Letters and New Philology

Chapter 17 Letters and New Philology Alexander Riehle 1 Philology The term “philology” as we understand it today was coined in the modern era but is derived from ancient Greek φιλολογία, already attested in the classical period, although only sporadically, with the meaning “love of learning/ literature”.1 The correlative adjective φιλόλογος appears more frequently in ancient and medieval sources, usually designating a person fond of letters. Only briefly, in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, and in specific contexts, φιλόλογος came to designate more technically the scholar, teacher or student dealing “professionally” with language and literature.2 This technical usage has prevailed in most languages, although the exact semantic field remains a matter of debate. Some scholars have described philology somewhat vaguely as the practice of “slow” (Roman Jakobson) or “close reading”, and as such, Edward Said saw philology as the basis of humanism.3 In a more recent and widely received article, the Indologist Sheldon Pollock defined philology more precisely as “the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory of language – that’s linguistics – or the theory of meaning or truth – that’s philosophy – but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.”4 1 See Liddell/Scott/Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1937, s.v. φιλολογία, with Alexiou, “Greek Philology”, p. 56. 2 See the evidence in Liddell/Scott/Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1937, s.v. φιλόλογος II.3, particularly Phrynichos (Atticist of the second century AD), Eclogae 372: “Philologos: the one who loves the letters and strives after learning. Nowadays people use the word also for the expert [in the letters], though this is not correct [according to Classical usage]” (Φιλόλογος· ὁ φιλῶν λόγους καὶ σπουδάζων περὶ παιδείαν· οἱ δὲ νῦν ἐπὶ τοῦ ἐμπείρου τιθέασιν τοὔνομα, οὐκ ὀρθῶς). 3 Said, “The Return to Philology”, p. 61: “That basis [for all humanistic practice] is at bottom what I have been calling philological, that is, a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history”. See also Pollock, “Future Philology?”, p. 935: “[We are talking here] about the survival of the very capacity of human beings to read their pasts and, indeed, their presents and thus to preserve a measure of their humanity” and ibid., p. 950: “only once we have acquired the means, through cultivation of philology, to access the textuality of the past can we proceed to dispute the value of knowing it.” 4 Pollock, “Future Philology?”, p. 934. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004424616_019 Letters and New Philology 467 This still rather broad understanding of philology as an academic discipline or approach to the textual record of the past and present contrasts with a more narrow definition – to which, most often, self-professed “philologists” subscribe –5 equating philology with what we usually call “textual criticism”, i.e., the branch of textual research that is concerned with the theory and practice of editing texts (cf. German Editionsphilologie/Editionswissenschaft, French ecdotique, Italian ecdotica, Spanish ecdótica).6 This type of philology is traditionally viewed as fundamental research (Grundlagenforschung), a “hard science” that provides basic tools and data for “soft sciences” such as literary criticism. Such an understanding is problematic as it evokes notions of objectivity that stand in contrast with the more subjective interpretive engagement with texts.7 Yet, as the following discussion will show, editorial theory and practice on the one hand and literary criticism, theory and history on the other are inseparably intertwined and belong to philology as a discipline that seeks to make sense of texts. While in various periods from the time of the Hellenistic kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages in the realm of Greek and Latin literature there was vibrant philological activity which secured the survival and restoration of texts in an era of manuscript transmission,8 the history of textual criticism in the modern sense takes shape with the humanist editions from the fifteenth century onward. The actual innovation of that period consisted, however, of mediality rather than editorial theory and technique: the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, which quickly led to a frenzy of making the Latin and Greek classics available through the new medium, enabled a significantly wider and quicker diffusion of texts as compared to the rather laborious, costly and slow circulation of manuscript copies. Yet, humanist editors followed basically the same principles as their ancient and medieval predecessors: they usually took one available manuscript, often a rather recent one, as the basis for their print edition and confined themselves to correcting apparently corrupt passages with the help of conjectures – i.e., hypothetical 5 Ziolkowski, “What is Philology”. 6 See, for example, the definition of “philologie” in the French Larousse encyclopedia <https:// www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/philologie/79148>: “Établissement ou étude critique de textes, par la comparaison systématique des manuscrits ou des éditions, par l’histoire.” 