Embodiment in Latin technical texts (original) (raw)

Studies in Language Companion Series, 2016

Abstract

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.

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