Mark Vessey: Rethinking the Books of Our Fathers: A Case for Cognitive Bibliology

Patristics as a theological science with philological underpinnings has proved both responsive and impermeable to the periodic retooling of humanistic disciplines that is a feature of Western academic ecosystems. The rise of ‘literary history’ in the nineteenth century led to projects for an altchristliche Literaturgeschichte that lapsed by the Second World War; since then, texts of the Fathers have floated free in disciplinary spaces marked out for ‘literatures’ of ‘late antiquity’. Developments in papyrology and codicology during the the last century created conditions for histories of books, ‘book culture’ and ‘the material book’ that have crossed patristic terrain without so far altering the appearance of the Fathers. In the 1980s and ‘90s, work by Averil Cameron and Peter Brown transformed our understanding of the late ancient ‘culture of paideia’ in ways that have impinged on study of late antique Christian texts, while leaving the traditional apparatus of critical editions and primary reference essentially intact. It is too soon to say whether the current revival of interest in the same texts as documents of the ‘organization of knowledge’ will have a more radical impact. How would it be if one could now (re)engage all these research tendencies at once? What might then happen to the Fathers—that is, in the first instance, to the books in which their profiles have chiefly been transmitted to us? This paper offers an experiment in such thinking, on the basis of the earliest evidence for the transmission of Leo the Great’s Tomus ad Flavianum.