Christianity and the Transformation of the Book

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, Emeritus, he writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Megan Williams is Assistant Professor of History, San Francisco State University.

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book is a highly enjoyable and successful collaboration between a distinguished senior scholar and a very bright young historian. Drawing on a wealth of recent writing on the cultural setting of early Christianity (much of it inspired by the seminal work of Peter Brown), Grafton and Williams bring their own distinctive insistence on the centrality of innovations in book production and book distribution to the formation of momentous new patterns of thought… The book succeeds in placing Origen and Eusebius firmly and illuminatingly against a world in which Christianity had not yet triumphed, and they convey vividly the intellectual daring involved in these pioneering attempts to articulate and define Christianity alongside and against the Jewish and the classical worldviews. In the process they provide a reminder—salutary and timely, from a European perspective, in an increasingly aggressive secularist climate—of how much Jewish and Christian thought patterns have contributed to shaping some of the most fundamental assumptions and directions of Western culture.

• Preface Cast of Characters Introduction: Scholars, Books, and Libraries in the Christian Tradition 1. Origen at Caesarea: A Christian Philosopher among his Books 2. Origen's Hexapla: Scholarship, Culture, and Power 3. Eusebius's Chronicle: History Made Visible 4. Eusebius at Caesarea: A Christian Impresario of the Codex Coda: Caesarea in History and Tradition Abbreviations Bibliography Notes Acknowledgments Index