Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. xvi + 367p. $18.95 (ISBN 9780674023147). LC 2007-273343

made accessible. Fisher’s early modern audience recognizes the metaphysical comparison of Christ to a book because of their familiarity with contemporary books and the materials from which they are made. The metaphor endures centuries past the days of wood boards and vellum leaves because early modern manuscript books have been preserved as historical artifacts. Discussions of girdle books come to life when an example that survives in the collections at Yale University is available for the scholar to study and reproduced for the reader to view. We do live in a time when the book is typically viewed as “a vehicle for the transmission of text” not “an instrument and not an icon,” not “a part of the world of bodies and things” (6). But scholars will continue to study how writers and readers imagined books, if physical examples of the books they imagined are preserved as artifacts.—Steven K. Galbraith, Folger Shakespeare Library.