Church Literature

[sunbear]

Quick question:
I'm wanting to do research into how literature specifically associated with the church has changed over time.

I'm thinking specifically about literature during the:
1st Century Church
Midevil Church
Renaissance Church
Modern Church
Post Modern Church

Things I'm wanting to look into are:
How did the style of writing change
How did the content of the writing change
How did the audience (readers) change

I'm not doing this for any specific reason. I just find myself being curious about it, and I've started to form some thoughts as I've been busy reading literature from different eras. I thought it might be a productive and possibly "leading" diversion to look into.

Does anyone have recommended books or articles I should check out?

Thanks much!

[Karen]

Hi sunbear,

I would recommend a wonderful book by Harry Gamble called Books and Readers in the Early Church. To get an idea of the contents, there's a long review of it .

[Allison]

[Karen]

[sunbear]

[sunbear]

[Josh]

[alecto]

If you want to see translations of 1st-4th century works themselves, go to: http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ These mostly predate the time when there was a single fixed doctrine of the church.

There is another archive at: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/
This one is less well organized. Sometimes you have to work to get to the actual writings, but you can use it to check the other web sites.

See also: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/ to learn something about who all the "church fathers" were.

[Karen]

[Tony]

[Adam Linton]

I might suggest as a good first step in the study of Christian writings over time the "Apostolic Fathers" (actually immediately post-apostolic) such as Ignatius of Antioch.

A good and inexpensive edition would be:

Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (Penguin Classics) ISBN: 0140444750

For background, for this and studies to follow, I recommend:

The Early Church (Penguin Hitsory of the Church), Henry Chadwick, ISBN: 0140231994

And -- with all due respect for Augustine -- by far and away, my own first recommendation for a later (but still fairly early) classic patristic text would be:

On the Incarnation, by Athanasius, of which a good edition with a wonderful introduction by C.S. Lewis, none the less, has been republished by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, ISBN: 0913836400.

Blessings.