I have attempted to trace a constellation of ideas about truth, and how a variety of late ancient scholars thought about, and went about, bringing it to light. Even if truths are unchanging, there is a history to the way that people have sought to access it. That history is obscured when modern disciplinary boundaries become wardens of historical imagination, limiting our estimation of ancient networks of influence. I have argued that the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire caused a revolution in meaning-making, and that as Nicene Christians came to hold positions of imperial power, their argumentative methods and aims found expression in domains of knowledge production far removed from theology.

Chapter 8 describes the net effect of scholastic and material changes on the way that Theodosian Age readers approached and interpreted books, showing how suspicion of documents and archives became institutionalized, and how rules for deciding between competing authorities appear in a wide variety of traditions: from theology to law to Talmud.

Chapter 1 introduces the project and its methods before reflecting on the interconnected social world of elite readers and writers during the Theodosian dynasty, showing how they comprise a single intellectual culture expressed in different disciplinary domains.

Chapter 3 turns to Constantine and Athanasius, showing how each shaped a set of scholastic practices used on all sides of the Nicene controversy, and how this new way of making arguments became widespread throughout the Orthodox Christian movement during the fourth century.

Chapter 2 introduces the ancient distinction between preceptual and epistemic knowledge. It then surveys the tradition of knowledge production within Christian theological scholarship before the Constantinian age. The chapter argues that little overlap is visible in scholarly practices between Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Gospel of Truth.

Chapter 6 turns to manuscripts themselves, showing how newly instituted scholastic practices influenced the production and use of books during the fifth century.

Chapter 5 focuses on the “rise of the code” and the investiture of the codex format with new meanings when it took center stage as the preferred bookform for scholastic productions.

Chapter 7 investigates manuscripts in which scribes copied non-Christian works using peculiarly Christian scribal tools. It describes the proliferation of Christian scribal practices through products of Theodosian Age scriptoria in order to trace the influence of Christianity in a manner that does not involve speculation about of the faith of scribes or readers.

Chapter 4 traces novel scholastic practices from the realm of theology into “secular” domains during the Theodosian Age, showing how a scholarly method created to solve theological problems came to be used in legal, historical, and scientific texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries.