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544 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Thomas Johann Bauer
is Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Erfurt and academic director of the Vetus Latina Institute, Beuron. He specializes in early Christian literature in the context of Greco-Roman religion and culture, and in the history of the Latin Bible. His recent publications include Das tausendjahrige Messiasreich der Johannesoffenbarung (Berlin, 2007), Paulus und die kaiserzeitliche Epistolographie (Tubingen, 2011) and Who is who in der Welt Jesu (Freiburg, 2013).
Alexander Beihammer (PhD Vienna) is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Notre Dame. He has published on Byzantine diplomatics and on relations between Byzantium, the Frankish East, and the Muslim world. His most recent monograph is Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim-Turkish Anatolia, ca. 1040-1130 (Routledge, 2017).
Floris Bernard is an assistant professor at Ghent University. His research interests include Byzantine poetry and epistolography. He is the author of Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025-1081 (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis is Associate Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on Byzantine rhetoric, historiography, criticism and aesthetics, letter-writing, and the reception and transmission of Classical texts in the Middle Ages. He is the author of Not Composed in a Chance Manner: The Epitaphios for Manuel I Komnenos by Eustathios of Thessalonike (Uppsala University Press, 2017).
Carolina Cupane is a lecturer at the University of Vienna and Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on Byzantine vernacular literature, Byzantine narrative, comparative literature, cultural studies, and cultural mobility and migration of narrative motifs between East and West. She is the editor of the Brill companion Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (with Bettina Krénung; 2016).
Niels Gaul is A.G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies in the University of Edinburgh and currently the PI of an ERC Consolidator Grant, “Classicizing Learning in Medieval Imperial Systems: Cross-cultural Approaches to Byzantine Paideia and Tang/Song Xue” (2017-2022). He most recently co-edited a volume on Center, Province and Periphery in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos.
Cecily J. Hilsdale is Associate Professor of Medieval Art History at McGill University. She specializes in cultural exchange in the medieval Mediterranean and her recent publications include Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Sofia Kotzabassi is Professor of Medieval Greek at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests include Byzantine rhetoric and epistolography, historiography and prosopography, and Greek paleography. Her recent publications include Das hagiographische Dossier der heiligen Theodosia von Konstantinopel (De Gruyter, 2009) and Greek Manuscripts at Princeton. A Descriptive Catalogue (with Nancy Sevéenko, Princeton, 2010).
Florin Leonte is an assistant professor at the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic where he teaches Greek language and literature. His main interests are Byzantine rhetoric, literature, and social history. His first monograph is titled Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium: Manuel IT Palaiologos and Rhetoric in Purple (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Divna Manolova is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of Southern Denmark and University of York). Her research deals with Byzantine intellectual history and, in particular, with the history of science and philosophy. Most recently, she has embarked on the history of emotions and on the cognitive function of cosmological diagrams in medieval Greek manuscripts.
Stratis Papaioannou is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Crete and works on rhetorical and narrative traditions as well as book culture in Byzantium. His most recent publications include Christian Novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2017) and Michael Psellos on Literature and Art (with Charles Barber, 2017). His critical edition of Michael Psellos’ letter collection appeared in 2019 with De Gruyter.
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller
is a senior research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He specializes in the history of Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean in a global perspective as well as in historical network analysis and complexity studies. His recent publications include Jenseits von Rom und Karl dem Grofsen. Aspekte der globalen Verflechtung in der langen Spdtantike, 300-800 n. Chr. (Vienna, 2018) and (as editor, with Ch. Gastgeber and E. Mitsiou) The Patriarchate of Constantinople in Context and Comparison (Vienna, 2017).
Alexander Riehle is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His research focuses on late Byzantine epistolography and rhetoric. He is currently preparing an edition and translation of the letter-collections of Nikephoros Choumnos (De Gruyter, anticipated 2021).
Jack Tannous is an assistant professor in the History Department at Princeton University. His research focuses on the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of the Near East in the late antique and early medieval period. He is the author of The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Lena Wahlgren-Smith is Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research focuses on Medieval and post-Medieval Latin literature. She has recently produced a critical edition and translation of the letter collections of Nicholas of Clairvaux (Oxford University Press, 2018).
NTRODUCTION
Byzantine Epistolography: a Historical and Historiographical Sketch
Alexander Riehle
1 Epistolography, or What Is a (Byzantine) Letter?
Faced with the question “What is a letter?”, most literate people across the globe today would probably think of a piece of writing, typed or by hand, on a piece of paper — as opposed to e-mail or oral communication — that is dispatched, usually in a sealed envelope, from a sender to a recipient by mail — rather than electronically or passed on directly from the sender to the recipient — in order to convey or solicit some kind of information;! and if asked to write a letter, for example, to a friend, family member or professional contact, they would likely resort to more or less standardized formal elements and expressions: a letter head, set phrases such as health wishes and salutations, signature, etc. The letter is thus defined by a matrix of specific material, communicative and formal elements.”
