Reading as a Journey
Reading as a Journey
An examination of the idea of the book of nature and related ideas about the world as text (and texts as navigable spaces) in late antiquity. These are related to broader Christian ideas about the incarnation of Christ as the Word made Flesh (John 1:14), as well as to the Roman tendency to acquire knowledge by reading rather than by doing. It is argued that Prudentius’ Peristephanon is presented as a literary world, into which the reader is immersed like a traveller. This reading is supported by one arrangement of the poems of the Peristephanon in the manuscript tradition, in which the poems are ordered to fit an itinerary beginning in northern Spain and circling the Mediterranean, before returning to Spain.
Keywords: reader, manuscripts, bibliographical imagination, book of nature, transmission, pilgrimage
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