The letter collections that the high-ranking court official Nikephoros Choumnos (c.1260–1327) compiled on the basis of his correspondence with the emperor, fellow intellectuals, clergymen and relatives, are an important testimony to the social and intellectual history of late Byzantium. They show how during this period of cultural revival and political crisis writers used letters not only as a medium for communication and networking within a small educated elite based primarily in Constantinople but also as a vehicle for self-representation through the publication of carefully curated manuscript collections.

The present book aims to make these different, yet closely intertwined layers of the 180 surviving letters of Nikephoros Choumnos accessible through a new critical edition with facing German translation. One of its main objectives is to present the individual collections the author commissioned as autonomous works of literary autobiography and to foreground textual fluidity on both the macrostructural level of the collections and the microstructural level of each letter. In addition to a short biography of the author, the introduction provides fundamental analyses of various aspects of the collections and of the individual letters preserved in them (transmission, formation and composition of the collections, prosopography, summaries with commentary, linguistic and literary elements), offers a detailed discussion of the orthography of the authorial manuscripts and explains the principles and methods applied in the edition and translation.

The present chapter examines the role that letter-writing played within educated elites of the late Byzantine period. It argues that epistolography was an essential medium of social exchange which enabled literati to communicate among another and to reaffirm themselves as a distinctive group based on the principles of friendship and shared intellectual ideals. While the general “conservatism” of Byzantine literary culture fostered the stabilization of social and linguistic codes within this framework, this essay shows that the transformation that Byzantine society underwent due to the severe crisis it witnessed in this period, also challenged traditional values and deeply affected the constitution of networks and behavior of educated elites.

The present essay offers a critical response to Ihor Ševčenko’s assessment of the controversy between Theodore Metochites and Nikephoros Choumnos which has had a lasting impact on scholarship on these two important political and intellectual figures in the reign of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. While Ševčenko contended that the feud was an outgrowth of a personal rivalry originating with Metochites’ replacement of Choumnos as the right-hand man of the emperor, this essay argues that it should instead be understood as a conflict of diametrically opposed ideas about the role of literature and philosophy in civic life and society. To that end, first the evidence about the date and background of Metochites’ assumption of the office of mesazōn is reevaluated. This is followed by a fresh look at the “dossier polémique” comprising four successive treatises by Choumnos and Metochites, which, as is shown, bears striking affinities to their previous, “friendly” correspondence. The final part of the essay focuses on the first text of the “dossier” which triggered the quarrel: Choumnos’ Discourse 27, On literary criticism and composition. An earlier version of this text which was unknown to Ševčenko supports the view that it was not intended as an attack on Metochites but rather continued their prior letter exchange. In an appendix, Discourse 27 is for the first time critically edited based on both the earlier and later redactions and rendered into English.

This chapter surveys key aspects of rhetorical practice in Byzantium, with a focus on the middle and late periods. The first part maps out the generic landscape of Byzantine rhetoric, which, in addition to oratory in the narrow sense, can be argued to comprise virtually all of (highbrow) literature, including poetry. While it is true that Byzantine rhetoric is particularly rich in texts of the demonstrative type such as encomia, the essay asserts against claims to the contrary, that forms of deliberative and judicial rhetoric continued to exist in Byzantium and appear in fact ubiquitously once we broaden the scope beyond secular oratory. After a brief sketch of the place of rhetoric in higher education, the chapter proceeds to discuss the various steps involved in composing and performing a rhetorical text. In this, it follows ancient and medieval precepts for the so-called "tasks of the rhetorician"—invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery—and shows their relevance for the practice of writing and reciting texts belonging to various rhetorical genres. Throughout, this chapter argues that scholarship on Byzantine rhetoric has focused too narrowly on panegyric and here on matters of style, and that we should turn our attention to long-neglected aspects of argumentative technique that were at the heart of Byzantine rhetorical theory and education and that can be found in a wide array of textual genres, particularly in religious literature.

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used, for instance, to give political advice, to convey philosophical ideas, or to establish and foster ties with peers. A particular type of this genre is the letter cast in verse, or epistolary poem, which merges the form and function of the letter with stylistic elements of poetry. In Greek literature, epistolary poetry is first safely attested in the fourth century AD and would enjoy a lasting presence throughout the Byzantine and early modern periods.
The present volume introduces the reader to this hitherto unexplored chapter of post-classical Greek literature through an anthology of exemplary epistolary poems in the original Greek with facing English translation. This collection, which covers a broad chronological range from late antique epigrams of the Greek Anthology to the poetry of western humanists, is accompanied by exegetical commentaries on the anthologized texts and by critical essays discussing questions of genre, literary composition, and historical and social contexts of selected epistolary poems.

This introductory essay raises general questions about the nature of Byzantine letters and provides some preliminary definitions for the purpose of the present volume. The second part sketches recent trends in scholarship on Byzantine epistolography and formulates suggestions for future research.

Essentially all Greek letters from the Middle Ages have come down to us not as originals but as manuscript copies, most often as part of collections. This specific form of transmission involves interpretive issues that for Byzantine epistolography have hardly been addressed. Scholarship on letter-writing commonly treats the individual letters transmitted in collections as documents of written communication while ignoring the issue that these collections provide a selective and most often deliberately manipulated image of original correspondence. This essay proposes that we turn our attention to the realities of epistolary manuscripts and that we take the historical collections seriously as coherent works of literature. The “New Philology”, it is argued, can serve as a useful guide for such an endeavor. While this philological movement, which emerged from currents of postmodern theory in the late 1980s, lacks a coherent conceptual framework or consistent methodology, its focus on the phenomenon of textual fluidity in medieval manuscript cultures and on concomitant problems of presentation in critical editions are highly relevant to the suggested reconsideration of Byzantine letter-collections.

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography introduces and contextualizes the culture of Byzantine letter-writing from various socio-historical, material and literary angles. While this culture was long regarded as an ivory-tower pastime of intellectual elites, the eighteen essays in this volume, authored by leading experts in the field, show that epistolography had a vital presence in many areas of Byzantine society, literature and art. The chapters offer discussions of different types of letters and intersections with non-epistolary genres, their social functions as media of communication and performance, their representations in visual and narrative genres, and their uses in modern scholarship. The volume thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of letter-writing in the Byzantine Empire and beyond.