The (CUA Studies in Early Christianity) early Christian book

Introduction: From Binding to Burning

Philip Rousseau I ntroduction  From Binding to Burning Books in a bookcase present a façade. Binding, typeface, and layout carry a message of their own, inspiring reverence or pleasing the eye, presenting themselves as examples of this category or that. Yet books are also penetrable. To take one down, to open it and read, is to enter another world, to journey elsewhere, to explore an unknown territory (the point is Catherine Chin’s). The second experience is modified, however, by the first. The physical book, with its edges, surfaces, and bindings, can circumscribe or define. We have to ask whether a book extends an invitation or puts up a defense, provides or protects , informs or dazzles, creates a window or a wall. Books can alter or misrepresent the territory they purport to describe. They will, at the very least, interpose a lens, creating images the writer deems acceptable. So the most welcoming of texts will still set boundaries to our imagination and understanding. The tension between seeing and absorbing is, in the case of the early Christian book, difficult for us to recapture. Our published editions, and even the later manuscripts upon which we rely, divorce in a misleading way the content of texts from the sensation of perusing them. In a society where literacy was thinly spread, books could awaken awe or impose power, even when unopened. That was most evident, perhaps, in the case of the scriptures, texts that others were entitled to hold, recite from, and interpret. The same might be said of the law and of administrative decrees. The scriptures, however, were almost never a book. We need to bear in mind both the purpose and the ef-  fect of either combining or separating the various authors of the sacred texts. Other works, similarly, were rarely divided into the chapters that later scribes and editors have made familiar. Even the literate lacked the controlling influence of heading, spacing, and punctuation. All those features of the reading experience separate us from the early Christian world. It demands imagination to understand what it was then to see, to hear, and to look. The written word was not automatically either inviting or accessible. Consequently, its function and impact were different from the function and image of “the book” in our own day. John Lowden’s chapter, “The Word Made Visible,” invites us to start with the façade and only slowly work our way inward. He provides the visible evidence of books in themselves. The treasures of Kaper Koraon and the Sion collection are striking enough, but we have to remember the wider deployment of codices bound in leather, skillfully protected with flaps, clasps, and bands, and carefully tooled or incised with geometric designs. Chrysi Kotsifou’s meticulous examination of monastic book culture in Egypt illustrates the same point. She presents us with the noise and bustle, as it were, that could accompany an intellectual, even spiritual, endeavor. Here, in a wealth of humble exemplars , we see lucky survivals from a more general industry: the “portable codices ” described with such wealth of evidence by Claudia Rapp. Other chapters conjure for us the same image of small, uncomplicated, unobtrusive volumes widely available to literate society. Yet Lowden’s point is that books were often far from unobtrusive. Even the simple crosses placed on the covers of smaller religious texts offered a message additional to, perhaps even more forceful than, that imparted by the texts themselves. The book as such made a statement; codicological iconography had a grammar all its own. The grandeur of gold, silver, and bejeweled covers was rare and expensive, certainly, and its detail powered a reflective interpretation more complex than that of a little psalter in the shoulder bag of a monk; but the artisan in each case was rising to the same challenge, putting a personal mark on what was often someone else’s composition. Kotsifou describes similarly the potential independence of décor. She also reminds us that literacy and literary interests were not the purlieu of wealth alone. We deduce all this not only from surviving codices but also from pictures of books (often in books). What strikes Lowden here is the way in which so    p h i l i p r o u s s e au many of the volumes were clearly there to be looked at, placed within a visual field that was itself deliberately contrived. The...