POSTPONED. Due to unforeseen circumstances we unfortunately have to cancel tomorrow's Institute's Colloquium with Glenn Most. Apologies to those of you hoping to attend. The event will be rescheduled at a later date—please check here for further details or follow us on Facebook or Twitter for updates.

My starting point is a programmatic article of this title that Lorraine Daston and I published a few years ago (Isis 106:2 (2015) 378-90), in which we proposed that the history of science and the history of philologies would both benefit by being brought into closer relation with one another. I will begin by summarizing briefly some of the arguments we sketched there, and then I will go on to give an example of the kind of research this would involve: how the study of the impagination of texts in the ancient Greek classical tradition can benefit from being undertaken with an attention to the kinds of issues of social practices and materiality that have increasingly come to the forefront of research in the history of science, and how such a study of an issue in ancient Greek manuscript culture can cast light on issues in other fields of the history of science.