This applies to Classics, too, despite the fact that a large part of the field’s extant texts deal with questions of medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts, this collection aims at approaching ancient Greek science and its texts from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship. Among the questions addressed are: What is a scientific author? In what respect does scientific writing differ from ‘literary’ writing? How does the author present himself as an authoritative figure through his text? What strategies of trust do these authors employ? These and related questions cannot be discussed within the typical boundaries of modern academic disciplines, thus most of the sixteen authors, many of them leading experts in the fields of ancient science, bring a comparative perspective to their subjects. As a result, the collection not only offers a new approach to this vast area of ancient literature, thus effectively discovering new possibilities for literary criticism, it also reflects on our current forms of scientific and scholarly written communication.

"The rich collection of topics, the diversity of backgrounds and approaches to scientific writing and its narratology, the inclusion of several different disciplines of ancient science, and the impressive learning which pervades the collection make this volume a welcome addition to the bibliography of ancient science and its Nachleben."
Konstantinos Kapparis in: BMCR 2014.12.08