Tradition and Diffusion

The title of the project reflects an overarching methodology of trans-disciplinarity, which consists in injecting the concepts and methods of a discipline into another, as well as searching for trans-chronological and trans-geographic connections. The 93 essays range across traditionally defined disciplines and historical periods in medicine and science, and across countries all over the world. The papers discuss venoms and poisons to medicinal plants, the Byzantine manuscripts of botanico-medical texts, codicology and the art of textual editing, pharmacy, ethnobotany and ethnopharmacy, botany and botanical illustration, laboratory analysis of archaeological remains, and the history of science and intellectual history. The papers therefore reach across many fields of science and medicine, and will be, necessarily and fundamentally, trans-disciplinary, trans-chronological, and trans-geographic. The papers demonstrate how the study of ancient science requires a multitude of crisscrossed approaches, none of which provides the answer; rather, each approach, when put alongside others, contribute to constructing a vision of what was ancient science.