Book Review: Books and Readers in the Premodern World (original) (raw)
Professor Harry Gamble's 1995 work, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts, was one of such breadth and impact that it continues to be required reading for all students of ancient material culture. Using the materiality of the book in the first centuries of the Christian church, Gamble looked backward to the cultures from which literary material began and forward to how the book as an artifact could inform readers of the environment that allowed it to flourish. It is precisely for this reason that the present volume, Books and Readers in the Premodern World, was compiled. Seven chapters are assembled, each seeking in its own way to apply Gamble's methodology to a new era of book culture. The difficulty faced with this endeavor is that Gamble did not select early Christianity at random but precisely because it stood on the precipice of a new mode of information transmission that came to shape all levels of society afterward. When approaching texts or the sociohistorical environment surrounding their use, those of the premodern era (presumably seventh to fourteenth century here) have already been informed by centuries of prior book use. Therefore, this work becomes less innovative or even informative in the sense of advancing knowledge and discussion but more informative for information's sake. Despite this drawback, several contributions to this volume are intriguing, though others leave the reader questioning their ultimate purpose. In this latter category, one finds the essay of Jonathan M. Bloom, titled 'The Transformative Role of Paper in the Literary Culture of the Islamic Lands." Bloom fails to provide a thesis for his chapter, choosing rather to meander about how he came to
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