7 See, for example, Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology, esp. pp. 3–4: “the identification and restoration of texts from the past – that is, philology as understood in this book – establishes a distance vis-à-vis the intellectual space of hermeneutics and of interpretation as the textual practice that hermeneutics informs. […] [P]hilology has cultivated its self-image as a patient craft whose key values are sobriety, objectivity, and rationality.” See also Alexiou, “Greek Philology”, pp. 54–55. 8 See Reynolds/Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 1–122; Pöhlmann, Einführung in die Überlieferungsgeschichte, vol. 1 and vol. 2, pp. 1–95. 468 Riehle emendations based on linguistic knowledge and common sense – and regularly by reverting to other codices offering variant readings. Through the reproduction and perpetuation in subsequent editions, a “vulgata”, or canonized version, of the given text was created. Only a few scholars of the later fifteenth through to the early eighteenth centuries – among them Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), Erasmus of Rotterdam (c.1469–1536), Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), and Richard Bentley (1662–1742) – developed a sense of the historicity of manuscript tradition and the basic principles of transmission through manuscript copies.9 It was only in the course of the eighteenth century that New Testament scholars and classical philologists started reflecting on relationships between manuscripts and their genealogy, and called for abandoning the vulgate version or textus receptus in favor of new editions based on the earliest or best manuscripts.10 This was to be basis on which nineteenth-century scholars formulated a new editorial method, which was named after its most important proponent: Karl Lachmann (1793–1851).11 In his impressive editorial activity, which in addition to Latin poetry and the New Testament extended to medieval German literature, Lachmann gradually developed his genealogical view of manuscript transmission and of the possibilities of retrieving the oldest available version of a given text through such genealogies. In this he could draw on the observations and conclusions formulated by contemporary peers, most importantly Karl Gottlob Zumpt (1792– 1849), Johan Nicolai Madvig (1804–1886), Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876), and Hermann Sauppe (1809–1893). In short, these scholars contended that through the “collation”, or comparison, of the available manuscripts of a given text it was possible to establish a genealogy of its tradition, which could be displayed in a stemma codicum – which Lachmann himself notably never attempted to do – and that through such a genealogy and with the help of specific criteria it was possible to reconstruct the origin of the entire tradition: a now-lost 9 10 11 See Timpanaro, La genesi, pp. 3–16 (= The Genesis, pp. 43–57); Reynolds/Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 123–207; Pöhlmann, Einführung in die Überlieferungsgeschichte, vol. 2, pp. 97–135. See Timpanaro, La genesi, pp. 17–34 (= The Genesis, pp. 58–74). For the basic principles of this method see Reynolds/Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 208–42; Pöhlmann, Einführung in die Überlieferungsgeschichte, vol. 2, pp. 137–82. West, Textual Criticism remains a useful practical guide; see more recently also Macé et al., “Textual Criticism and Text Editing” (for “oriental”, including Greek, literature), Tarrant, Texts, Editors, and Readers (for classical Latin literature), Hanna, Editing Medieval Texts (for Western medieval literature) and Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know (examples mostly from Western medieval and Renaissance literature). For the historical formation and development, and Lachmann’s contribution and impact see Timpanaro, La genesi, pp. 35–103 (= The Genesis, pp. 75–138) with the more recent and somewhat different perspective in Fiesoli, La genesi del Lachmannismo. Letters and New Philology 469 manuscript labeled “archetype”. This process, commonly called recensio, was further refined, systematized and modified by philologists of the following century, namely Paul Maas (1880–1964) and Giorgio Pasquali (1885–1952).12 The fundamental principle of the recensio is that relationships between manuscripts can be established through errors, such as omissions or misreadings, they share or do not share. If, for instance, two manuscripts – let us call them A and B – have significant errors in common (so-called “conjunctive errors”) that a third manuscript C does not present, and C has some errors of its own (“separative errors”), we can assume that AB and C do not directly depend upon another. That is, neither were AB copied from C, because they would otherwise share C’s errors, nor, vice versa, C from AB, because it would share AB’s errors, and can be classified as two different branches or sub-branches of the tradition. If, furthermore, B exhibits all of A’s errors while having additional ones, then B must derive from A and can be eliminated from further consideration as it does not offer readings potentially closer to the archetype than A – this procedure is called eliminatio codicum descriptorum. These relationships can be visualized with the following diagram, with α being the now-lost manuscript from which A and C were independently