Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
Cristiana Sogno is Associate Professor of Classics at Fordham University.
Bradley K. Storin is Assistant Professor of the Religious Studies at Louisiana State University.
Edward J. Watts is Professor and Alkiviadis Vassiladis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California, San Diego.
“With largely overlooked and understudied letter corpora . . . this book will undoubtedly be a standard consultative work for future research on late antique letter collections.”—Augustinian Studies
“[A]n impressive and wide-ranging collection of essays, which together provide a comprehensive study of the major collections of Latin and Greek letters from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.”—Journal of Theological Studies
“Late Antique Letter Collections stands to offer an example of a newly developing way of viewing letter collections, not as funds of social details to be mined without critical perspective but as pieces of literature in their own right.”—Ellen Muehlberger, Associate Professor of Christianity in Late Antiquity at the University of Michigan and author of Angels in Late Ancient Christianity
488 pp.7 x 10Illus: 2 line illustrations, 12 tables
9780520281448$150.00|£125.00Hardcover
Dec 2016