Reading, Writing, and Bookish Circles in the Ancient Mediterranean

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Description

By integrating conversations across disciplines, especially focusing on classical studies and Jewish and Christian studies, this volume addresses several imbalances in scholarship on reading and textual activity in the ancient Mediterranean. Contributors intentionally place Jewish, Christian, Roman, Greek and other reading circles back into their encompassing historical context, avoiding subdivisions along modern subject lines, divisions still bearing marks of cultural and ideological interests. In their examination, contributors avoid dwelling upon traditional methodological debates over orality vs. literacy and social classifications of literacy, instead turning their attention to the social-historical: groups of people, circles and networks, strata and class, scribal culture, material culture, epigraphic and papyrological evidence, functions and types of literacy and the social relationships that all of these entail. Overall, the volume contributes to an emerging and important interdisciplinary collaboration between specialists in ancient literacy, encouraging future discussion between two currently divided fields.

Reviews

This volume is an essential resource for those curious about ancient readers and the complex process of composing and writing texts in antiquity. The contributors write thoughtfully about the social, political and cultural factors that went into the development and reception of ancient literary traditions. * Brian Rainey, Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA *

Author Bio

Jonathan D.H. Norton is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Director of the Heythrop Centre for Textual Studies, Heythrop College, University of London, UK. Garrick V. Allen is Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies at the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. Lindsey A. Askin is Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.