copied: α A C B By applying this basic principle to all the surviving manuscripts of a given text, one can establish a stemma codicum (genealogical tree of manuscripts) at the top of which stands the archetype, usually designated with the siglum ω, whose text can be reconstructed through the consensus of its independent sub-branches, the hyparchetypes. Assuming that the archetype did not constitute the author’s autograph copy – which for ancient literature is a safe assumption, given that even the earliest surviving manuscripts are separated from the author’s lifetime by several hundred years – its reconstructed text will not be free of errors. It should also be noted that even authors are not exempt from committing mistakes when writing down their own compositions. This is when the second step of “textual criticism” comes into play, the emendatio, i.e., a correction of obvious errors in the archetype that is not based on readings found in the manuscripts but on the modern editor’s conjectures. 12 Maas, Textkritik (Textual Criticism); Pasquali, Storia della tradizione. 470 Riehle From early on there was opposition to the rather simplistic assumptions and mechanic procedures of “Lachmann’s method”. Already scholars of the eighteenth century realized that scribes did not always make their copies from one exemplar alone, but sometimes took readings from several manuscripts at their disposal. Thus, regularly the “vertical” transmission gets “contaminated” with variants coming from different branches of the tradition (so-called “horizontal” transmission). Such a situation usually hopelessly spoils the construction of a stemma. Moreover, the tradition of an ancient text frequently does not go back to a single version represented by the archetype, but there are branches that seem to be completely independent from one another, which may point to different versions already circulating in antiquity (so-called “open” tradition). Despite these and other limitations,13 “Lachmann’s method” has asserted itself in classical philology and numerous medieval and modern philologies.14 In the wake of post-modern theory, however, a new wave of opposition has overrun the editorial principles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The critique came specifically from medievalists and early modernists, whose philological traditions, as those of classical philology, were heavenly influenced by Lachmann. Their objections were of a much more fundamental nature than the observation that the stemmatic method cannot do justice to complex forms of transmission.15 In 1989, the French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini published a small monograph titled Éloge de la variante (In Praise of the Variant), which prompted a plethora of rejoinders.16 Cerquiglini’s main argument is that philology of the stemmatic type is wrong because it presupposes the notion of a reliable, definitive text – a notion that according to him did not exist in pre-modern cultures up until the eighteenth century (pp. 17–29 [1–12]). He insists that, on the contrary, especially in the Middle Ages text is variance (esp. pp. 57–69 [33–45]) and that it is philology’s and the philologists’ task to display such variance in their editions (pp. 105–16 [72–82]). In this, he criticized not only “Lachmann’s method”, which treats every variant as error that needs to be eliminated in order to get as close as possible to a supposed original text 13 14 15 16 For instance, an endless discussion has revolved around the puzzling question of why almost all stemmata are bipartite, as in our simple example above, rather than having three or more main branches. Is this situation inherent in the nature of manuscript transmission or due to some flaw in the method of reconstruction? See, for example, Timpanaro, La genesi, pp. 123–50 (= The Genesis, pp. 157–87); Grier, “Lachmann, Bédier and the Bipartite Stemma”. The essays in Greetham, Scholarly Editing on traditions of text editing in various disciplines provide a good overview; see the name index at p. 693, s.v. Lachmann, Karl for references to “Lachmann’s method” throughout the volume. For a concise overview of the New Philology movement, its background and impact on Medieval Studies, see Yager, “New Philology”. See also Bein, “Textkritik”, pp. 90–92. See, for instance, Busby, Towards a Synthesis?; Stackmann, “Neue Philologie?”. Letters and New Philology 471 (pp. 73–101 [46–71]), but also Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), who, in opposition to Lachmann and his followers, had argued for editing medieval French texts or text versions on the basis of one manuscript only (today usually labelled “besttext method”).17 In his conclusion, Cerquiglini advocated the use of the then still relatively new computer technology in text editing, because “the computer, through its dialogic and multidimensional screen, simulates the endless and joyful mobility of medieval writing”.18 Shortly after the publication of Cerquiglini’s book, a special issue of the journal Speculum, edited by the American Romanist Stephen G. Nichols, appeared under the title “The New Philology”. What was new in this philology was not a coherent conceptual framework for textual scholarship, but a general “desire to return to the medieval origins of philology, to its roots in a manuscript culture” and “to