In this article, the authors propose that late antique medicine is a rich and versatile subject to teach in undergraduate courses, despite a seeming lack of sources and teaching resources. Following an introduction, authors Crislip, Langford, Llewellyn Ihssen, and Marx offer contributions describing their experiences teaching courses that offer some coverage of medicine in Late Antiquity. The contributions show that late antique medicine fits in easily as part of courses on magic and science, and that it lends itself to comparative or world-historical approaches. Late antique medicine likewise provides opportunities to explore the relationship of religion to science and of medicine to the humanities. The authors show that a range of approaches to late antique medicine, including disability studies and medical anthropology, can inspire productive and thoughtful responses from students, and serve as a helpful introduction to the medical humanities for aspiring healthcare professionals.

The 20 th century saw intense change in theories of knowledge. How can we integrate such developments with our approach to knowledge (as represented in texts) in Late Antiquity? What happens if we apply the notion of knowledge as a product of specific acts and institutions with specific purposes and functions to late ancient texts which concern themselves with the production, collection or display of different grades of knowledge? How would such an approach change the way we frame research on theological, philosophical, and pedagogical texts? In this essay I argue that we should abandon debates about whether to categorize specific texts as esoteric, theological/Christian or philosophical/pagan, and turn our attention to culturally and historically particular features of the terrain of the late ancient episteme. I describe six features of knowledge production through textual practices and articulate the imagined epistemic world in which reading practices took place and which defined the conditions of the value or legitimacy of those practices. This essay is offered as a framework for the interpretation of texts concerned with the production of knowledge, whether on the quotidian level of grammatical education or in its more rarefied forms. This framework allows texts to be read together according to function rather than formal genre or the the religious identity of their authors, so that new conversations around late ancient knowledge production can emerge and models of influence or borrowing can be left behind. The six features I have identified are patrimony, curatorship, mimesis , oikonomia , cosmos, and the product of all of these, the object-subject.