James Cross – författare

On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On Breaths, On the Nature of Human Beings and On the Sacred Disease are among the most well-known and sophisticated works of the Hippocratic Collection. The authors of these treatises were seeking to find means to express their arguments that built on authoritative models of their predecessors. By examining the range of expressive resources used in their expository prose, James Cross demonstrates how oral tradition and written techniques, such as sound patterning, sign-posting and antithetical formulae, were deployed to help the writers develop a case. The book demonstrates that there were various layers of meaning and manners of communicating ideas which can be found in Hippocratic expository prose, and offers fresh insights into the oral debating culture and experiments in persuasion which characterise the ancient Greek world of the late fifth-century BCE.

In the course of this book Professor Cross presents the discovery of the actual manuscript source for the Old English versions of two biblical apocrypha, The Gospel of Nichodemus and The Avenging of the Saviour. In collaboration with four other scholars, Professor Cross explores the implications of this discovery. Here, parallel editions of the relevant Latin and Old English texts are given, together with modern English translations, and detailed discussion outlines the background to the Latin texts, and to the manuscript which contains them. The assembled material provides an insight not simply into the transmission of two apocryphal texts, but also into the mind of the single Anglo-Saxon translator who, it is argued, struggled in his own idiosyncratic fashion to make two badly spelt and incomplete Latin originals his own.

There are two prose dialogues in Old English, consisting together of some 109 questions and answers. These questions are related to the medieval Latin Joca Monachorum and Adrian and Epictus dialogues and deal with various and quite diverse topics. Some questions concern scripture and Christian tradition –  'How tall was Adam,' 'where did he get his name,' and 'what are the eight parts of which he was made.' Some questions are scientific or quasi-scientific – 'Where does the sun go at night,' 'what is the number of birds.' Others concern riddles or proverbial lore. Together they are the early medieval equivalent of the Guinness Book of Records, a gathering of odd facts and curious information designed to amuse and entertain. This edition from the British Library manuscripts provides translations of these dialogues, and, more important, traces the sources of these sometimes rather curious ideas. The book will be useful to specialists and students concerned with Old English and medieval literature in general. The texts themselves are of some importance and the illustrative material gathered here is relevant to a wide range of problems. Yet the book is also intended, as were the originals, to amuse and instruct a wider audience, a new age of curious readers.