minimize the isolation between medieval studies and other contemporary cognitive methodologies”.19 This desire expresses itself in the New Philologist’s attention to the manuscript not merely as textual witness in the tradition of an authorial work, but as a cultural product, which involves visual images, script, paratexts and other elements that stand in dynamic relationships with one another. Post-structuralist theory which called into question several pivotal notions of traditional literary criticism such as “author”, evidently served as an important source of inspiration for the movement. Nichol thus characteristically states that “in the act of copying a text, the scribe supplants the original poet, often changing words or narrative order, suppressing or shortening some sections, while interpolating new material in others”, concluding that “medieval culture did not simply live with diversity, it cultivated it”.20 On a historiographical side note, it should be emphasized that Cerquiglini’s and Nichol’s ideas were not as unprecedented as their prominent place in medievalists’ discussions about editorial scholarship may suggest, but had important precursors in philologies of mostly modern literatures.21 In Anglo-American Studies it was particularly Jerome McGann who, in light of 17 18 19 20 21 Bédier, “La tradition manuscrite”, esp. 353–56. A related (but in several ways fundamentally different) method, which is primarily employed in Anglo-American text editing, is that of the “copy-text”; see Tanselle, “The Varieties of Scholarly Editing”, pp. 21–23 for an introduction to its history and its distinction from best-text models. In Praise of the Variant, pp. 80–81 (Éloge de la variante, p. 114: “l’ordinateur, par son écran dialogique et multidimensionnel, simule la mobilité incessante et joyeuse de l’écriture médiévale”). Nichols, “Introduction”, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 7–9. In his introduction, Cerquiglini remarks on contemporary interest in “genetic criticism” but does not provide any references: Éloge de la variante, pp. 9–11 (In Praise of the Variant, pp. xi–xiii). 472 Riehle then recent trends in literary theory, took a critical stance against the heavy reliance on authorial intention in the eclectic methods of copy-text editions.22 In German philology similar trends loomed already in the early 1970s.23 On account of the many variants they found in authorial drafts, in multiple “final” versions and authorized publications, scholars in this field left behind the notion of a stable, definitive text and declared as the most important objective of their “historical-critical editions” (historisch-kritische Ausgaben) the adequate presentation of such fluidity and in particular of the genesis of texts. The collective volume Texte und Varianten, edited by Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller and published in 1971, was an important milestone. In his own contribution to the volume, Martens posited a dynamic understanding of “text”, stating programmatically that “text in this sense proves to be no longer a static entity, but a phenomenon whose specific nature is always its immanent motion.” This shift in perspective necessarily deeply affects our editorial approaches to such texts in permanent flux: “It seems obvious that this view of a quasi-infinite textual dynamic must have far-reaching ramifications for the editor of texts. Firstly, it becomes evident that with this theoretical conception of text, variance must play a pivotal role […]. Secondly, from this consideration it follows that none of the various versions of a text can claim for itself priority”.24 In order to put such considerations into practice, editors developed and implemented various types of apparatuses, such as the Einblendungsapparat through which variants are presented in linear succession in the running text – rather than in individual lemmata as part of a separate apparatus on the bottom of the printed page – and the synoptic apparatus, which displays variants vertically in the context of the entire text and is particularly suited for works that survive with significant textual variation.25 22 23 24 25 McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism; id., The Textual Condition. See also the essays in Cohen, Devils and Angels, which discuss from various perspectives the intersection between critical theory and text editing. Several important contributions have been translated into English and assembled in Gabler/Bornstein/Pierce, Contemporary German Editorial Theory; see in particular Gabler’s “Introduction: Textual Criticism and Theory” for a succinct overview and comparison with the Anglo-American copy-text method. Martens, “Textdynamik und Edition”, pp. 169 (“Text erweist sich schon in diesem Sinn nicht mehr als ein statisches Gebilde, sondern als ein Phänomen, dessen spezifische Charakteristik schon immer die ihm immanente Bewegung ist”) and 171 (“Es erscheint klar, daß diese Auffassung einer quasi unendlichen Textdynamik für den Herausgeber von Texten weitreichende Konsequenzen nach sich ziehen muß. Zunächst wird deutlich, daß unter diesem texttheoretischen Geichtspunkt der Textvarianz eine zentrale Rolle zukommen muß […]. Zum zweiten ergibt sich jedoch aus dieser Überlegung, daß unter verschiedenen Fassungen keine Textgestalt für sich eine Priorität