This contemporary understanding of the letter conforms with the historical record of the ancient and late antique Mediterranean and beyond.? For example, all three of the above criteria apply to Hellenistic, Roman, and late antique/early Byzantine letters that have been preserved in great number in the sands of Egypt. These were written, either by professional scribes or by the senders themselves, on sheets produced from the papyrus plant in order to deliver messages of a private, official or business nature, delivered by a bearer — most often a random person who happened to travel to the letter’s place of destination. These letters exhibit a set of standard elements, which include, among other things, a prescript (usually 6 Setva t@ Setvt yatpet: “So-and-so to so-and-so, greetings!”); a prologue expressing a health wish, joy or thanksgiving; concluding exhortations, wishes for the addressee, greetings to other persons and a valediction such as éppwoo (“farewell!”; postscript); recurring set phrases to introduce the different parts of the letter; and conventional motifs pertaining to the exchange of letters and the relationship between writer and addressee.*
Unfortunately, no such Byzantine material survives from after the early eighth century, as Greek gradually lost its status as lingua franca in Egypt as a result of the Arab conquest of this region.> Save for a few imperial missives to foreign authorities,® no original Byzantine letters are preserved today. What survives under the rubric “letter”’ is instead transmitted in manuscript books, most commonly as part of some kind of edited collection. To the individual examples of this rich and diverse material — more than 15,000 Greek letters from the period between 300 and 1500 have come down to us in this form® — only one or two elements of our tripartite matrix apply.
A fundamental process of transformation takes place when a letter is transcribed from a piece of support — a tablet or sheet of papyrus, parchment or paper — bearing a written message to a roll or codex where it stands in a dynamic dialogue with other texts included in the same manuscript.!° While the letter still possesses a materiality in this context, that of the manuscript book, it is anew and quite different one that is not specific to the letter but is shared by a variety of textual genres. Most letters transmitted as part of a collection lack the above-mentioned standardized formal elements at the beginning and end — probably because they were considered redundant in the context of a collection and therefore eliminated — and are thus deprived of their most conspicuous epistolary markers."
This renders letters often hardly distinguishable from texts traditionally classified as belonging to other genres, and there are even cases when texts change their genre in the world of books: for example, letters transformed into orations and vice versa.!2 Moreover, with the transcription into a book, the letter loses its common status as a private message intended for the addressee’s eyes or ears only and assumes a public nature that makes it available to a broader readership.
Other letters contained in books never served the purpose of long-distance interpersonal communication in the first place. Fictional epistolography flourished in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods in the form of collections attributed to historical personages, sometimes assuming the form of epistolary novels; letters of farmers and fishermen; and erotic letters.!4 Although Theophylaktos Simokattes’ Ethical, Rustic and Erotic Letters (first half of seventh century) are the last representative of this tradition of self-standing fictional letter collections, fictionalized epistolography had a continuing presence in Byzantine literature, as is evidenced, for example, by John Chortasmenos’ responses to letters by Libanios and the embedded letters in novelistic literature.
The reasons for this diversified understanding and usage of epistolography are to be sought in its literarization in the late classical and early Hellenistic periods. In the fourth and third centuries Bc the letter was adopted and adapted by educated elites, who employed it for various purposes: to impart political advice to rulers (Plato, Isocrates); to defend their deeds (Plato, Demosthenes); to expound philosophical doctrine to students (Epicurus); and, of course, to deliver messages of more or less private nature, albeit in a more elaborate manner than the everyday letters of common people.!® This development prompted modern-day scholars — following the programmatic definitions of the New Testament scholar Adolf Deifgmann (1866-1937) — to draw a sharp line between “real”, private letters (Brief) and literary epistles intended for a wider public, with a third group comprising official correspondence. In more recent decades, proliferating work on individual epistolary oeuvres of the Greco-Roman realm has shown how problematic, and ultimately impossible, such a strict distinction is, not only because of the questionable understanding of literature it implies!” but also because there is simply too much overlap between letters of these different categories to justify neat distinction.!®
Ironically, especially the Pauline Epistles, which provided the incentive for Deif{mann’s reflections (who considered them “letters”), are an excellent example of the futility of Deifgmann’s rigid classification.’ To alleviate the divide, scholars established a fourth main category, that of the “private literary letters” (literarische Privatbriefe), which were authored by educated men or more rarely women,”° of private content but written with an eye to “publication” such as reading in a literati gathering or inclusion in a manuscript collection, and therefore not only more sophisticated in style than private correspondence proper but also less generous with specific details (so-called “deconcretization”).?! The lion’s share of surviving Byzantine letters would fall into this class.
