Reading, Writing, and Bookish Circles in the Ancient Mediterranean

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. Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1. Reading, Writing, and Bookish Circles in the Ancient Mediterranean: An IntroductionJonathan D. H. Norton 2. The Social Stratification of Scribes and Readers in Greco-Roman JudaismLindsey A. Askin 3. Aspects of Scripturality in the Community Rule: A Key to the History of Qumran LiteratureAnnette Steudel 4. The Making of the Theme of Immortality in the Wisdom of SolomonEkaterina Matusova 5. Bookish Circles? The Move Toward the Use of Written Texts in Rabbinic Oral CultureCatherine Hezser 6. Sympotic Learning: Symposia Literature and Cultural EducationSean A. Adams 7. Teaching and Learning in Philosophical Schools of the Second Century ad: Arrian’s Epictetus and Aulus Gellius’s Calvenus TaurusMichael Trapp 8. The Lone Genius and the Docile Literati: How Bookish Were Paul’s Churches?Jonathan D. H. Norton 9. Reading the New Testament in the Context of Other Texts: A Relevance Theory PerspectiveSteve Smith 10. Divine Dissimulation and the Apostolic Visions of ActsJohn Moxon 11. Scriptural Literacy within the Corinthian Church: From the Corinthian Correspondence to 1 ClementH. H. Drake Williams, III 12. Libraries, Special Libraries, and John of PatmosGarrick V. Allen Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors