#NEWBOOKS Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice. Cambridge
Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice. Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing
J. M. F. Heath, University of Durham. Cambridge University Press 2020
Online ISBN:9781108918640
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918640
Clement
of Alexandria's Stromateis were celebrated in antiquity but modern readers have
often skirted them as a messy jumble of notes. When scholarship on Greco-Roman
miscellanies took off in the 1990s, Clement was left out as 'different' because
he was Christian. This book interrogates the notion of Clement's 'Christian
difference' by comparing his work with classic Roman miscellanies, especially
those by Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius, and Athenaeus. The comparison opens up
fuller insight into the literary and theological character of Clement's own
oeuvre. Clement's Stromateis are contextualised within his larger literary
project in Christian formation, which began with the Protrepticus and the
Paedagogus and was completed by the Hypotyposeis. Together, this stepped
sequence of works structured readers' reorientation, purification, and
deepening prayerful 'converse' with God. Clement shaped his miscellanies as an
instrument for encounterin ty of divine work refracted through the variegated beauty of
his own textuality.
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