Abstract
Horses were domesticated some 5,000 years ago and since then have been the constant companions of humans. Their widespread use in military operations, agricultural work and leisure meant that an interest in their health developed and subsequently veterinary works on this special subject were produced. The book at hand is devoted to one of these texts, the Epitome (of the Hippiatrica). In order to understand the scope of this work it is essential to give a brief overview of the texts examined here. The main horse medicine text is the collection known as Hippiatrica, a fifth- to sixth-century compilation of excerpts from seven late imperial authors; it is preserved in five redactions in twenty-two manuscripts reflecting the changes that the text underwent after its compilation (see Anne McCabe, A Byzantine encyclopaedia of horse medicine: the sources, compilation, and transmission of the Hippiatrica, Oxford, 2007). Some time after the tenth and before the thirteenth century another compilation was made based on the text of the Hippiatrica: it is conventionally called the Epitome, as it is to a large extent a summary of the original in some forty odd chapters. It survives in eight manuscripts (preserving ten witnesses to the text) and underwent five significant stages of reshaping, which included quite important changes. As a living text, which “eludes the classical laws of stemmatics” it was an influential text that was used by Byzantine veterinarians. Compared to the Hippiatrica it is concise and practical, organized around headings on each disease followed by a small number of recipes. This is the text discussed in the present volume. Anne-Marie Doyen-Higuet has been working on horse medicine texts for over twenty-five years. Her five volume PhD thesis on the Epitome was completed in 1983; in 1984 she published a very useful outline of all known hippiatric texts in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1984, 38: 111–20, followed by a gap of almost twenty years, only to restart publishing on the topic in 2001. This volume (the first of three) is a vast prolegomena to the edition of the Epitome (never published before, which will appear in the second volume, followed by a French translation with commentary on the third). In 240 printed pages (and another 407 pages in PDF form on the accompanying CD Rom) Doyen-Higuet meticulously outlines the complex transmission history of both the Hippiatrica and the Epitome. In the book itself a preliminary history of the text and its authors is provided, followed by a detailed outline of all the known redactions and the manuscripts that preserve them (pp. 39–196). This is repeated in an expanded, detailed way in the CD: the first part includes an analytical plan of each redaction of the Hippiatrica, while the second part dealing with the Epitome compares the arrangement of material in both texts, the internal arrangement of chapters within the Epitome, a collection of the recipes of the Epitome, an exploration of parallel passages between the Epitome, the Hippiatrica, the Geoponica and Latin hippiatric texts, and finally a discussion of possible sources of the Epitome. This work will be of great interest to specialists of ancient veterinary texts and especially those concerned with the complex transmission history of the Hippiatrica and the Epitome. I fear it has little to offer to anyone else, as the largest part of the substantial text is purely technical. However, it certainly whets the appetite for the forthcoming edition, translation and commentary (though it is not stated when they are likely to be published) as they will make another highly interesting Byzantine technical text available and illuminate the workings of medieval compilers and editors.
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