by Scott McGill
As the symbolic action assigned Christian “ammas” and “abbas” finds expression in a venerable “Elder” surrounded by visiting Bhikkus, it underscores the degree to which aptly assigned narrative detail marks the broad influence of common forms and audience in shaping emergent literary content.
29.6 Conclusion
Wedding literary media with classroom practice and contexts, the excerpts, artifacts, and exercises examined here raise as many questions as they answer. Implicit intersections elucidate not rote mechanics that render substantive thought into sound bites but, instead, a sustained trajectory of creative reframing (more transparent in broad deployment than in isolated articulation). The fact that “more [gnomic] sentences survive in schoolhands than fragments of any other literature and any other form” (Morgan 1998, p. 122) affirms the merits of viewing the “fragmentary” literature of late antiquity through a pedagogical prism. In both pedestrian and profound ways, what emerges is a kaleidoscope of literary creation and dissemination. Each hue elucidates the degree to which malleable media seem particularly suitable for addressing audiences that appear increasingly hybrid. Troubling trajectories traditionally delineated as fundamentally disparate, these literary landscapes appear to transcend chronological, geographical, religious, and linguistic divides.
Once such patterns become visible, it is difficult to ignore concomitant questions about the determinative role that perceived authorship and audience has played in shaping contemporary consideration of late ancient literature. Long‐standing convention has framed Christian and, more particularly, monastic authors and educators as somehow engaged in alternate forms of praxis (Marrou 1956; Guy 1974; Rappe 2001) – or, in turn, no practice at all (Wilken 2012). However, the simple complexity encountered in melded material and literary remains raises serious questions about the adequacy of such assessment. If one is to move beyond depictions of late ancient literature as uniquely “less synthetic and sophisticated” than its Greco‐Roman counterparts (Kaster 1988), it is the deployment of common classroom media that eloquently elucidates the static fluidity that characterizes established forms. Both texts and artifacts invite further exploration of the “habits of thinking and writing” (Kennedy 2003, p. ix), which persist from the classical period, through late antiquity, into Byzantium and beyond. They instead commend embracing late ancient literary models that premise reframing of core content through common media to address diverse audiences. They invite replacing simple binaries with complex configurations, manifested in multifaceted composition and disseminated along textual trajectories which link Egypt and Syria, Gaul and Central Asia, Cappadocia and Thebes.
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CHAPTER THIRTY
Literature of Knowledge
Marco Formisano
This chapter is devoted to late antique technical and scientific writing, particularly in Latin, a strand of textuality that has generally been consigned by modern scholarship to the very margins of the ancient literary and cultural system. These texts have been the object of a double condemnation; they have been perceived as marginal texts from the most marginal phase of ancient literary history. Yet the simple fact that a large number of texts on a range of disciplines – medicine, veterinary medicine, architecture, the art of war, land surveying, and others – were produced during the late Roman Empire and have been transmitted to us should be sufficient to attract the attention not only of historians and historians of science and technology but also of literary scholars.
Classicists interested in ancient literary culture can approach technical treatises from the perspective of their very marginality in the literary system; these texts have much to say about that system precisely because they tend either to reproduce or to enter into conflict with its principles. We might ask questions regarding the differences between these “technical” texts and the more traditionally “literary” texts that they cite, or regarding the argumentative strategies pursued by “technical” authors in order to present their work to a general audience that, although highly educated, was in most cases not particularly familiar with specific items of knowledge in the various fields. A related question is this: What form does the text take in order to present and maintain a certain degree of applicability and usability in extratextual reality, something that many modern readers implicitly consider the priority of any technical text?
These questions, raised over the past decades, can grosso modo be classified under two general labels that well illustrate the current scholarly debate on the “literary aspects,” as scholars tend to put it, of technical writings. The first label is a German word, Wissensvermittlung. This concept has been identified and variously articulated above all, but not exclusively, within German‐language scholarship (see esp. Meißner 1999; Formisano 2001; Horster and Reitz 2003, 2005; Asper 2007; König and Whitmarsh 2007) and focuses mostly on the ways a technical text works essentially as a medium for transmitting a particular kind of knowledge by recurring to certain kinds of language, sets of arguments, logical structures, classifications of various parts and/or subfields, and responses to (sometimes highly hypothetical) readerly expectations. Particular attention has been directed at the leading principles of the systematization of the field described by a given text. In his pathbreaking Das systematische Lehrbuch (1960), Manfred Fuhrmann established the features of a genre – the ancient “manual” or “handbook” – by identifying its single most important characteristic as an inherent drive toward the systematization of knowledge. Connected to this key concept of Wissensvermittlung is that of authorial self‐fashioning. Literary scholars interested in ancient technical writing often focus on the question of how authors not only introduce their field by offering an ordered classification of the subject matter but also on how they present themselves as authorities in a given discipline (for instance, Doody and Taub 2009; Fögen 2009).
