At the National Humanities Center, I started work on my second book project, tentatively entitled The Momentum of the Word:  Rufinus of Aquileia and the Birth of Christian Literature.  My subject is the monk and translator Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345-411), whose controversial career took him from Northern Italy to Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and back to Italy, on the verge of the Gothic invasions.  His task throughout his career was the translation of Greek Christian works into Latin.

Rufinus’ work is of interest for several reasons: first, historians of ancient literary culture traditionally focus on figures who wished to be remembered as authors of new material.  In Rufinus, by contrast, we find a writer who became famous, indeed notorious, as a translator—so notorious that his detractors continued to denounce him long after he was dead.  Rufinus’ reputation suggests that historians of pre-modernity can learn a great deal about ancient literary culture by focusing as much on the transmitters of words as they do on their authors.  Present-day revolutions in media find their origins in the medieval scribes and transmitters whom Rufinus inspired.

The idea of transmission is particularly interesting in the religious context of early Christianity, because Christian theologians in this period were intensely concerned with the relationship between the figure they thought of as The Word, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and the divine originator of that Word.  Hence theological debates in this period were also debates over just what it meant to use words at all, and what it meant to call someone the source of those words.  Much of the acrimony that Rufinus generated was over his translations of material that speculated on what the mechanics of this divine movement between the Word and its source might have been. In Rufinus, the history of theology becomes a formative part of the history of Western linguistics and literary theory.

Rufinus is also a pivotal figure in the creation of the Western library, part of a biblio-imaginative tradition that stretches from the Library of Alexandria to the fictions of Borges. Rufinus’ translations became the standard sources for much Greek Christian literature in the Latin West both in his own time and during the middle ages.  More importantly, Rufinus’ attempt to provide Latin audiences with a body of Greek literature, and his own writings about how that literature should be read and understood, made him an early theorist, and theologian, of the book collection and its uses.  Writing at the end of the Roman era and the beginning of the middle ages, Rufinus’ model of the monastic library helped set the stage for European book production in the subsequent thousand years.