On "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book" by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams ***

Neither Andrew Carriker's amazing undertaking about Eusebius's library nor this book quite get at what I hoped to learn about early archives of the Christian church, a work I suspect isn't even really possible, but both works have proven very useful. While Carriker's is more technical in nature and likely to appeal to few outside of scholars, Grafton and Williams have managed to tell a story that is a bit more broadly interesting. As the title denotes, this is really a history of early book making. As with Carriker's book, the library at Caesarea plays a large role.

Grafton and Williams look specifically at two works, one by Origen and one by Eusebius. But they also delve a bit into the history of the Caesarean library, of Caesarea, and of the book more generally. The library at Caesarea seems to have been in many ways the product of Origen, who brought many of his books with him and then wrote extensively. His work, in turn, was preserved by Pamphilus, who then passed that material on to Eusebius. Each of these men were the beneficiaries of patrons who supported them, since such work and undertakings were not things a common man could afford. Eusebius had the advantage, later in life, of having not just a private patron but a public one, since the Emperor Constantine's adoption of the Christian faith meant that he had an interest in seeing the library profit.

Such libraries weren't just archives, however. They were book-making institutes, with a whole staff of scribes, some with specialist knowledge of languages. Both Origen and Eusebius moved away from scrolls toward codexes, the basis of our modern book. The codex allowed them to do things that previously would have been difficult to accomplish. With his Hexepla, Origen set out to create a Bible with six different versions set side by side for easy comparison, including Hebrew and various Greek translations. This was a new type of work. That work, in turn, became, at least in format, a model for Eusebius, who would set out to present a timeline of world history in his Chronology, by setting out events from different peoples in columns. Such work would have been near impossible on a scroll, but a codex was more suited to such a task. In turn, of course, these works became the basis for how many of our works even to our day do similar things in terms of presenting information in tables or columns. In other words, they revolutionized book making for millennia to come.