Blurb:

The book concludes by returning to the opening discussion of the bookroll as a format that limits and constrains the reader’s experience of the narrative. The Visions also cultivate emotional predispositions for introspection and self-examination as Hermas’s interior consciousness becomes disclosed more and more to the reader. Watchfulness increases as the reader moves with Hermas along his foot-journey through the narrative world of the Book of Visions. These effects of enactive reading contribute to the moral formation of the reader by drawing the reader immersively into Hermas’s narrative world and cultivating the emotional states that generate the necessary predispositions for reading the subsequent sections known as the Mandates and the Similitudes, namely a watchfulness and a heightened state of anticipation.