Beside these questions of classification, the very status of the letter within textual history has been debated. Is it a genre? Or rather a form? A mode??? If we understand genres as groups of texts in a culturally and chronologically delimited space, which are perceived by authors and public of that culture as cohesive and therefore provide an interpretative framework for their contemporary audience — rather than as immutable Naturformen or as a classification system and heuristic-hermeneutical tool created by modern-day scholars — we can well accord the Byzantine émtctoAy the status of a genre, in my opinion. A corpus of texts that by their authors or contemporaries are attributed to a given genre — e.g., in headings, glosses or commentaries, or through inclusion in a collection — can therefore serve as starting material for the description of this genre.
This text corpus can be analyzed in terms of shared and divergent textual structures and functions.23 On this basis, texts that survive under a different generic label, or without one, but which reveal similarities with the texts of our corpus, can be considered as part of the genre. This is, for instance, the case with the considerable number of hitherto unacknowledged Byzantine verse letters or epistolary poems.”* Genres, of course, always have fuzzy edges, and explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious hybridity is inherently inscribed in any genre system.*5 Depending on specific type, ie., function or occasion, a text can therefore be a letter and something else at the same time.”® Several chapters in the section Forms and Functions of Byzantine Epistolography in this volume explore exactly such connections and interpenetrations with other, not specifically epistolary, genres, types and modes.??
With this historical, rather than historiographical, understanding of genres in mind, it is perhaps best to begin with a look at how the Byzantines themselves defined and understood letter-writing. The composite term “epistolography” is a modern invention,?® which combines two Greek words that are used already in antiquity to designate oral and written communication.?9 The noun emtotoAy — a derivative of the verb émtotéAw (“to send, dispatch, command”) — indicates the function and content, rather than the form, of a communication in early classical times: originally some kind of order and, by extension, any message, be it oral or written. It is only in the course of the fourth century BC that émiotoAy is exclusively used for written communication and that it becomes the generic name for “letter”. In the process, new derivative adjectives (EmlaToAKds, ExtaToAatos, EmtataAtixdc: “epistolary”), diminutives (émtatOAtov, émtotoAtsiov) and composite nouns (e.g., emtotoAtapdpoc: “letter-bearer”; emtotodoypagos: “letter-writer”) are created. This consolidation of terminology goes hand in hand with the emergence of the structural-formal epistolary markers mentioned above. This evidence suggests that the emtatoAy developed into a distinct genre during the late classical period.
Nouns derived from the verb ypdqw (“to draw, write”) constitute the second major group of terms for “letter’, thus distinguishing written from oral communication: most commonly yedupate (literally “written characters, letters”) and less often its singular yp&uya, the diminutive ypappdtiov or ypagy (“piece of writing”). Although these terms are frequently used in correspondence and generated the common derivative ypapyato-/ypappatypopos (“letter-bearer”), they never appear, to my knowledge, as a genre name in headings of collections and only exceptionally, in the singular yea&uya, in lemmata of individual letters. Other terms in antiquity — mostly in the early phase of the history of Greek epistolography, before the more specific terms émictoAy and yedpyata prevailed — are metonymically borrowed from the writing support used: BuBAtov / BiBAtov (“piece of papyrus”), which in the Roman period is replaced by the synonymous yaoty¢ / xaotiov; LoAvBStov (“piece of lead”); mivag (“wooden table, writing tablet”); SéAtog / SeAtiov (“writing tablet”); dotpaxov (“potsherd”).
The Byzantine usage builds on this classical and Hellenistic terminology:3° by the late antique period, émtctoAy is firmly established as generic name, while Yeduuata continues to be used as a synonym, although it had a broader semantic field and its meaning could therefore be ambivalent. (The plural does not help either: the modern reader in particular, lacking context, often has to guess whether a writer refers to one or several pieces of correspondence.) With the exception of the vernacular yapti(v) or yaptitat (from yapty¢s: “piece of papyrus’, see above, or later “paper”, hence “document”), ancient terms derived from the writing support were gradually abandoned, while new names emerged either as synonyms for émtotoAy / yp&upata or to designate specific epistolary types or subgenres. For example, avAaby / cvMaBat (literally “syllable(s)”) and mtt&xt(ov) fall into the first category.