beanspruchen kann”). See the surveys with examples in Scheibe, “Editorische Grundmodelle”, pp. 32–44 and Plachta, Editionswissenschaft, pp. 99–114. Letters and New Philology 473 Although claims like Martens’ quoted above – which are very much in line with Cerquiglini’s later formulations – remain controversial, the New Philology and related trends have had a sensible impact on editorial theory and practice in Medieval Studies. This is particularly evident in the growing number of digital editions of medieval texts,26 which enable not only the publication of much larger quantities of materials – such as transcriptions of several versions along with the edited text(s), manuscript reproductions, accompanying commentaries and glossaries, etc. – than would be possible in traditional print media but also, through hypertext method, their presentation in such a way that these materials become flexibly relatable to one another. Such editions can thus cater to the interests and needs of different groups of users, who may prefer to read the given text(s) in individual versions independently or in comparison with any given number of other versions; with the “accidentals” (spelling, punctuation) in the original form or adapted to modern-day standards; from the manuscript(s) directly, in diplomatic transcriptions, or in edited scholarlycritical or modernized versions; etc.27 At the same time, computer tools have contributed to changes in genealogical methods of the “Lachmann” type as well, especially for texts that survive in a great number of manuscripts, such as the books of the New Testament or patristic literature.28 2 New Philology29 in Byzantine Studies As a still relatively young child of classical philology, Byzantine Studies naturally also inherited its philological methods, and it was notably a scholar very much devoted to Byzantine literature who expanded textual philology of the “Lachmann” type, namely Paul Maas.30 Although it seems that Byzantine Studies in recent years – in a kind of pubertal act of defiance – has increasingly turned its back to the discipline that gave birth to it and seeks to be adopted into a wider community of medievalists and, for the early period, late 26 27 28 29 30 See, among others, the examples in Menzer, “Review of Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant” and Bein, Textkritik, pp. 154–65, and the bibliography of digital editions of ancient, medieval and modern texts in Sahle, Digitale Editionsformen, vol. 3, pp. 488–508. For a comprehensive introduction to digital editions and editing see Sahle, Digitale Editionsformen, vols. 2 and 3. See, for example, Wasserman/Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism; Macé/Schmidt/ Weiler, “Le classement des manuscrits”. In the following, I will use the term New Philology to comprise also the related movements in Anglo-American and German philology briefly discussed in the previous section. See above, p. 468 at n. 12. 474 Riehle antiquists, it is interesting to note that the New Philology movement has made little impact in this field, and this only recently. To my knowledge, the only explicit attempt to capitalize on the ideas formulated by Cerquiglini, Nichols and company constituted a round table convened by Staffan Wahlgren at the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Sofia 2011,31 and the only digital critical editions in the field to date are those of the Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project, which include collections of sayings with a complex manuscript tradition, as well as Kekaumenos’ Advice and Anecdotes.32 Although these editions are perhaps not as sophisticated as some of their Western medieval counterparts, these projects haven proven the feasibility of such enterprises within Byzantine Studies and can serve as encouragement and a point of reference for future web-based editions. One area for which the theorizations and methodologies discussed above could be particularly fruitful are texts that survive in autograph or authorized copies with significant authorial variants, which can either reflect the genesis of the given text or the revision of a “final” version for a new purpose such as performance in a different context or publication in a manuscript as part of the collected works of an author.33 Another promising field is Byzantine vernacular literature. Curiously, however, the New Philology, which was proclaimed by specialists of medieval vernacular literatures, has had little influence on the philological engagement with texts composed in vernacular Greek. Although scholars from the 1970s onwards started publishing parallel editions of vernacular texts that survive in several different redactions,34 there was virtually no theoretical discussion of inherent editorial and interpretive issues until the late 1990s and early 2000s. The subject received wider attention in the framework of two conferences of the Neograeca Medii Ævi devoted to Greek vernacular literature of the late Byzantine and Renaissance periods, convened in 1997 in Cyprus and in 1999 in Hamburg.35 The first involved a round-table discussion 31 32 33 34 35 See the abstracts in the Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress, vol. 2, pp. 32–37. Apophthegmata et gnomae secundum alphabetum, eds. Searby/Bylund/Österdahl; Kekaumenos, Advice and Anecdotes, ed. and