Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy by Denise Kimber
Buell
Review by: Kim Haines-Eitzen
Church History, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 867-869
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3169336 .
Accessed: 28/11/2014 06:13
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BOOKREVIEWSAND NOTES
Les Apologistes Chretienset la Culture Grecque.Edited by Bernard Pouderon
and Joseph Dore. Theologie Historique 105. Paris:Beauchesne, 1998. xiv +
490 pp. 288 FF paper.
These twenty-three essays, all in French and most written by members of
Frenchuniversities, are a selection of papers presented at a colloquium held at
Institut Catholique de Paris in September 1996. Topics range from the first
Christianapologies and their relation to Judeo-Hellenistic apologetics through
Justin, Tatian, Tertullian, and Lactantius, among others, ending with two
essays on Syriac and Georgian literature of the sixth through eighth centuries.
Though these touch upon history, philosophy, theology, and culture, the focus
is very heavily philological and the quality very uneven. Some, such as M.
Alexandre on Judeo-Hellenistic apologetic, I. Bochet on Augustine, and M.
Calvet-Sebasti on Nazianzus and Theodoret, are solid, focused, and up-todate. Others have a variety of flaws. A. Hamman on Justin is oddly elementary and dated. M. Fedou on the figure of Socrates in Justin offers nothing new.
B. Pouderon on the formation of a Christian intellectual elite is disappointing
since he concerns himself with historical theology and literary sources,
ignoring social-historical questions on the nature and formation of elites and
their relation to the mass of believers. P. Laurence on Jerome, Greek culture,
and women is even more disappointing, contenting himself with observations
on Jerome's opinion of Greek, using his letters to women as sources, and
leaving untouched rich questions regarding women's education and literary
tastes. None of the sizable literature on Jerome and women that has appeared
in the past several years is even mentioned. A sketchy and dated bibliography
appears at the end of this only marginally useful work.
James A. Francis
University of Kentucky
Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy. By
Denise Kimber Buell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv +
221 pp. $39.50 cloth.
In recent years, scholars of late antiquity have given much attention to
ancient rhetoric,interpretation,and discursive formations of identity. In some
cases, this has been fueled primarily by the interest in texts, authors and
readers, and interpretive communities among critical and literary theorists
(for example, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Stanley Fish) or by recent
consideration of literacy in antiquity (for example, William Harris);in others,
the influence of theory and studies of literacy remain secondary and unacknowledged. The extent to which theoretical work is given credit, however,
does not negate what all of these recent studies have in common: a desire to
explore the cultural, religious, and social significance of rhetoricalmaneuvers
performed by ancient authors to effect various responses in their readers or
hearers. Denise Kimber Buell's lucidly written and carefully crafted Making
Christians:ClementofAlexandriaand theRhetoricof Legitimacyscarcely mentions
theoretical influences but shares the interest in the uses, functions, and
implications of early Christian rhetoric. The study, a revision of Buell's
doctoral dissertation (Harvard, 1995), opens with a broad question-"How
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