The latter originally designated a writing tablet and in the middle Byzantine period especially imperial and patriarchal documents, and would become a standard term for letter in vernacular Greek. In the second category of terms signifying particular epistolary types belong, for instance, dvttypaypa or dvttypagov for a letter-response; dvagopé (“report”) for a petition to an emperor; and odxpa — derived from Latin sacra — for an official letter issued by the emperor or an ecclesiastical authority, which from the Greek found its way also into Syriac, as did tépo¢ (originally “papyrus roll’, “book”) for a synodical letter and ¢yxtdxAtog for an encyclical.3!
Epistolary theorists and letter-writers described and defined the emotoAy (henceforth “letter”) using both formal and functional criteria. In functional terms, the letter is a medium of communication, “the one half of a dialogue” as the editor of Aristotle’s letters, Artemon, is famously said to have phrased it.3? However, unlike the dialogue, which “imitates spontaneous speech’, the letter is “committed to writing and in a way sent as a gift’.33 A popular late antique manual of letter-writing gives the following succinct definition: “A letter is akind of written conversation of someone absent with another absent person and fulfills a practical purpose.” Pivotal to this definition of the fundamentally communicative function of epistolography is the spatial separation between two or more people, a situation from which emerged a series of epistolary motifs and set phrases such as presence in absence, the unio mystica, the letter as alter ego, etc. The letter can help overcome or at least cope with separation, but also draws attention to this separation, thus potentially enforcing the feeling of loneliness.*° Friendship naturally looms large in this context, although the Byzantines were well aware that epistolary philia is essentially instrumental:
The friendly type [of letter], then, is one that seems to be written by a friend to a friend. But it is by no means [only] friends who write [in this manner]. For frequently those in prominent positions are expected by some to write in a friendly manner to their inferiors and to others who are their equals, for example, to military commanders, viceroys, and governors. There are times, indeed, when they write to them without knowing them [personally]. They do so, not because they are close friends and have [only] one choice [of how to write], but because they think that nobody will refuse them when they write in a friendly manner, but will rather submit and heed what they are writing. Nevertheless, this type of letter is called friendly as though it were written to a friend.°°
As a reciprocal medium of communication which served social and pragmatic needs, letter-exchange was closely related to gift-giving. The letter itself was considered a gift?’ and was regularly accompanied by presents such as foodstuff, textiles, books or devotional objects. Although a material object understood primarily as a piece of writing, the letter had also an oral/aural di-mension. Regularly, oral messages delivered by the bearer supplemented the written text. More importantly, the written letter also possessed an inherent orality. As letters were commonly regarded as true likenesses of their writer,3® the written characters, which would be recited upon delivery rather than silently read by their recipient, functioned as a representation of the author’s character and voice just like an image represented the person depicted.*?
In terms of formal features, theorists generally advise that a letter should be relatively short, in a plain but graceful style — which included, for example, literary quotations, proverbial phrases and the moderate use of playful elements such as gibes and riddles — and clear in diction and syntax.4 However, since the letter is a utilitarian genre (Gebrauchsliteratur)™ that in practice can serve a multitude of functions, cover a wide range of topics and be addressed to people of different social standing, the epistolary form is characterized by great variance,‘ and so a letter’s style had to be adapted to each particular occasion.*? Although brevity was a virtue, the length of a letter was to be determined by its specific purpose (ypsic);44 and letters addressed to people of high rank could employ a more elevated style than that envisioned for more mundane contexts.*5 In order to find and practice the appropriate form for each occasion, theorists and teachers advised aspiring letter-writers to study and imitate the style of canonical authors, especially of late antiquity.
In the ninth century, Photios included a brief discussion of Basil of Caesarea’s letters in his monumental work of literary criticism known as Bibliotheca, recommending that one should “take them as a guideline for the epistolary style”,4® and named in a letter to Amphilochios the letters attributed to Phalaris and Brutus as well as those of Libanios, Julian, “the sweet Basil” (BactAetog 6 yAvxis), “Gregory, who more than anyone is a creator of beauty” (6 xé&Mous et tI¢ déO¢ epyatys Tpyyoptos) and Isidore of Pelousion as useful readings for epistolary composition.*”
The late twelfth- or thirteenth-century treatise On the Four Parts of the Perfect Speech names as models (dpyétuma) the three Cappadocian Fathers, Synesios, Libanios and Michael Psellos.4® This passage was integrated in the early fourteenth-century into Joseph Rhakendytes’ Synopsis of Rhetoric.*9 Studies have shown that these instructions on imitation were by and large heeded by the practitioners of the art who often explicitly or implicitly draw on the letters of the great letter-writers of the past, either by quoting and alluding to specific passages from them, or by generally imitating their style and rhetorical structure.5° An extreme case are the “mashup letters” of James the Monk in the mid-twelfth century, which incorporate several hundred whole passages and snippets from letters of the church fathers, particularly Basil.5!
