Courtney Roby - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Courtney Roby

Technology and Culture, 2019

and the devastating effects of garlic on magnets), making these “errors” yield up broader epistem... more and the devastating effects of garlic on magnets), making these “errors” yield up broader epistemological truths. The reader is immediately warned against taking for granted too much uniformity between “scientific” cultures, and particularly against assuming a one-to-one correspondence between an observer’s truth and things that are actually present in the world. This search for difference, for Lehoux, lies at the heart of the enterprise of history of science: “we could have done it differently. Indeed, on one way of looking at it, the history of the sciences is virtually a catalogue of different ways of doing it…” (Lehoux 2012, 1) Estrangement of Roman thought, and of ancient science more generally, is a crucial part of Lehoux’s strategy for allowing his reader to see Roman scientific thought through new eyes. Each chapter is structured around a particular problem and an exemplary text or two: Seneca’s Natural Questions informs a discussion of the extent to which a judicial system ...

Aestimatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science, 2021

This volume of essays represents the fruit of an ambitious project driven by two working groups (... more This volume of essays represents the fruit of an ambitious project driven by two working groups (Sociétés, milieux, climats and Normes et représentations du pouvoir) of the Centre de Recherche en Archéologie, Archéosciences, Histoire at Le Mans Université. Reviewed by: Courtney Roby, Published Online (2021-08-31)Copyright © 2021 by Courtney RobyThis open access publication is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND) Article PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/view/37722/28725 Corresponding Author: Courtney Roby,Cornell UniversityE-Mail: croby@cornell.edu

The Classical Review, 2018

chapter, ‘Caesarian Questions: Then, Now, Hence’, but also four essays in Parts 1 and 2. All the ... more chapter, ‘Caesarian Questions: Then, Now, Hence’, but also four essays in Parts 1 and 2. All the contributors have to contend with the problems posed by either too much material or too little, using judicious selection or cautious extrapolation as necessary to reach plausible but often aporetic conclusions. One of the editors’ stated aims is to encourage further research on Caesar’s intellectual achievements (p. 8), and to that end they have reinvented and retitled the genre of the chapter-concluding bibliographical guide, which in this Companion appears under the heading ‘Further Reading and Research’. These guides, and the essays themselves, provide welcome indications of topics worthy of further study with an eye to giving Caesar the writer his due.

The Frame in Classical Art

Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature

Studies in Language Companion Series, 2016

In this chapter I analyze Latin textual representations of the engagements between body and world... more In this chapter I analyze Latin textual representations of the engagements between body and world entailed in the technical tasks of laying out spaces in the landscape and orienting oneself within them, emphasizing how rhetorical techniques of enargeia or “vividness” give the reader a sense of being physically present in those spaces. Drawing principally on the works of the Roman surveyors and Frontinus’s De aquae ductu urbis Romae , I focus on the road and water networks, and on the surveyed landscapes of Roman settlements. I give particular attention to linguistic techniques that vividly render the manual activities used to reify these spaces, from the surveyor’s manipulation of his instruments to the creation and decoding of the landscape of boundary markers.