My copy of the book just came in today.
I've only skimmed it, and mainly have skimmed this chapter.
My impression is that this chapter is very uneven in quality. Sometimes Stove makes some perceptive comments, but sometimes he blows his credibility in a big way.
About the Stove's perceptive comments, I want to think a bit more before addressing them, but it is easy to jump in on some of the his weaknesses, so here goes:
Stove writes (p 292):
"There are whole huge parts or aspects of religion which do not figure at all in Jaynes's theory. One is what I do not shrink from calling the Velikovskian-astronomical part: for I am enough of an admirer of the late Immanuel Velikovsky to..."
Stop everything. No good can come of claiming to be any sort of admirer of Immanuel Velikovsky while giving a "tribute" to Jaynes. If Stove's point was that Jaynes doesn't address archaeoastronomy, he should mention some of the work of the respectable figures in the field, not the dubious ideas of Velikovsky.
Next, and perhaps related to his having Velikovsky on the brain, consider this statement by Stove (p. 270):
"This state of mind was brought to an end, in the 2nd millenium B.C., by some catastrophe: Jaynes hints at a catastrophe of extraterrestrial origin, but he is exceedingly vague about the whole matter."
Where is there a hint of a catastrophe of extraterrestrial origin to be found in Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Please point this out to me if it exists because I missed it. In chapter 3 (of Book II) "The Causes of Consciousness," in the section called "Eruption, Migration, Conquest" (beginning p. 212), Jaynes describes the eruptive explosion of the volcano at Thera (Santorini) and the subsequent collapse under the ocean (sic, he is referring to the Mediterranean Sea or the Aegean Sea) of "a good part of the Aegean people's land." Jaynes describes this event as accelerating the collapse of the bicameral mind. But this catastrophe is a geological catastrophe, not an extraterrestrial catastrophe. Stove seems to be confusing Velikovsky's extraterrestrial catastrophe scenario (which fundamentalists like to use to make a claim for the historicity of Noah's flood) with Jaynes's Thera catastrophe scenario.
Not good. In fact, very not good.