A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine

A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine by Anne McCabe deals with a little known work called the Hippiatrica, a handbook for veterinarians and horse keepers. The book grew out of McCabe’s doctoral thesis, and she shows full command of the material and a rare combination of textual facility, technical knowledge (of both manuscripts and their subjects) and the ability to use these in contextualizing historical documents.
The study begins with an overview of the Hippiatrica and immediately stresses that it, like the the Geoponica, the agricultural manual with which it is often compared, is the product of two movements. The first of these is the development of specialized disciplinary knowledge in the technical arts that we detect over the third through sixth centuries AD. The second is the trend of scribal excerpting that occurred in the tenth century, when technical literature was revived in intellectual circles in Constantinople. Although they were produced in the rather rarified environment of elite circles in the imperial center, these books had an utterly practical function. This fact would be easy to forget, but McCabe does a good job of foregrounding the various mixtures of real-world needs and literary choices that yield the text that we have.