Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
Early Christian Impresarios
By Eamon Duffy
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea
by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 367 pp., $29.95
The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
by Megan Hale Williams
University of Chicago Press, 315 pp., $45.00
These two books are built on a sin-gle perception. Early Christianity was more than a new religion: it brought with it a revolutionary shift in the information technology of the ancient world. That shift was to have implications for the cultural history of the world over the next two millennia at least as momentous as the invention of the Internet seems likely to have for the future. Like Judaism before it and Islam after it, Christianity is often described as 'a religion of the Book.' The phrase asserts both an abstraction—the centrality of authoritative sacred texts and their interpretation within the three Abrahamic religions—and also a simple concrete fact—the importance of a material object, the book, in the history and practice of all three traditions.
Review, 4185 words
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