Copyright

Martin Wallraff

Published On

2023-12-19

Page Range

pp. 191–214

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

A List in Three Dimensions

The Case of Eusebius’s Canon Tables of the Gospels

Chapter of: Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World(pp. 191–214)
Wallraff examines the canon tables of the gospels, composed by Eusebius of Caesarea in the first half of the fourth century CE, as a new form of synopsis: a list in three dimensions which uses both the extension (length and breadth) of a page in a codex, and the hypertextuality within the codex (intratextual references back and forth). In the antique culture of the book, this system raises the list to a new level of complexity. Given the extraordinary success of the device (with many hundreds of extant copies in numerous languages), the impact on viewing habits and textual practices was enormous.

Contributors

Martin Wallraff

(author)
Professor for the History of Ancient and Global Christianity at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1085-8601

Martin Wallraff (Dr. theol. Heidelberg 1997, Habilitation Bonn 2000) is Professor for the History of Ancient and Global Christianity at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Germany). He has published widely on the transmission and canonization of biblical texts, and in 2014 received an ERC Advanced Grant for the project Paratexts of the Bible. Analysis and Edition of the Greek Textual Transmission. His most recent monograph is Die Kanontafeln des Euseb von Kaisareia. Untersuchung und kritische Edition (de Guyter, 2021).