Pre-modern Seminar No 29: Davide Ermacora

On Monday December 9th PhD student Davide Ermacora from the University of Turin will give a talk called:

“Hippocrates, Epid. 5: 86, an Ancient ‘Simple’ Story from Antiquity? A Comparative and Contextual Folkloric Approach.”

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The seminar will take place in the library of Skandinavistika (Ülikooli 17, 3rd floor, room 305) at 18.15.
 

Davide has sent us a short presentation of the lecture:

“A short, problematic and seldom discussed passage to be found in one Hippocratic text gives us a chance to discuss some aspects of folklore in Ancient Greece. A comparative and contextual folkloric approach to the text in question, in fact, reveals that the passage constitutes what is possibly one of the earliest variants of the well-known narrative and experiential theme of a snake or other similar little animals entering the human body (e.g. motif B784 / tale-type AaTh/ATU 285B*). This was already perfectly understood by Renaissance commentators, students and interpreters of Hippocrates. This seminar aims to throw light on this ancient textual source through a combination of folklore and philological analysis, also in the light of modern and contemporary interpretations.”

Davide Ermacora is joint PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Turin and the Université Lumière Lyon 2. His research topic is the “ideological” and historiographical relashionship between shamanism as an abstract category of reli­gious ethnol­ogy and European folklore studies.

Everybody is welcome!