Manuscripts, Memory and History

Download Manuscripts, Memory and History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789382993605
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Manuscripts, Memory and History by : Rajesh, V

Download or read book Manuscripts, Memory and History written by Rajesh, V and published by . This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earliest stratum of Tamil literature - Ettuthogai, Pathuppattu and grammar Tolkappiyam is dated to the early centuries of the Common Era. Widely commented upon during the medieval period the classical corpus was known among the commentators as Canror Ceyyul (poetry of the noble ones). This book traces the history of classics during the modern period when print technology started to proliferate in Tamil society during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Tracing the manuscript copies of classical Tamil literature during the pre-colonial period the book investigates the social history of print-publication of this literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The publication of classical Tamil literature created conditions for the reappraisal of Tamil literary history, a task taken up by the indigenous Tamil scholars. The process involved contesting the histories of and commentaries on Tamil literature by missionary-orientalists and colonial administrators. The book reconstructs the debate on Tamil literature among indigenous Tamil intellectuals, missionary-orientalists and colonial administrators. Classics also provided 'resources' for modern nationalism and the book locates the place of classical corpus in the organized politics of colonial Madras.

Memory and Manuscript

Download Memory and Manuscript PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780802843661
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (436 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Memory and Manuscript by : Birger Gerhardsson

Download or read book Memory and Manuscript written by Birger Gerhardsson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here in one volume are two of Birger Gerhardsson's much-debated works on the transmission of tradition in Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. In Memory and Manuscript (1961), Gerhardsson explores the way in which Jewish rabbis during the first Christian centuries preserved and passed on their sacred tradition, and he shows how early Christianity is better understood in light of how that tradition developed in Rabbinic Judaism. In Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (1964), Gerhardsson further clarifies the discussion and answers criticism of his earlier book. This Biblical Resource Series combined edition corrects and expands Gerhardsson's original works and includes a new preface by the author and a lengthy new foreword by Jacob Neusner that summarizes the works' importance and subsequent influence.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Download Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192843818
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts by : Elaine Treharne

Download or read book Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts written by Elaine Treharne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

The Book of Memory

Download The Book of Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107652251
Total Pages : 875 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (76 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Book of Memory by : Mary Carruthers

Download or read book The Book of Memory written by Mary Carruthers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 875 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

Memory's Library

Download Memory's Library PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226781720
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Memory's Library by : Jennifer Summit

Download or read book Memory's Library written by Jennifer Summit and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts

Download The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004193588
Total Pages : 598 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (41 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts by : Maarten Jansen

Download or read book The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts written by Maarten Jansen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook surveys and describes the illustrated Mixtec manuscripts that survive in Europe, the United States and Mexico.

The Book of Memory

Download The Book of Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374714886
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Book of Memory by : Petina Gappah

Download or read book The Book of Memory written by Petina Gappah and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

History and Memory in the Carolingian World

Download History and Memory in the Carolingian World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521534369
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (343 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis History and Memory in the Carolingian World by : Rosamond McKitterick

Download or read book History and Memory in the Carolingian World written by Rosamond McKitterick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-29 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2004 book looks at the writing and reading of history during the early middle ages.

Toward a Global Middle Ages

Download Toward a Global Middle Ages PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 160606598X
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (6 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Toward a Global Middle Ages by : Bryan C. Keene

Download or read book Toward a Global Middle Ages written by Bryan C. Keene and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Mesoamerican Memory

Download Mesoamerican Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 080618809X
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (61 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Mesoamerican Memory by : Stephanie Wood

Download or read book Mesoamerican Memory written by Stephanie Wood and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities’ histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors’ stories. In Mesoamerican Memory, volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from contributors around the world to compare these various memories and explore how they were preserved and altered over time. Rather than dividing Mesoamerica’s past into pre-contact, colonial, and modern periods, the essays in this volume emphasize continuity from the pre-conquest era to the present, underscoring the ongoing importance of indigenous texts in creating and preserving community identity, history, and memory. In addition to Nahua and Maya recollections, contributors examine the indigenous traditions of Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Totonac peoples. Close analysis of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts, and of social and religious rituals, yields insight into community history and memory, political relations, genealogy, ethnic identity, and portrayals of the Spanish invaders. Drawing on archaeology, art history, ethnology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, the essays consider the function of manuscripts and ritual in local, regional, and, now, national settings. Several scholars highlight direct connections between the collective memory of indigenous communities and the struggles of contemporary groups. Such modern documents as land titles, for example, gain legitimacy by referring to ancestral memory. Crossing disciplinary, methodological, and temporal boundaries, Mesoamerican Memory advances our understanding of collective memory in Mexico and Guatemala. Through diverse sources—pictorial and alphabetic, archaeological, archival, and ethnographic—readers gain a glimpse into indigenous remembrances that, without the research exhibited here, might have remained unknown to the outside world.

