Sam Kennerley’s first book is a reception history of the textual transmission and translations of writings by the late antique archbishop John Chrysostom (c. 347–407 ce) in the early modern period. Building on the foundation of Charles L. Stinger’s 1977 Humanism and the church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian antiquity in the Italian Renaissance, Kennerley offers a detailed study of this influential Greek Father that is both sharper in focus and broader in scope than Stinger’s classic monograph. Chrysostom’s Nachlass in Greek and its reception history in Latin translation is not a topic for the faint-hearted. The sheer volume of his homiletic and literary output (over 800 sermons and 200 letters) makes this textual tradition a daunting subject of study. To his credit, Kennerley navigates these perilous waters with confidence and care. The result is a clear account of the ways in which early modern scholars and their protégés and competitors read, interpreted, translated and published the works of Chrystostom for a myriad of purposes – confessional, intellectual and commercial – between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Kennerley begins the book with a short biography of Chrystostom and a useful survey of the reception of his writings in Byzantium and medieval Europe. Only a fraction of the archbishop’s writings was translated into Latin in late antiquity, but it was enough to kindle a millennium-long interest in his work. The arrival of Greek manuscripts of Chrystostom in early Renaissance Florence precipitated a flurry of new Latin translations by Leonardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari and others, some of which informed arguments about the consensus of the church Fathers on doctrinal issues debated at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–45). The founding of the Vatican Library under Pope Nichols v (1447–55) encouraged not only the collection of Greek patristic manuscripts, but also their translation into Latin by eastern scholars like George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza. Pietro Balbi, Francesco Griffolini and other western translators soon followed suit, especially when it became clear that rewards attended such translations, whether from the papacy or from elite patrons like Jean Jouffroy, a prelate and diplomat who read and supported [Latin] translations of Chrysostom in order to find material that he could use in speeches delivered on the grandest stages of Renaissance diplomacy’ (p. 103). Printed editions of Chrysostom’s writings in Latin first appeared in 1466, only a decade or so after the invention of print. These early editions favoured two genres in particular: penitential tracts and biblical exegesis. The demand for Chrysostom in Latin was so great that the first omnia opera editions of the archbishop’s work were published in Venice in 1503 and in Basel in 1504.

Critical of late antique and early modern Latin translations of Chrysostom alike, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536) applied his energy to acquiring Greek exemplars of his writings, undertaking new translations and publishing new editions of them. While doing so, he imbibed the archbishop’s Pauline commentaries, especially their insights about the question of grace and free will. Erasmus soon emerged as a champion of the view that Chrysostom was ‘a superior interpreter of Paul to Augustine’ (p. 130). In the late 1520s, the Dutchman allied himself with the French Catholic humanist Germain de Brie (d. 1538) against another translator of Chrysostom, the Protestant Johannes Oecolampadius (d. 1531), whom Erasmus suspected of distorting the saint’s teachings with his poor translations. New omnia opera editions of the Chrysostom’s writing published at Basel in 1530 and at Paris in 1536 provided Erasmus with the opportunity to silence his rival, but his last-minute inclusion of Oecolampadius’ translations of the Homilies on II Corinthians and Acts, anonymised and sanitised of Protestant paratextual material, allowed them to be reprinted as canonical versions of these texts for centuries until their inclusion in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (1857–66). The 1536 edition also featured the final version of Erasmus’ Life of Chrysostom, which presented a novel account of the prelate’s life based on previously unexploited Greek texts like Palladius’ Life of Chrysostom and some of Chrysostom’s letters from exile.

Struggles between rival Christian groups did not play as much of a role in the reception of Chrysostom in the century following the death of Erasmus in 1536 as they did during his lifetime. Rather, Kennerley argues that ‘[c]ommercial rather than confessional rivalry between Paris and Basel … drove the Opera omnia of Chrysostom’ (p. 201) printed in the middle of the sixteenth century. In France, the founders of the French royal library in service of the new Collège Royal collected dozens of Greek patristic manuscripts, which eventually informed the first Parisian printing of Chrysostom in 1550. The Froben Press in Basel responded with a new Opera omnia in 1558. An exception to this commercial competition was the translation activity sparked in Italy by Cardinal Marcello Cervini (d. 1555), who commissioned Latin translations of several Greek Fathers, including Chrysostom, to coincide with the beginning of the Council of Trent (1545–63), where Cervini served as papal legate. Around the same time, the 1558 index of prohibited books issued by the papacy ‘dramatically restricted access’ (p. 229) to Greek patristics in Latin translation because so many of their recent translators, like Erasmus and Oecolampadius, were deemed heretical by the inquisition.

New editions of the Latin Chrysostom corpus appeared toward the end of the sixteenth century, freshly translated by Catholic scholars like Jacques de Billy (d. 1581) and sanitised of Protestant commentary. Demand for Chrysostom in the original Greek also grew in the decades around 1600 as Protestant and Catholic teachers realised the utility of his homilies and letters for instruction in Greek letters. There was a growing interest in bilingual editions in this period as well, which Kennerley attributes to ‘mistrust and competition between different confessions, in which Greek was often appreciated not in its own right, but rather as a means of evaluating a Latin translation produced by a member of a different Church’ (p. 271). Even so, the ambition of Henry Savile (d. 1622), Greek tutor to Elizabeth i and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, to publish the first opera omnia of Chrysostom in Greek, for which he and his proxies undertook extensive travels in Europe, illustrates how patristic scholars and library gatekeepers could cooperate despite their confessional differences.

Kennerley wears his impressive erudition lightly in this learned book, which examines the ways that scholars read, translated and interpreted the writings of John Chrysostom in early modern Europe. Through a close analysis of private letters and the prefaces to published editions of Chrysostom’s writings, he discovers and examines the confessional tensions and commercial interests that motivated prelates and presses alike to produce Greek editions and Latin translations of his sermons, biblical commentaries and penitential works. The industry of these early modern editors and translators has had a lasting impact on modern scholarship. As the conclusion of the book reminds us, almost two-thirds of Chrysostom’s works in Greek are most easily accessible in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, a nineteenth-century repository of textual editions that were first published as early as the seventeenth century. Reconstructing the motives of these pre-modern editors is essential for us to understand the choices underlying the early modern printed editions of his work, which have provided the foundation of modern scholarship on Chrysostom.