trans. Roueché. See generally Reinsch, “Bemerkungen zu byzantinischen Autorenhandschriften”; for detailed discussion of specific cases see, for example, Ševčenko, “The Author’s Draft of Nicolas Cabasilas’ ‘Anti-Zealot’ Discourse” with Kotzabassi, “Ein neues Autographon des Nikolaos Kabasilas”; Tiftixoglu, “Zur Genese der Kommentare des Theodoros Balsamon”. In my unpublished MA thesis, I prepared an edition with synoptic apparatus, adapted from German models (see above, p. 472), of Michael Apostoles’ Funeral Oration for Bessarion, which survives in two autograph copies that reveal repeated authorial revision. See van Gemert, “Σκοπός, δυνατότητες και όρια”, pp. 25–26 with the list of editions in n. 27. An earlier conference (Cologne 1986) remained firmly within the bounds of traditional approaches; see Eideneier, Neograeca Medii Aevi: Text und Ausgabe. Letters and New Philology 475 of “editorial method: problems and solutions”, during which the existence of multiple text versions and its ramifications for the practice of text editing were addressed at several points, albeit with hardly revolutionary suggestions for actual practice.36 This preliminary discussion prompted the organization of a follow-up conference to be fully devoted to “the theory and practice of editing late Byzantine Renaissance and post-Byzantine vernacular literature”.37 The interpretive and editorial issues involved in “fluid” texts received more room in this context, and particularly Michael Jeffreys’ contribution called for a radical shift in our editorial approaches to such texts that echo closely the remarks by the pioneers of the then still recent New Philology.38 However, these tentative attempts at reconsidering editorial approaches to vernacular texts have left little traces on editorial practice, and so Hans Eideneier’s 1988 edition of the early modern versions of the bacchanalian poem Krasopateras and Helma Winterwerb’s 1992 edition of the late Byzantine satirical novella Porikologos, both of which included appended synopses of the various versions in a manner akin to the German synoptic editions, have remained the only efforts to go beyond either a pure best-text method or the mere juxtaposition of parallel versions.39 However, with no apparent connection to the New Philology, Byzantinists since the 1980s have started questioning some of the traditional editorial principles. For example, an increasing sensitivity towards certain peculiarities of manuscripts can be noticed in editions of the last few decades. While editors prior to the nineteenth century regularly followed, more or less closely, the manuscript(s) with regard to orthography and punctuation (the “accidentals” in copy-text terminology), “Lachmannists” have ever since tended to dismiss these features as irregular and misleading and have standardized spelling and accents according to the system presented in modern grammar books of 36 37 38 39 Agapitos/Pieres, «Τ’ ἀδόνιν κεῖνον ποὺ γλυκὰ θλιβᾶται», pp. 245–75. See in particular the contributions by Giorgos Danezes and Michael Jeffreys at pp. 249–51 and 258–60. Eideneier/Moennig/Τouphexes, Θεωρία και πράξη των εκδόσεων. See Jeffreys, “Πολυμορφία” with his later handbook chapter “Textual Criticism”. It should be noted that Jeffreys does not actually draw on the medieval-French scholars Cerquiglini and Nichols but rather on their Anglo-American modern-literature counterparts mentioned above. See also Agapitos, “Ἔκδοση καὶ ἑρμηνεία τῶν κειμένων” with his more extensive introduction to Libistros and Rodamne (Redaction α), ed. Agapitos, esp. pp. 94–108, and van Gemert, “Σκοπός, δυνατότητες και όρια”. Krasopateras, ed. Eideneier, pp. 90–124; Porikologos, ed. Winterwerb, pp. 274–327. In the main part of their editions, Eideneiner edited each version of the Krasopateras independently (where two witnesses exist for one version, he used one as his Leithandschrift and gave the variants of the other in the critical apparatus), while Winterwerb opted for a best-text approach within the three different groups of versions of the Porikologos. 476 Riehle classical Greek – which in the case of accentuation has its roots in Alexandrian scholarship of the second century BC – while introducing a punctuation system borrowed from modern languages, most commonly the native language of the editor.40 In particular, editions published in the Corpus Christianorum / Series Graeca, and later also the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae series, increasingly decided to reproduce the orthography – for instance, “proclitic” spelling of adverbial phrases like διατοῦτο – literally ‘for-this(-reason)’, ‘therefore’ – and, more recently and hesitantly, punctuation of the manuscripts.41 Concomitantly, a series of case studies on historical orthography and punctuation were published, many of them demonstrating that – at least within specific periods, authors, genres or groups of manuscript – there is a logic behind the spelling and usage of punctuation marks, as well as striking coherence in these, which we should therefore not easily disregard in our critical editions.42 These are tiny, yet important, steps but we still have a long way to go until we arrive at a more historical and holistic appreciation of individual manuscripts and their interrelation as envisaged by New Philologists. While it is clearly necessary that we reconsider our methods of presenting texts in critical editions, the texts in which we are interested and which we publish are in the manuscripts regularly accompanied by elements that we either completely ignore in our editions or reserve for separate publication, such as marginal and interlinear paratexts (e.g., scholia, glosses, short poems),43 diagrams44 and images,45 which are often closely linked to the main text of the given manuscript. It would be an intriguing avenue for future projects to explore viable ways of recreating these elements in editions so as to allow users to get a fuller picture of the multimedia realities of the underlying manuscripts. 