REVIEW of William E. Klingshirn, Linda Safran, The Early Christian Book

The topic of intensified and transformed bookishness in early Christianity, as well as in formative Judaism and Late Antiquity generally, has understandably caught the imagination of scholars who are themselves working in an age of media transformation.1 The volume of studies edited by William Klingshirn and Linda Safran took its beginning from a conference held at the Catholic University of America in 2002. The product, however, is considerably more integrated than most conference collections: there is more evidence than usual that the initial participants shared an understanding of the sweeping theme and that the process of revision and editing brought the separate essays into frequently explicit reference to each other. Most contributors are acknowledged experts in early Christianity, formative Judaism and Late Antiquity; others are more junior scholars writing about what they know best. The contributions are arranged harmlessly, but unnecessarily, into six thematic pairs. A vestige, presumably, of the original conference organization is that the essays vary sharply in length, so that some of the shorter pieces left this reader wanting more.
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