Although a great deal of texts that survive under the label émtotoAy conform with these functional and formal parameters, others defy the definitions outlined above. This troubled already ancient theorists. Demetrios thus complained that some so-called “letters” are actually treatises (cvyypduyata) with the word “Greetings” (yaipew) attached at the beginning, while he considered it equally inopportune to employ the periodic style of forensic oratory. In addition to the criteria of length, diction and syntax, Demetrios insists that not every subject matter (pd&ypc) is suited for the letter, and mentions specifically sophistical debates (cogicuata) and inquiries into natural history (q@uatoAcytac) as inappropriate.5? These deliberations show that the label émictoAy could in practice accommodate a wider range of styles and topics than contemporary theory — which attempted to distinguish the letter from other genres by establishing boundaries — wished to concede, and the surviving record for Byzantium confirms that the letter continued to serve as an Einkleidungsform especially for religious, political and scientific instruction. In order to avoid violating the norms of letter-writing - which is a permanent concern in Byzantine correspondence — writers resorted to often explicit hybridity and invented a new composite term to accommodate in letters elements considered to exceed the limits of epistolography such as length and discursive character: Adyos EmtatoAtpatos (“epistolary discourse, speech”).5+
The present volume builds on the premises outlined above. It discusses examples from the vast corpus of Byzantine texts that are classified in the historical record as émtotoAai and other texts that share similarities with these “letters”; the various different forms they could assume and purposes they could serve; their theorizations and representations; and their uses by historical and literary scholarship. While this brief introductory essay works under the assumption of a more or less solid genre of Byzantine epistolography, a much-needed monographic treatment will likely come to the conclusion that the genre underwent significant changes in the course of Byzantium’s millennial history — which brings us to the next issue.
The field of Byzantine Studies has been vexed by the issue that “Byzantium” does not exist as a historical entity. For the “Byzantines”, who considered and called themselves Romans, there existed no Byzantine Empire, but only the Roman Empire, which came to end when the Ottomans conquered the “New Rome” Constantinople in 1453. The endpoint is thus clear. But where and when are its beginnings? Various historical turning points have been suggested: the reign of Constantine 1 (sole emperor 324-337) which saw the foundation of the empire’s soon-to-be capital Constantinople and the firm establishment of Christianity as an officially recognized and promoted religion; the late fourth century, when pagan cultic practices were prohibited by law and the empire was split into an Eastern and a Western domain between the heirs of Theodosios 1; the mid-sixth century, when under Justinian I the empire witnessed an expansionist revival and the last pagan institution — the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens — closed its doors; and the rise of Islam and subsequent Arab expansion in the seventh century, which threw the empire into a severe political and economic crisis, thus triggering a process of massive administrative and social transformations. While classicists and self-professed late antiquists since the groundbreaking work of Peter Brown in the 1970s tend to consider these centuries as belonging to a “long late antiquity’,>> Byzantinists have tried to reclaim this period for themselves.°® This is not the place to give an account of the respective arguments in favor of each position, let alone contribute to the still ongoing debate. Suffice it to say that although there are good reasons to have a volume on Byzantine culture begin in the fourth century, the early centuries are not systematically covered in this companion, though several contributors do sporadically discuss authors and practices of the fourth through seventh centuries.
This exclusion should not be understood as a statement vis-a-vis the question of the beginning of Byzantine literature.5” On the contrary, our genre shows how closely this period and the later centuries belong together, as it was then that the typical “Byzantine letter took on its definitive form’.5® The reason is rather a pragmatic one: while for late antiquity, or early Byzantium, there is a plethora of excellent recent work on specific topics and individual authors,°? such groundwork is for the most part still lacking with respect to the enormously rich epistolary culture of the middle and late Byzantine periods. Between the classicizing epistolographers of the fourth through the first half of the sixth century and the revival of traditional forms of letter-writing at the turn from the eighth to the ninth century the relatively scant epistolary material that has survived usually takes the form of theological treatises. This is, for instance, the case with the letters of Maximos Homologetes® — which nevertheless exhibit clear awareness of traditional epistolary conventions of learned private correspondence — or the synodal and encyclical letters that are transmitted as part of the acts of church councils.® It is only towards the end of iconoclastic period that epistolography, along with several other genres, including historical narrative and epigrammatic poetry, experienced a forceful renewal.®?
