Reading, writing and bookish circles in the ancient Mediterranean / Jonathan D.H. Norton, Garrick V. Allen, Lindsey A. Askin.

"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 the ideological marks of ecclesiastical 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 traditionally divided fields"-- Provided by publisher.