Manuscript, Print and Memory

Download Manuscript, Print and Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110352761
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Manuscript, Print and Memory by : Eva Maria Wilden

Download or read book Manuscript, Print and Memory written by Eva Maria Wilden and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Tamil poetic corpus of the Caṅam ("The Academy") is a national treasure for Tamilians and a battle-ground for linguists and historians of politics, culture and literature. Going back to oral predecessors probably dating back to the beginning of the first millennium, it has had an extremely rich and variegated history. Collected into anthologies and endowed with literary theories and voluminous commentaries, it became the centre-piece of the Tamil literary canon, associated with the royal court of the Pandya dynasty in Madurai. Its decline began in the late middle ages, and by the late 17th century it had fallen into near oblivion, before being rediscovered at the beginning of the print era. The present study traces the complex historical process of its transmission over some 2000 years, using and documenting a wide range of sources, in particular surviving manuscripts, the early prints, the commentaries of the literary and grammatical traditions and a vast range of later literature that creates a web of inter-textual references and quotations.

The Missing Pages

Download The Missing Pages PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 150360764X
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Missing Pages by : Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Download or read book The Missing Pages written by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts

Burning the Books

Download Burning the Books PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 0674241207
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Burning the Books by : Richard Ovenden

Download or read book Burning the Books written by Richard Ovenden and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wolfson History Prize Finalist A New Statesman Book of the Year A Sunday Times Book of the Year “Timely and authoritative...I enjoyed it immensely.” —Philip Pullman “If you care about books, and if you believe we must all stand up to the destruction of knowledge and cultural heritage, this is a brilliant read—both powerful and prescient.” —Elif Shafak Libraries have been attacked since ancient times but they have been especially threatened in the modern era, through war as well as willful neglect. Burning the Books describes the deliberate destruction of the knowledge safeguarded in libraries from Alexandria to Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets to the torching of the Library of Congress. The director of the world-famous Bodleian Libraries, Richard Ovenden, captures the political, religious, and cultural motivations behind these acts. He also shines a light on the librarians and archivists preserving history and memory, often risking their lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries support the rule of law and inspire and inform citizens. Ovenden reminds us of their social and political importance, challenging us to protect and support these essential institutions. “Wonderful...full of good stories and burning with passion.” —Sunday Times “The sound of a warning vibrates through this book.” —The Guardian “Essential reading for anyone concerned with libraries and what Ovenden outlines as their role in ‘the support of democracy, the rule of law and open society.’” —Wall Street Journal “Ovenden emphasizes that attacks on books, archives, and recorded information are the usual practice of authoritarian regimes.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post

The Medieval Craft of Memory

Download The Medieval Craft of Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812218817
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (188 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Medieval Craft of Memory by : Mary Carruthers

Download or read book The Medieval Craft of Memory written by Mary Carruthers and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume that will interest a wide spectrum of readers."—Patrick Geary, University of California, Los Angeles

Memory Practices in the Sciences

Download Memory Practices in the Sciences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262524899
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Memory Practices in the Sciences by : Geoffrey C. Bowker

Download or read book Memory Practices in the Sciences written by Geoffrey C. Bowker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-02-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past. The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

Memory, History, Forgetting

Download Memory, History, Forgetting PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226713466
Total Pages : 662 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Memory, History, Forgetting by : Paul Ricoeur

Download or read book Memory, History, Forgetting written by Paul Ricoeur and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Early Christian Books in Egypt

Download Early Christian Books in Egypt PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400833787
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Early Christian Books in Egypt by : Roger S. Bagnall

Download or read book Early Christian Books in Egypt written by Roger S. Bagnall and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past hundred years, much has been written about the early editions of Christian texts discovered in the region that was once Roman Egypt. Scholars have cited these papyrus manuscripts--containing the Bible and other Christian works--as evidence of Christianity's presence in that historic area during the first three centuries AD. In Early Christian Books in Egypt, distinguished papyrologist Roger Bagnall shows that a great deal of this discussion and scholarship has been misdirected, biased, and at odds with the realities of the ancient world. Providing a detailed picture of the social, economic, and intellectual climate in which these manuscripts were written and circulated, he reveals that the number of Christian books from this period is likely fewer than previously believed. Bagnall explains why papyrus manuscripts have routinely been dated too early, how the role of Christians in the history of the codex has been misrepresented, and how the place of books in ancient society has been misunderstood. The author offers a realistic reappraisal of the number of Christians in Egypt during early Christianity, and provides a thorough picture of the economics of book production during the period in order to determine the number of Christian papyri likely to have existed. Supporting a more conservative approach to dating surviving papyri, Bagnall examines the dramatic consequences of these findings for the historical understanding of the Christian church in Egypt.