This is evidenced not only in the compilation of major lettercollections of authors of that period — beginning with Theodore the Studite and Ignatios the Deacon® — but also in an increasing interest in the epistolary oeuvres of authors of the past, especially of late antiquity, such as the Church Fathers of the fourth century, Libanios, Synesios and Isidore of Pelousion. This establishment of a canon of epistolary classics in the middle Byzantine period is witnessed by their dissemination in manuscripts in the form of complete corpora of one or more authors or in some kind of miscellany, where they are sometimes paired with more recent epistolographers;® in grammatical-lexical and geographical-historical commentaries on them;® their appearance as models in critical discourse; and their imitation by contemporary writers.® It is also in this period that poetry attains such an important place in the school curriculum and performative practice that letters are increasingly couched in verse.®7 All these trends continue into the later centuries, when the letter also found its way into the revived genre of the novel and into illustrated manuscripts of various genres.®* Although Byzantine epistolary traditions continued well into the post-Byzantine period in both Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire,® the volume takes the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as its endpoint.
In terms of geographical distribution, it is noticeable that surviving Greek letter-collections of late antiquity span the entire Eastern Mediterranean: almost all major author-collections of the fourth-sixth centuries are by men who spent most of their lives in cities of North Africa, Palestine, Syria or Asia Minor. With the loss of these territories to Muslim rulers in the seventh century and the concomitant de-urbanization of Byzantium’s remaining Eastern territories, Constantinople increasingly became the sole center of literary production.”° The vast majority of surviving Byzantine letters was therefore written by authors who resided in the capital or were at least closely tied to the imperial court and Constantinopolitan elites. Only during the final century of Byzantium’s existence Greek epistolary collections become more geographically diversified again — a result of the fragmentation of the empire and the emigration of intellectuals into regions not under Byzantine rule.”!
A final remark in this preliminary sketch of Byzantine epistolography regards language. As it will have become clear by now, letters of the Byzantine period and realm, as defined in the previous paragraphs, are almost exclusively written in Greek. Latin never asserted itself in the Eastern parts of the Roman Empire outside of the central bureaucratic apparatus, and even these imperial institutions were gradually Hellenized in the course of late antiquity, a process that was completed in the early seventh century.” As a result of this development, we usually equate Byzantine with Medieval Greek literature. Letter-writing is of course no exception, and so almost all examples of epistolary literature discussed in this volume, save for the first three chapters, are in Greek.
2 The Historiography of Byzantine Epistolography
The following does not aim to provide an exhaustive survey and discussion of previous scholarship on Byzantine epistolography — which would require considerably more room than is available for such an introductory chapter — but merely intends to outline some general trends in approaches to medieval Greek letter-writing. A good starting point for such an endeavor is Peter Hatlie’s “Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography”, which ingeniously summarized and evaluated the state of the art in the 1990s and formulated thoughts on the way forward.
Perhaps the most significant development, and best news, since the publication of Hatlie’s article is that Byzantine epistolography today seems to be in little need of redemption. The bad press it got in much scholarship of the twentieth century has given way to a multitude of different approaches to letters as valuable historical sources and as a literary genre in which the Byzantines excelled. This shift was prompted by a general turn away from two major interpretive trends that dominated Byzantine Studies in its first century of existence as an institutionalized academic discipline: historical positivism and romantic literary criticism. While scholars of the former school attempted to extract factual details from elusive rhetorical genres,’? literary critics in the romantic tradition assessed the Byzantine literary heritage under the assumption that originality and individuality are the only merits of literature.”* Both trends had led to adecidedly negative assessment of the bulk of Byzantine letter-writing, as most collections are reticent about the kind of details for which historians thirst — such as narratives about historical events, proper names, and dates — and instead abound in conventional motifs and phrases. Devoid of both the historical information they were seeking and the aesthetic principles favored by them, Byzantinists frequently vented their frustration with learned epistolography. In 1977, the editor of Manuel 11 Palaiologos’ letter-collection, George T. Dennis characterized the average Byzantine letter as “about as concrete, informative and personal as the modern mass-produced greetings card” and concluded: “In general, then, Byzantine letters tend to be conventional and impersonal and, one might add, terribly boring.””> Few Byzantinists would endorse such a view today, and it should be noted that, in hindsight, Dennis seems to have regretted his remarks.”6 As Hatlie already observed in 1996, few modern scholars would dispute that “epistolography is worthy of serious scholarly study”,”’ and this is reflected in a plethora of monographs, collected volumes and essays that have appeared in recent decades.
