Knowledge, Magic and Horse Medicine in Late Antiquity

This project will study ancient hippiatric material: Greek and Latin texts on the care and medical treatment of horses. The material consists of texts excerpted from veterinary manuals compiled in the large collection Hippiatrica. They have been organized in different ways, and thus represent a fluid text material.

The currently available printed editions of these texts are few, dated, and wanting, primarily because of the complexity of the material. Thus, the first aim of this project is to make this rich but neglected material accessible in an open access database.

The two central authors in the collection, Apsyrtos and Pelagonius, will be selected for transcription, translation and subsequent studies.

By registering the structure and TEI-encoded transcriptions of the most important manuscripts, the material can be studied systematically across language barriers.

Theoretically the framework of the project is based on new philology, which emphasizes the single manuscript rather than a stemmatically reconstructed text.

The second aim is to study the transmission of knowledge, including the magic and religious elements in these texts and the placement of this type of literature within the classic paideia: how did ancient people view the boundaries between humans, animals and spiritual beings, and how does it appear in the construction of knowledge in these texts?

This four-year-project consists of three scholars specializing in Greek, Latin and the History of Religion.