'What's in a name? - Authorship and Authority in the Transmission of Medicinal Recipes from 'Hippocrates' to 'Galen'. (360G-Wellcome-078737_Z_05_Z)

Names (real authorial names or pseudonyms) attached to ancient pharmacological treatises, or within a treatise, to individual recipes, conferred authority on pharmacological material. This project will investigate the relation between authorship and authority in the transmission of pharmacological knowledge in antiquity, taking into account variations through time, variations according to the literary genres in which recipes are listed, and variations according to the social origin of the authority named. I will study Greek and Latin sources from the second half of the fifth century BC (approximate date of the recipes preserved in the Hippocratic Corpus) to the end of the second /beginning of the third century AD (date of the pharmaceutical treatises in the Galenic Corpus). I will write five chapters covering the strategies used by pharmacological compilers to establish their authority; the methods of source quotations in pharmacological writings; the involvement, real or imagined, of political figures in pharmacology; the appropriation of traditional remedies by medical writers; and parallel versions of recipes attributed to individuals. Building upon my previous research on pharmacological recipes, and drawing upon recent studies on the history of the book, this study will enhance our understanding of the construction and transmission of ancient medical knowledge.

£128,553

10 Nov 2005