40 41 42 43 44 45 Compare, for example, the edition of Theodore Hyrtakenos’ Letters published in 1798/1800 by La Porte Du Theil on the basis of the sole surviving manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Par. gr. 1209), with the recent edition by Karpozilos/Fatouros. For the respective series guidelines of the Corpus Christianorum and their application in recent editions, see Macé, “Rules and Guidelines”, pp. 260–62. For punctuation see, for example, the essays in Giannouli/Schiffer, From Manuscripts to Books; for accentuation see the survey in Noret, “L’accentuation Byzantine”. On marginal “microtexts” see generally Odorico, “‘… Alia nullius momenti’”. Specifically for poetic paratexts see Demoen, “La poésie de la συλλογή” with Ghent University’s Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams <http://www.dbbe.ugent.be/> and the recent edition of selected book epigrams in illuminated manuscripts by Rhoby, Ausgewählte byzantinische Epigramme. See the interdisciplinary 2018 Dumbarton Oaks symposium devoted to this theme: <https://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/scholarly-activities/the-diagram-paradigm>. See Tsamakda, A Companion to Byzantine Illustrated Manuscripts. Letters and New Philology 3 477 New Philology and Byzantine Epistolography Perhaps the most important contribution of the New Philology to textual scholarship is its attempt to reintegrate, at least on a theoretical level, text editing – which in recent decades has been regarded mostly as a mechanical technique, hence its gradual disappearance from Classics curricula in colleges across the globe – with the interpretation of texts. In the following I will argue that two related focal points of the New Philology – namely, textual fluidity and the “manuscript matrix”46 – can help us re-assess important aspects of Byzantine epistolography and reconsider both our interpretive and our editorial approaches to Byzantine letter-collections. Before outlining some possibilities of such a synergy, a few remarks on the transmission of medieval Greek letters are necessary. From most literate cultures – ancient, medieval and modern – we today possess letters that have come down to us in the form of the original piece of writing – on clay, stone, wood, lead, leather/parchment, papyrus, paper or other materials – dispatched from the sender(s) to the recipient(s).47 Given this form of transmission, scholars treat such letters as private or official documents with a primarily historical source value. For the purpose of publication, these letters are therefore transcribed from the originals as accurately as possible – usually without the editor’s intervention in the running text even in the case of obvious mistakes (so-called “diplomatic editions”) – and provided with a historical commentary.48 The situation the Byzantinist faces is quite different.49 Apart from a couple of thousand late antique/early Byzantine letters preserved by the dry sand of Egypt and a handful of imperial missives, no original Greek letters from the period between c.300 and 1453 survive. The reasons for this curious fact are simple: letters were written on materials susceptible to the humid climate that prevailed in most of the empire – parchment, papyrus, paper, wood – and the private and official archives that would have stored at least some of them perished with the end of the Byzantine Empire. So where do the more than 15,000 Byzantine letters that we can read today in scholarly editions come from? As 46 47 48 49 Nichols, “Introduction”, passim. See Introduction, pp. 1–2 and Ch. 1 in this volume. For modern letters see, for example, Schmid, “Was ist ein Brief?”; Frühwald/Mähl/ Müller-Seidel, Probleme der Brief-Edition; Roloff, Wissenschaftliche Briefeditionen; Bohnenkamp/Richter, Brief-Edition im digitalen Zeitalter. For an introduction to editing ancient papyri (including letters) see Schubert, “Editing a Papyrus”. For a more detailed discussion of the issues tackled in this paragraph see the Introduction, pp. 2–4 in this volume. 