The Early Christian Book (review)

This volume collects twelve papers delivered at a conference held in June 2002 at The Catholic University of America. The revised papers, divided into six pairs dealing with topics ranging from the physical form of books to literary theory, are preceded by a helpful introduction by Philip Rousseau. The papers deal with a still underdeveloped area of inquiry: the physical form and cultural implications of the book as created, used, and imagined by early Christians, from the third to the seventh centuries of our era. The topic is both timely and genuinely important. Over the last few decades, scholars in a variety of fields have produced a substantial literature on the history of reading and the book. Relatively little work has been done, however, on books and reading in early Christianity—for all that the new faith was, as the preface to this volume notes, "quintessentially a religion of books" (p. ix).

The Early Christian Book comprises papers written from a dazzling array of perspectives, by scholars with varying disciplinary affiliations and at all stages of their careers, including several who were still completing the doctoral degree at the time of writing. Unsurprisingly—as in the case of so many collections of conference papers—the quality of the contributions varies. The end result, therefore, is more suggestive than definitive: the book's influence will follow more from the questions it raises than from the answers it gives.

Some of the less successful contributions share common weaknesses. Constant reference to a limited canon of secondary works produced within the field of early Christian studies sometimes gives the volume a hermetic quality. Correspondingly, the rich body of relevant literature produced by historians and critics working on other periods is at times neglected (but see the article by Mark Vessey, p. 250, n.25, for a summary of key references). Reliance on a narrow evidence base also makes some of the same papers less convincing. Finally, the balance between papers dealing with the book as material object and those addressing primarily literary issues perhaps falls too heavily toward the latter.

Many of the articles, however, make substantial contributions—too many even to list here. Particularly impressive are John Lowden on the early Christian codex, specifically on book covers and their liturgical function; Claudia Rapp on books as holy objects, placing "Holy Scripture," and potentially also hagiography, alongside the "Holy Man" at the center of late-antique Christianity;and Mark Vessey's rather oracular concluding essay "Theory, or the Dream of the Book (Mallarmé to Blanchot)." This last is a new departure, in that it reads formative moments in modern literary history and in the history of modern literary theory through the lens of patristic texts, rather than the other way around.

Both the volume's editors and the individual contributors are to be commended for taking on a vast, fascinating, and relatively unexplored area of research and for pioneering a range of different approaches to what will surely become a major focus of investigation for scholars of early Christianity. Although the individual articles are of somewhat uneven quality, the volume as a whole—unlike so many in its genre—is a resounding success.