Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England by Ian M. Green (review)

162 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE the imperial period" (83). The codex, then, becomes standard in the Church in the late second to early third centuries, a century before society at large. This coincides, Bagnall suggests, with the Church becoming "visible as an institutional presence in Egypt;' which "highlights the distinctiveness" of Christian practice (88-89). If we agree with Bagnall and others that Rome was the locus originis of the codex, it suggests, at least to me, that the Church in Rome must have played no small part in its dissemination-St. Peter, so to speak, passing the codex to St. Mark, the traditional founder of the Church of Alexandria. Dare one say that a book by a papyrologist can be a page-turner? I'll answer in the affirmative because of Bagnall's holistic approach and the suggestions, conjectures, and conclusions that he offers as a result of his methodology. I admit that I was tempted to click fast-forward in chapter 2 on the case studies and the numerological excurses occasionally lost me. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from this volume-particulars, yes, but even more importantly, a reaffirmation of the way one does scholarship, especially scholarship about antiquity, where so much is at best tentative. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested not only in papyrology, but also in early Christianity, the Greco- Roman period, Late Antiquity, and history in general. Oh yes-and books. Tim Vivian California State University, Bakersfield Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England. By Ian M. Green. London: Dr Williams's Trust, 2009. ISBN 978-0-85217-072-4. Pp. 50. £5. Many years ago, in an obscure seminar room a few doors away from the famous Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, three scholars were found having an extraordinarily spirited conversation. All three of them were different ages and different frames of reference. Two were Anglo-Saxon specialists, and one was an emerging voice in Middle English studies. The topic of the day was the paradigm-breaking insight that Suzanne Fleischman articulated-in her seminal article, "Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text;' (Speculum, 65 [1990] 19-37)-when she bluntly reminded her readers that: "In the Beginning was the Voice." It was certainly obvious to all three of those scholars that all human communication starts orally. The medieval texts at the Parker that all three were examining were the second stage of a widely recognized process. They all had been orally composed, then transcribed into the written page during a manuscript-based era and-only very, very much later-edited and published into the frozen reality that we often see in today's research libraries. BOOK REVIEWS 163 One of the three participants (who had married into a theater family) even noted that a great deal of the Parker manuscripts the three would be examining werewhat his colleagues in theater might have called "post-production scripts:' It wassheer serendipity that this tract, Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England, reminded me of that singular meeting. Ian M. Green, the author of this small tract, might have felt comfortable within that legendary conversation. His scholarly interests flow in a parallel yet equally arcane scholarly path. In this 2006 lecture, and the 2009 tract that is its post-production script, he examines a huge but largely ignored collection of orally composed texts that continue to live in both manuscript and edited published formats. Those are the early modern Protestant sermons: compositions primarily meant for oral delivery but which currently exist in the chronology of our contemporaneous moment as manuscript and published texts. Professor Emeritus Green now serves as a Research Fellow in the School of History and Classics at the University of Edinburgh. In this work, he takes a rambling trip through the almost overpowering morass of written fossils of some 200 years of Protestant preaching. He is able to find pathways that help him organize and conceptualize several thousand written examples found primarilybut not exclusively-in the archives of London's Dr Williams's Library. Early in this lecture, he mentions the reason why this survey became so topical for him...