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The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences. By Yii-Jan Lin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xi + 203 pp. $78.00 (cloth).
Yii-Jan Lins The Erotic Life of Manuscripts began as a PhD dissertation and takes its title from the metaphor of sexual reproduction that New Testament text critics have borrowed from the biological sciences to describe the creation and transmission of the manuscripts they study. Lin argues that scholars engaged in the search for the "original" New Testament text adopted sexual and racial metaphors from the biological sciences to classify and categorize New Testament manuscripts into families and races with different characteristics, with certain texts and families bearing the taint of corruption or adulteration (p. 5). While Lin addresses issues of text criticism, she is not a text critic, nor is she attempting to operate as one in this work. Rather, Lin situates her w'ork within the field of cultural studies, with the goal of "analyzing] and deconstruct [ing] a technical aspect of the field [of] textual criticism" (p. 8) with the purpose of revealing how the metaphors used in textual criticism shape the way text critics and other scholars understand (or...