The Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms: Introduction

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the ‘Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’. During a 5-year ERC-funded project, a team of researchers led by Peter E. Pormann has produced a 1.5m-word corpus of preliminary editions, and analysed it in multi-faceted ways. The team shared their digital editions with scholars from outside Manchester, and invited them to engage with the new material; these editions are now freely available to all under a Creative Commons license. In April 2015, they organised an international conference at which team members and other scholars discussed this rich commentary tradition from various vantage points. This special issue contains a selection of papers read at the conference. In this contribution, we introduce our project and its collaborators; list the texts in our corpus of preliminary editions and reflect on the scholarly analysis to which it has hitherto been subjected, ranging from Graeco-Arabic studies, textual criticism, medieval exegetical methods, medical theory and practice, and questions about the social history of medicine. We conclude with an outlook on the most pressing needs for future research, and close with acknowledgments for the manifold support that we have received.