Book Review: Winds of Change: Trystan Owain Hughes, Winds of Change: The Roman Catholic Church and Society in Wales, 1916–1962

Abstract

treatment of the problematic Eighth Stromateus, which has otherwise not received attention in the recent turn to the fragmentary works. Indeed, the last monograph on it was composed in Latin, back in the days when that was an acceptable language for scholarly dissertations. Havrda provides a lemmatic commentary on the text, together with a Greek text, English translation, and a 77-page introduction which engages closely with the problems of the origin and purpose of the book. His interlocutors are the handful of scholars who have engaged with this problem over the last four centuries. His own arguments are fresh and incisive. He identifies a portion of the extant material as likely to be dependent on Galen, and argues that it probably derives from Galen’s lost On Demonstration. For ancient philosophers, this is one of the greatest reasons to take an interest in Clement’s eighth book. Havrda also shows how parts of the work are related to earlier books of the Stromateis. For scholars of ancient literary culture, this is valuable for understanding Clement’s working method as a miscellanist: the evidence of the ‘liber logicus’ suggests that he composed excerpt books, choosing material without special regard to its original context, but a view to its relevance for his Christian purpose. Later he would rework it into his own composite argument. Havrda’s study is a work of consummate erudition, published at an apposite moment for patristics, ancient philosophy, and potentially early imperial literary scholarship—though his own weight of attention and interest is clearly pointed toward the philosophical tradition.