Review of Minets, The slow fall of Babel

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: The slow fall of Babel: languages and identities in Late Antique Christianity.

Yuliya Minets, The slow fall of Babel: languages and identities in Late Antique Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. ISBN 9781108980821

Review by
Philip Forness, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. philip.forness@kuleuven.be

... With this broader background, Yulia Minets’s timely monograph The Slow Fall of Babel investigates the ways in which Late Antique Christian sources reflect on and conceptualize language. The book takes as its source material Christian texts written roughly between 200 and 600 ce in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and occasionally Coptic, focusing on Christian interpretations of “language-related phenomena described in the biblical narrative” (p. 7) as well as “metalinguistic comments in early Christian narratives” (p. 8). ...

The book also gives considerable attention to Jewish sources and Jewish scriptural exegesis.

I noted an essay by the author on the then-forthcoming book here.

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