Christmas presents for John Tzetzes: a new verse epistle from the letter collection

The corpus of Tzetzes’ epistles edited by Pietro Luigi Leone in 1972 includes 107 letters. However, two of the earliest manuscript witnesses of the collection bequeath a 108th letter consisting of 16 iambs and closing the corpus. The short missive is addressed to one Konstantinos Phyteianos. The present paper provides the first edition and translation into English of this letter, analysing its authorship and contents as well as its rhetorical function within the corpus.

Leafing through Pliny with Sidonius

The programmatic opening letter 1.1 of Sidonius Apollinaris’ correspondence is clearly inspired by the opening letter of Pliny the Younger’s correspondence. This article, however, argues that it can only be fully understood when read against a combination of Pliny’s letters 1.1, 1.2, and 1.5. Plin. Ep. 1.2 raises the issue of editing and publishing speeches, which Sidonius explicitly applies to bringing out a letter collection, as well as the eminently important discussion of a literary canon in which Cicero plays a crucial role for both authors. In Sidonius’ opening letter, Cicero’s appearance is cloaked in a strangely farcical guise which, however, becomes transparent once read against the foil of Plin. Ep. 1.5. Cicero then appears as a symbol of non-conformist behaviour which is at the basis of Sidonius’ editorial project.

Epistolary cognition: The family letters of Rosalie Calvert

This article argues for the distinctive nature of cognition involved in correspondence, arguing that this cognition is highly creative and in corollary, arguing that this cognition is positioned within social and cultural conditions that must be considered in a full analysis. The author argues that letters are often written from the perspective of an “embodied epistolary present,” the letter writer’s temporal, spatial, and corporeal viewpoint depicted through the use of present tense and other markers. The author further elaborates the relationship between correspondence and common ground. The embodied epistolary present facilitates the “imagined copresence” of writer and recipient (possible through conceptual blending), which the author describes as “the fictitious conceit that a recipient is present to serve as an interlocutor during the writer’s embodied compositional present.” Like the face-to-face conversation that it simulates, epistolary discourse depicted with imagined copresence relies on the common ground shared by the writer and recipient; the author argues that the common ground also shapes other discourse modes present in correspondence including narrative episodes and reporting. The author further shows that epistolary discourse reflects cultural norms, shaping what writers include and elide. To demonstrate all these points, the author draws examples from the letter collection Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795–1821, edited by Margaret Law Callcott (1992). Calvert was a plantation mistress in postrevolutionary Maryland who corresponded with intimate relatives in Belgium; as such, Calvert’s letters demonstrate both the imaginative work that letters deploy and the common ground that shapes epistolary content.

Kinship in the Diplomacy of Theoderic the Great

This article addresses the active matrimonial diplomacy of Theoderic the Great, its textual design, kin rhetoric and its possible patterns. The main issue of this article is the attempt to understand whether there were any Germanic patterns of behaviour that correlate with the Latin rhetorical design of Theoderic’s matrimonial diplomacy. The main source used is the Variae, a letter collection of Cassiodorus Senator.

Writing letters and chronography in parallel: the case of Michael Glykas’ letter collection and Biblos Chronike in the 12th century

This paper focuses on the 12th-century Byzantine scholar Michael Glykas and the two main pillars of his multifarious literary production, Biblos Chronike and Letters, thoroughly exploring for the first time the nature of their interconnection. In addition to the primary goal, i. e. clarifying as far as possible the conditions in which these two works were written, taking into account their intertextuality, it extends the discussion to the mixture of features in texts of different literary genre, written in parallel, by the same author, based on the same material. By presenting the evidence drawn from the case of Michael Glykas, the paper attempts to stress the need to abandon the strictly applied taxonomical logic in approaching Byzantine Literature, as it ultimately prevents us from constitute the full mark of each author in the history of Byzantine culture.

The Formation of the Pauline Corpus

This chapter explores the question how the letters of Paul came to be preserved, edited, and collected, so that a corpus Paulinum became broadly available in the early church by the close of the second century. The chapter begins by canvassing the relevant evidence, part of which is external, consisting of references to the letters of Paul in early Christian sources, and part of which is internal, consisting of features of the letters themselves. This overview of the evidence is followed by descriptions and evaluations of a variety of theories about the agents, motives, and methods that may have played a role in the development of the Pauline letter collection and about the various forms it may have taken. Finally, the essay draws some conclusions that seem probable, even though the evidence that is available does not allow for a full understanding of all the attendant issues.