Let us begin with the most important advances in Grundlagenforschung, that is, fundamental research that is commonly considered to form an indispensable basis for interpretive work — although this kind of research has been increasingly discredited in the humanities as banal and therefore in most countries receives little or no financial and other support, which is to the detriment especially of relatively young disciplines like Byzantine Studies in which essential groundwork is still missing for various areas. Since the publication of Hatlie’s 1996 article and Margaret Mullet’s 1997 list of then recent editions,” access to the primary texts has been further enhanced through first or new editions of several major letter-collections which are occasionally also accompanied by translations.’”? However, in addition to the need for more translations of the linguistically often — even for the expert — challenging texts,8° there still remain whole collections completely or largely unpublished: Theodore Patrikios from the tenth (?) century, Hierotheos from the twelfth century and George Oinaiotes from fourteenth century, to name only the three most glaring lacunae;®! and there are still numerous minor, mostly anonymous, collections and individual letters hidden in the manuscripts that await scholarly attention. Moreover, the editorial methods employed in existing editions are frequently problematic, and in light of growing interest in letter-collections as works of literature in their own right, it may become necessary to republish even recently edited collections in the near future.8?
Letters of course continue to be used as a historical source, albeit with new methods. The kind of “fact-seeking” research, which sought to extract hard data from epistolary sources, while ignoring other aspects such as the formal composition and communicative function of these texts,®% has largely waned and increasingly made room for studies examining epistolary practice as part of social, political and religious dynamics, while paying attention to issues inherent in the genre.®4 The only exception is perhaps prosopographical research, which however has also become more sophisticated in its methodology and sensitive to literary aspects of textual sources.®> Similarly, attempts to “unveil” the author's personality and Weltanschauung through combined historical and formal analysis of letters — a supposedly personal genre in which writers reveal their inner self and express their emotions —8° have proven problematic, and we now tend to think of the author’s presence in his or her letters rather in terms of discursively and performatively constructed personae, which can vary according to context.8”
Analysis of formal elements and typical epistolary markers — such as forms of address, structural patterns and style — which can be interpreted as epistolary conventions, as conscious literary choices or as indicators of social dynamics such as ritualized communication, social status and relationships, or all of this at once,®° have been further pursued, primarily in studies on individual letter-writers.89 Apart from the more easily attainable categories of figures of speech,9° prose rhythm,” epistolary motifs? and literary quotations and allusions® — which are often simply compiled into catalogues and only rarely interpreted within the specific context of the individual letters — there has been very little literary criticism proper, and Hatlie’s remark that “[t]he history of the Byzantine letter as literature in the strict sense still remains to be written” remains, regrettably, true today.°* One reason for this lacuna may be the inextricable interpenetration of literary, socio-communicative and pragmatic elements in epistolography, and so it may be undesirable, and unfeasible, to isolate formal and aesthetic aspects in any history of epistolary literature. It may be precisely for this reason that the greatest achievements in epistolary research in recent decades have been accomplished in what could be called the “sociology of epistolography”.
Twenty years after the appearance of Hatlie’s article, friendship is no more among the “very basic epistolographic concerns’ that “still await the attention of historians”.9° Since Margaret Mullett’s groundbreaking essay on friendship in Byzantium,” we have abandoned the view that epistolary expressions of friendship are merely rhetorical tropes, and take letters seriously as documents not only reflecting but performing — i-e., establishing, fostering, negotiating, etc. — relationships.®* In conjunction with this increasing interest in friendship and associated roles such as patronage, social networks have moved into the focus of scholars working on Byzantine letters. Mullett’s work — which with the help of analytical categories such as role relation, transactional content, directional flow and duration of interaction scrutinized the nature of each relationship in the epistolary network of Theophylact of Ohrid; reconstructed and analyzed this network structurally (e.g., its size and density, clusters within the network); and finally examined how the archbishop made use of his relationships®? — again provided a major impetus and has remained influential,!°° although the field has also moved further, and so quantitative, computer-assisted network analysis is perhaps the one vision Hatlie articulated in 1996 that has been most forcefully realized since.!° There remain problems inherent in the methods of network analysis, which are usually acknowledged but not always sufficiently addressed: the image of networks emerging from letter-collections are representations of networks, constructed and manipulated by the compilers of the collections in question: to give just one simple example, high-profile personalities such as members of the imperial family and the aristocracy tend to be overrepresented in collections. We therefore should be wary of falling into the positivist trap yet again.!0?
