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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific story of innovation in early Christian texts, December 19, 2008
Did you know that early Church Father Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, invented the hyperlink? Neither did I, until I read Grafton and Williams's wonderful book. (Well, it wasn't really the hyperlink, but it was the first simple means of navigating point-to-point within a text.)
Clearly and beautifully written, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book is an expansive literary tour of all of the Hellenized cultures of the eastern Mediterranean in the third and fourth centuries CE. But mostly it is about the innovative work of Eusebius and Origen, who invented new methods of presenting textual information and in so doing revolutionized book production.
Grafton and Williams zoom in on Origen's Hexapla, which compared six Hebrew and Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible in parallel columns, and on Eusebius's Chronicle, the first history of the known world organized as what today we would call a time line. But they also zoom out to look at the larger world of libraries, literary patronage, and scribal cultures among early Christians, pagan philosophers, and Hellenized Jews.
I am no scholar of this field and so not qualified to pass judgment on some of their academic arguments, but for a civilian with an interest in the evolution of information in culture, this is one very good read.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
". . . we are still the heirs of Origen and Eusebius", October 1, 2007
This review is from: Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Hardcover)
There is much to like about this book. While a few assertions and historical models are certainly debatable, Grafton and Williams have authored a fascinating account of the origin of rigorous western scholarship. Among the giants of philological erudition as well as text collection, preservation, translation and analysis, Origen was the titan of the titans. He was "a man of encyclopedic learning, and one of the most original thinkers the world has ever seen." His contemporaneous and subsequent opponents have had to admit to his intellectual gifts, including his emphasis on documentary evidence. His Hexapala "was one of the greatest single moments of Roman scholarship," and he has cast a very long shadow in which we stand today. Of course, he didn't live and work in an intellectual vacuum, as the authors demonstrate at some length. The following excerpts will lend some small sense of their book:
". . . the scholars of Christian Caesarea lived in a time of seismic cultural change, a time when one regime of book production and storage supplanted another . . . they were themselves impresarios of the scriptorium and the library, and developed new forms of scholarship that depended on their abilities to collect and produce new kinds of books . . . they struggled to devise texts that could impose order on highly varied forms of information. . .
". . . Christian scholars used written materials--both those they inherited from others, and those they created themselves--in ways that drew upon classical precedents, but they also developed these in new directions. They made their technical mastery of the production of complex books the basis of new kinds of intellectual authority, which in turn shaped new modes of scholarly inquiry. . . We in the modern university owe a great debt to this particular strand of the Christian intellectual tradition."
Among those given to selective oversimplification, skewed piety or ideological combat, Eusebius has had his detractors and Origen his outright assailants. In its very dispassion, a text like this one from Grafton and Williams is an important perspective and corrective. This volume certainly belongs in the library of any bibliophile and/or historian of scholarship itself.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An Obscure Academic Gem, January 12, 2012
I needed a book suitable for the subject my 15 page paper- I was looking for something well written, well researched, on a topic I found interesting, meaningfully interacts in some way with previous research and other fields, and makes some kind of debatable claim. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book fit the bill. At first, I was slightly daunted by the heft- Transformation clocks in at a cool 348 pages. However, the bibliography is extraordinarily lengthy, and in many sections of the work there are delightful illustrations, so the "real" count is somewhere in the mid 200s, which isn't bad at all. Often, books written by two authors that take 'halves' of a book are disjointed, and Transformation's coherence could have easily been hampered by focusing the first half on Origen and the second on Eusebius, two church fathers who were responsible for completing massive compilations of scripture. Although Williams is responsible for Origen, and Grafton Eusebius, Transformation still reads like one book. The way Grafton and Williams integrate images into their argument about emerging methods of research is the strongest part of the book. Page fragments from Origen's Hexapla and Eusebius' Chronicle are especially helpful.
Although I disagree with minor points in Transformation, such as when Grafton was too lenient when ascribing noted inconsistencies to secretarial error (214), but these points are not central to their main claim. Quote to Remember: Eusebius' Chronicle, a multi-religion world timeline, is described as a "rich crazy salad." G and W call it how they see it.
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