Both approaches, which are often combined and presented as interconnected, emphasize significant commonalities between technical and literary texts; as a result, ancient technical treatises can be seen as part of the larger ancient literary discourse and can be read as texts rather than only as sources for the history of science and technology. And yet, precisely the emphasis on formal and rhetorical aspects such as argumentative and ordering strategies as well as authorial self‐fashioning is based on the implicit assumption that the “literary aspects” of technical texts can be seen as detached from their technical content, as if their literary quality were to be considered only on the level of the linguistic surface (language, style, rhetoric), as not really connected with the subject matter. In the above‐mentioned contributions to the field there is regularly discussion of “literary polish” or “literary allusions” as something that any technical writing unavoidably contains. The result of this approach is that the “literary” is conceived as something that is added to the technical content of these texts by various stylistic and rhetoric means, rather than as an inherent quality of the texts themselves, qua texts. A similar argument can be made, of course, for other genres. Epistolography in particular shares an analogous tension between a concrete extratextual goal, for instance, the transmission of certain specific information, and its intrinsic literariness.
For these and other reasons, then, instead of the label “technical writing” or the influential German term Fachliteratur, I prefer to use here and elsewhere (see Formisano 2012, 2017a) the term “literature of knowledge,” a looser definition perhaps, but one that places emphasis on the concept of literature rather than on that of technology. Relatedly, I prefer to reverse the common trend in scholarship briefly illustrated above, by pointing to the technical core of the content of these texts, rather than just to formal aspects such as style, rhetoric, or intertextual allusions. A “technical” text, just like any other text, can certainly be read for the information it provides on a certain subject or topic. For example, we read Palladius’s Opus agri culturae in order to obtain a view of late antique agricultural practices and political and legal measures taken in that period in order to respond to or prevent certain problems; similarly we can look for intertextual references to other authoritative texts on farming, such as those by Varro, Virgil, or Columella. Yet a text cannot be reduced to a mere instrument whose primary function is simply to transmit knowledge and instructions on how to apply it. It is equally important to remember that the text is that knowledge, so that even seemingly arid technical content can actually have sophisticated meaning, one that displays the highly literary quality precisely of that knowledge. Knowledge, in fact, once it takes on the form of a text, irreversibly modifies its own nature by becoming subject to the hermeneutical openness and epistemic instability that, by definition, characterize every text. Whatever content a text may have, the text is not equivalent to that content. For instance, the agriculture of Palladius’s text is not the same as the agriculture that was actually practiced “out there;” the medicine presented by Julian’s doctor Oribasius cannot be considered “medicine” itself. This perspective should not be surprising to classical scholars: Who would consider Virgil’s Georgics to be a textbook or handbook on ancient agriculture, whatever the poem itself might claim? And yet, these same sophisticated readers of Virgil seem generally unwilling to conclude that
Columella’s or Palladius’s texts are not mere “agricultural handbooks.”
The following discussion, taking account of limitations of space, pursues three avenues simultaneously. The first two have been touched upon above: first, discussing the literature of knowledge in accordance with critical approaches valid for any other text; and second, identifying specifically late antique traits of these texts. The third large point has to do with the role played by the late antique literature of knowledge within the larger history of Western science. In a previously published article (Formisano 2013) I argue that late antiquity plays a key role in this history by advancing toward a better definition of what we might call “technical knowledge”: Late antique texts display a progressive tendency toward the emancipation of technical and practical activities from the standards of traditional education, that is, from the dominion of rhetoric. This statement might appear to contradict my earlier insistence on the literariness of these texts, but in fact it is meant to complement and complicate the discussion of the rich textuality of technical knowledge. In other words, a text can, of course, be read and used for the content it conveys (in the terms of Wissensvermittlung as described above), even though the transmission of technical knowledge is not the text’s primary function. I will briefly return to this point later.
In what follows, instead of producing a list of various technical texts and arranging them by discipline, I focus on a selection of passages from a variety of texts that exemplify this approach. By way of emphasizing the literariness of the texts, I organize them under three thematic headings: competition; fighting, grafting, and healing; the pursuit of practicability.
30.1 Competition
Late antique literature has been often seen as derivative: a littérature au second degré that derives its substance from older and thus authoritative texts. Modern readers generally have difficulties reading a late antique text that openly presents itself as reworking, rewriting, or rearranging a previous text (the most extreme example being the centones) without comparing the text with its model(s). This happens for a number of reasons, mostly related to the déformation professionelle of classicists, traditionally interested in identifying models and reconstructing genealogies. This hermeneutic principle has profoundly conditioned the reading and critical appreciation of the late antique literature of knowledge, seen as a set of vessels of information stemming from the authorities of the earlier, “classical” past.