Isabelle Boehm and Nathalie Rousseau, eds. L’Expressivité du lexique médical en Grèce et à Rome: Hommages à Françoise Skoda. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014. 513 pp. €37.00 (978-2-84050-929-5).
Recently, the American Philological Association changed its name to the Society for Classical Studies. On the positive side, this change shows how classical studies have evolved since the nineteenth century, from a rather elitist field to one that welcomes interdisciplinarity and new approaches. On the negative side, this change indicates how unfashionable philology, the close study of ancient languages, has become in the Anglophone world. By contrast, Continental Europe still celebrates philology, and the current volume is a prime example of what philological studies can achieve in fine-tuning our understanding of Greek and Roman medicine. This work is offered to Françoise Skoda, emerita professor of Greek linguistics at the University of Paris–Sorbonne. Skoda has devoted her career to analyze the Greek language, with a particular emphasis on medical language and its reliance on metaphors. Following an homage to Skoda and her list of her publications, the volume presents thirty-one chapters that exemplify the richness and expressivity of the ancient medical and botanical vocabulary, primarily in classical Greek and Latin, but with some references to Mycenaean Greek (chapter by Charles de Lamberterie, pp. 47–56) and Arabic (chapter by Ivan Garofalo, pp. 415–27). The volume also contains an excellent index of Greek and Latin terms, as well as a particularly useful bibliography. All Greek and Latin texts presented in the volume are translated into French, thus enabling students of ancient medicine who do not read the ancient languages to benefit from the painstaking work carried out by all contributors.