Chapter 1. Prologue: Textual acts and the history of science; Karine Chemla & Jacques Virbel.- Part I. Speech acts and textual acts.- Chapter 2. Speech act theory and instructional texts; Jacques Virbel.- Chapter 3. The issue of textual genres in the medical literature produced in late imperial China; Florence Bretelle-Establet.- Chapter 4. Zoological nomenclature and speech act theory; Yves Cambefort.- Chapter 5. Ordering operations in square root extractions. Analyzing some early medieval Sanskrit mathematical texts with the help of speech act theory; Agathe Keller.- Part II. Enumerations as textual acts.- Chapter 6. The description of enumerations; Jacques Virbel.- Chapter 7. The enumeration structure of 爾雅 Ěryǎ's "Semantic Lists"; Michel Teboul.- Chapter 8. A tree-structured list in a mathematical series text from Mesopotamia; Christine Proust.- Chapter 9. Describing texts for algorithms: how they prescribe operations and integrate cases. Reflections based on ancient Chinese mathematical sources; Karine Chemla.- Chapter 10. A work on the degree of generality revealed in the organization of lists: Poincaré's classification of singular points of differential equations; Anne Robadey.