Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea | 
 enlarge | Authors: Anthony Grafton, Megan Williams
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 385916
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
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Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0674030486
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780674030480
ASIN: 0674030486
Publication Date: September 15, 2008
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Product Description
p When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. /pp iChristianity and the Transformation of the Book/i combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. iChristianity and the Transformation of the Book/i attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today. /p (20070323)
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". . . we are still the heirs of Origen and Eusebius" October 2, 2007
Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA)
There is much to like about this book. While a few assertions and historical models are certainly debatable, Grafton and Williams have authored a fascinating account of the origin of rigorous western scholarship. Among the giants of philological erudition as well as text collection, preservation, translation and analysis, Origen was the titan of the titans. He was "a man of encyclopedic learning, and one of the most original thinkers the world has ever seen." His contemporaneous and subsequent opponents have had to admit to his intellectual gifts, including his emphasis on documentary evidence. His Hexapala "was one of the greatest single moments of Roman scholarship," and he has cast a very long shadow in which we stand today. Of course, he didn't live and work in an intellectual vacuum, as the authors demonstrate at some length. The following excerpts will lend some small sense of their book: br / br /". . . the scholars of Christian Caesarea lived in a time of seismic cultural change, a time when one regime of book production and storage supplanted another . . . they were themselves impresarios of the scriptorium and the library, and developed new forms of scholarship that depended on their abilities to collect and produce new kinds of books . . . they struggled to devise texts that could impose order on highly varied forms of information. . . br /". . . Christian scholars used written materials--both those they inherited from others, and those they created themselves--in ways that drew upon classical precedents, but they also developed these in new directions. They made their technical mastery of the production of complex books the basis of new kinds of intellectual authority, which in turn shaped new modes of scholarly inquiry. . . We in the modern university owe a great debt to this particular strand of the Christian intellectual tradition." br / br /Among those given to selective oversimplification, skewed piety or ideological combat, Eusebius has had his detractors and Origen his outright assailants. In its very dispassion, a text like this one from Grafton and Williams is an important perspective and corrective. This volume certainly belongs in the library of any bibliophile and/or historian of scholarship itself.
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