Reviewed by: Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things by Blossom Stefaniw David Brakke Blossom Stefaniw Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019 Pp. x + 249. $95.00. Didymus the Blind was a grammarian. He may have been several other things as well, such as a Christian theologian and a dedicated ascetic, but at least part time he worked as a grammarian, teaching young people how to read and, in so doing, how to think and behave in their political, social, and cultural environment. It is not that Didymus was like a grammarian, not that he borrowed some reading strategies from grammarians, and not that he was influenced by grammarians. No, he was a grammarian. Such is the deceptively simple and entirely persuasive argument of Blossom Stefaniw's Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things (not that one would gather that from the title, which I think could have included at least the words "Didymus" and "grammar"). I first encountered Stefaniw's thesis in a chapter in an edited volume, and it immediately struck me as true and important. In this monograph she can make her case fully and explore its implications, especially the glimpse that Didymus's works provide of one way in which the late Roman world became more Christian. The works of Didymus in question here are those known (incorrectly, we now know) as "commentaries" on the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, preserved in the papyri discovered near Tura-el-Asmant in 1941. Unlike commentaries—including those of Didymus, such as those on Zechariah and Genesis—these works preserve clearly real, sometimes off-topic questions from actual students, and Didymus's responses evince the occasional hesitations, contradictions, indirections, and moments of impatience ("We have already said that frequently," 85) that characterize the oral instruction of a teacher in the classroom. Previous scholars have categorized these works as "lecture notes" and identified the meetings they record as perhaps gatherings of Christian ("Origenist") ascetics or as sessions of a "catechetical school" that Didymus is alleged to have led. Thanks to about twenty-five pages of translations from the "lessons" that Stefaniw provides, however, the reader can see that these are not the questions of Christian monks, nor is Didymus providing instruction in Christian doctrine to catechumens. Rather, these are the questions of teenage readers who come to twice-daily classes on sequential days, and Didymus is teaching them not the content of the Bible as much as the skill of reading and the accumulated learning of his culture, what Stefaniw calls "the patrimony." (I may be mistaken, but I believe that the word paideia does not appear in the book; it is not in the index. This is an observation, not a criticism, and I am confident that Stefaniw has considered reasons for choosing the vocabulary that she has.) The book has four chapters. The first provides "a narrative history of the Tura papyri" from the transcribing of the teaching event in Didymus's classroom in the 370s, to copying and transport to the monastery at Tura, to their discovery during World War II, to their publication by German scholars, to Stefaniw's own work on them in recent years. Much of this history is necessarily speculative: for [End Page 166] example, Stefaniw suggests that it was the monk Aresenios who carried copies of the lessons from Alexandria to Sketis and then to Tura (10–16, 34–35) and that an abbot's enforcement of the anathemas against Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus prompted the hiding of the papyri (17–22, 36–37). Less imaginative are her accounts of her own engagements with these works. The chapter communicates effectively different modes of "Christian reading" over time. Chapter Two makes the basic argument for reading the Psalms and Ecclesiastes works as transcripts of lessons in a grammarian's classroom. The ancient pedagogical theorists Dionysius Thrax and Quintilian and the modern historians Raffaella Cribiore and Edward Watts provide Stefaniw with the reconstruction of grammatical instruction against which she assesses Didymus's instruction. The third and fourth chapters explore the patrimony into which Didymus initiated his students. The third studies modes of reading...