Epistolary communication and performance are further areas that have increasingly attracted the attention of Byzantinists. Often with the help of modern sociological and anthropological theory, case studies on individual writers or specific periods have examined codes and rituals of epistolary exchange, the function of gifts - which are no longer seen merely as “realia”!°3 — and humor, the role of letter-bearers, the interpenetration of oral/aural and textual elements in long-distance communication, and the performative afterlife of letters in intellectual gatherings (theatra).!°4 Finally, I should mention that fruitful work combining literary with psychological analysis has been done on letters of consolation.!°5
Some of these advances have particularly benefitted from interdisciplinary projects between Byzantinist and scholars working on the medieval West.106 This should not be a surprise: letter-writing and epistolary communication is a practice shared by almost all literate cultures from the very beginnings of the invention of writing systems, and similar structures in correspondence of different cultures may be explained by similar human needs for communication and self-presentation. Pioneering, in this regard, was the Medieval Friendship and Friendship Networks project (2005-2010), headed by Julian Haseldine, Margaret Mullet and Jon-Vidar Sigurdsson, and funded by the British Academy, which produced a number of comparative conferences with concomitant publications!® and has had a continuing impact on scholars who show mutual awareness of research trends in each other’s fields.!°® Although these interdisciplinary projects with western medievalists have proved productive, Byzantinists should seek collaboration with other disciplines as well. While we should consider crossing chronological boundaries into the early modern period,!°° a look further east seems particularly promising,” as scholars working not only on neighboring Islamic but also east Asian cultures are interested in very much the same questions as are Byzantinists.™
The various essays assembled in the present volume intend to provide accessible overviews of some of these research trends in specific areas of study for those readers who are not (yet) experts of Byzantine epistolography, but also to indicate new avenues for scholars and students in the field of Byzantine Studies. It should be understood as a companion in the proper sense: it does not aim to cover all relevant aspects and issues pertinent to Byzantine letterwriting in the manner of an exhaustive handbook, but rather as an eclectic guide giving orientation, raising questions, and providing inspiration. Several important subjects — for example, letter-writing manuals, letter-writing and religion," letters and literary theory — as well as further case studies on individual epistolary oeuvres such as that of Theodore the Studite were part of the original publication plan but did not materialize. It is hoped, however, that this somewhat fragmented picture will not encroach on the usefulness of this volume but will, on the contrary, instigate others to explore those areas that have remained at the periphery or are absent from the volume.
The first section, Contexts for Byzantine Epistolography, introduces epistolary writing in cultures other than Byzantium as defined above, some of which are entangled with Byzantine epistolary traditions (Chapters 1 and 2), while insight into others may be useful for comparative purposes (Chapter 3). Byzantine Letter-Writers in Context presents case studies on two authors — one each from the middle and late Byzantine periods — who have left behind substantial corpora of letters (Chapters 4 and 5). The aim of the largest section, Forms and Functions of Byzantine Epistolography, is to provide a kaleidoscopic view of the great variety of different forms Byzantine letters could take on and purposes they could serve, which includes specific types of letters and intersections with genres, discourses and practices that are not genuinely epistolary in the narrow sense (Chapters 6-9, 15); their social functions as performative writings and pieces of communication that may focus on the “T’, the “you” and/ or the relationship between the “I” and the “you” (Chapters 8-13); and their representations and internal roles in visual and narrative genres (Chapters 14 and15). The two essays in the final section, Byzantine Epistolography and (Post-) Modern Theory, intend to exemplify how theories and methodologies developed in other fields may be usefully employed for the study of Byzantine letters (Chapters 16 and 17).
Notwithstanding my hope that this volume will contribute to furthering our understanding of epistolary culture in Byzantium and beyond, and despite the remarkable progress in recent years outlined above, much work remains to be done. We certainly need more case studies on individual authors and collections, including collections of sample letters;? on epistolary types (petitions, recommendations, encyclicals, ethopoietical/“fictional” letters, etc.) and themes (exile,!"4 illness,"5 travel,46 to name but a few of the most obvious); on formal and structural elements of letters; and on letters figuring in other genres, such as hagiographical narrative. These will be the indispensable basis for the even more significant synthetic studies on specific periods and on developments throughout the entire Byzantine millennium, which are almost entirely missing from our bibliography of Byzantine epistolography."” In all these, and further, areas, Hatlie’s 1996 concluding remark still seems apposite as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century:
Whatever the particular directions of future research, the larger picture is one in which codicologists, philologists, literary critics and theorists, and historians must borrow on one another's findings. Collaborative work is perhaps the best way ahead. Or, failing at that, scholars can and should cross boundaries into other fields as needed. The continued redemption of Byzantine epistolography may depend on it.U8
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to: the managing editor of Brill’s Companions to the Byzantine World, Wolfram Brandes, who invited me to contribute a volume to this important new series; the authors of the individual chapters for their unfailing cooperation; Angela Zielinski Kinney for her excellent work as the translator of Chapters 1 and 15; the two anonymous reviewers who made a number of valuable suggestions; Sara Elin Roberts who copyedited the text of the manuscript, and Hannelore Segers who revised references and bibliographies; and the publisher’s former and current editorial staff, in particular Julian Deahl, Irini Argirouli, Alessandra Giliberto and Dinah Rapliza, for their steady support and patience during the long publication process.
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