At the start of this volume, the narrative voice announces that it is “a book about defining and shaping the world through reading, a book about fragmented pasts” (1). The oscillation between abstraction and concreteness atomized in that early announcement is emblematic of Blossom Stefaniw’s main object of study—the work of the grammarian as fundamental for the setting, transmission, and reproduction of textualized and embodied world-making in the late ancient world. At the center of this cultural sequencing is Didymus the Blind, a fourth-century Alexandrian Christian author whose traditional characterizations in the scholarly record emphasize a set of rarefied identities such as “exegete,” “theologian,” “allegorist,” or “Origenist.” Christian Reading aims not to deny these identities but to challenge and sideline them for the sake of examining the impact and depth of “teaching in the Bible” as an enterprise that postulated normalcy, shaped subjectivities, and shared worlds. Stefaniw sets on this...

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