478 Riehle becomes evident from various contributions to this volume, ancient and medieval Greek letters were not simply a medium of pragmatic communication, that is, pieces of writing aiming exclusively or primarily to convey information over a distance or to maintain contact with loved ones. Starting in the fourth century BC, rhetors and philosophers used letters as a vehicle of learned discourse, and in the process, the letter (ἐπιστολή) emerged as a distinct literary genre with specific markers, while at the same time being cross-fertilized with other genres such as deliberative and forensic oratory. As a consequence of this literarization of epistolography, letters were considered part of the oeuvre of their authors and therefore frequently publicized through various channels. In one of his letters, the late Byzantine intellectual Joseph Bryennios (c.1350–1436) provides an insightful account of the process that would normally take place from writing a letter to its wider circulation: For this reason, the ancients did not have this habit [to obliterate letters they had received], but did the exact opposite. When they wrote or received a letter, the senders, before handing it over to the bearer, would copy the letter into a book which also contained other writings of theirs. The recipients, on the other hand, upon receipt would show the letter immediately to other erudite men, who would memorize it and write it in their own booklets. From these men, further people would receive the letter, take it down in their turn into their books, memorize it and deliver by heart – instead of any idle talk – these useful things [expounded in the letter] at home, in public places, in the streets, in gatherings, and on the occasion of all different kinds of encounters. Thus the recipient would be admired for being friends with such a great man and the writer applauded with much praise for being a rhetorician. Moreover, in this way the power of rhetoric would be advertised and many men would strive after learning. Then something like the following would happen. When the writer decided again to send a letter to the same or another friend, well aware that the recipient would memorize, copy and tell many people about it, and that within a year the letter would be inscribed in ten or even a hundred booklets and through continuous perpetuation by learned men would last forever, imagine with how much pleasure, effort and artistry he would write the letter! This is how Libanios wrote his letters, and likewise the philosopher Synesios, Isidore of Pelousion and all the remaining writers whose letters survive. This is how much they were devoted to literature, learning, beauty, and mutual love.50 50 Joseph Bryennios, Letters, no. 2, ed. Tomadakes, pp. 125–26: Διά τοι τοῦτο οἱ παλαιοί, οὐ ταύτην ἔχοντες τὴν συνήθειαν, ἀλλὰ τὴν αὐτῆς ἐναντίαν, ὁπηνίκα ἔπεμπον γράμματα ἢ Letters and New Philology 479 This vivid description is indicative of learned Byzantine conceptions of letter-writing in several ways. Note, for example, that Bryennios takes for granted the close connection between epistolography and rhetoric. For the present purpose, the passages in which he comments on the public nature of private correspondence51 are of particular interest. Bryennios suggests – as do other Byzantine letter-writers – that from the moment a letter left the sender’s hands, it could possibly enter a new sphere of written and oral discourse that the author of the letter could not completely control.52 Of course Bryennios says nothing of textual variance – on the contrary, his account suggests that the wider circle of recipients in the act of memorizing, delivering and copying tried to render the much-admired text as accurately as possible – but from all we know about oral and manuscript transmission we must assume that from this moment on, the door for deliberate or unintended variation was pushed wide open. Moreover, Bryennios’ comments about “continuous perpetuation” and the canonical epistolographers of late antiquity hints at preservation, publication and transmission beyond personal, ephemeral notebooks of writers and recipients. This is corroborated not only by the evidence of the manuscripts, on which more below, but also by further references to the compilation and publication of letters in Byzantine epistolary texts. Maximos Planoudes (c.1255–c.1305), for example, mentions in a letter his plan to “publish” (ἐκδίδωμι, literally “give out”) for a wider audience (τοῖς ἔξω = “those outside”) his hitherto “unpublished” (ἀνέκδοτοι) correspondence with Alexios Philanthropenos.53 John Tzetzes’ (c.1110–after 1160) paratextual comment in 51 52 53 ἐδέχοντο, οἱ μὲν πέμποντες, πρὸ τοῦ εἰς χεῖρας αὐτὰ δοῦναι τοῦ διακομιστοῦ, ἐτίθουν γράφοντες εἰς βιβλίον, ἔχον καὶ ἄλλα τῶν συγγραμμάτων αὐτῶν, οἱ δὲ δεχόμενοι, ἅμα τῷ δέξασθαι, τοῖς λόγου μετόχοις εὐθὺς ταῦτ’ ἐπεδείκνυον· καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀποστηθίζοντες πρῶτοι τοῖς ἰδίοις δελτίοις ἐνέγραφον καὶ οἱ ἐξ ἐκείνων λαμβάνοντες πάλιν εἰς τὰ ἑαυτῶν καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐνετίθουν βιβλία, καὶ ἀποστηθίζοντες ἐπὶ ἐπιδείξει οἴκοι τε καὶ εἰς τὰς ἀγορὰς καὶ εἰς ὁδοὺς καὶ τὰς συνελεύσεις καὶ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ὁμιλίαις ἀντὶ πάσης ἀργολογίας τὰ χρήσιμα ταῦτα διήρχοντο ἀπὸ στόματος. Ὅθεν ἐθαυμάζετο μὲν ὁ δεξάμενος, ἅτε τοιούτου φίλος ἀνδρός, ἐκροτεῖτο μετὰ ἐπαίνων ὁ γράψας ὡς ῥήτωρ, ἐγνωρίζετο δὲ καὶ ἡ τῆς ῥητορικῆς δύναμις καὶ ἐζηλοῦτο πολλαχόθεν ἡ παίδευσις. Ἐξ οὗ καί τι τοιοῦτον ἐπηκολούθει· ὅταν γὰρ καὶ αὖθις ἐβουλήθη ὁ γράφων πρὸς τὸν αὐτὸν ἢ καί τινα ἄλλον ἐπιστεῖλαι τῶν φίλων, μεμνημένος ὅτι ἐκεῖνα τὰ γράμματα ὁ δεξόμενος φίλος καὶ ἀποστηθίσει καὶ μεταγράψει καὶ πολλοῖς διηγήσεται καὶ ἐντὸς ἐνιαυσίου κύκλου εἰς δέκα ἢ καὶ ἑκατὸν δέλτους ἔσται ἐγγεγραμμένα καὶ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα μενεῖ πρὸς ἀνδρῶν φιλολόγων πολλάκις μεταγραφόμενα, μετὰ πόσης οἴει <τῆς> ἡδονῆς καὶ τῆς σπουδῆς καὶ τῆς τέχνης αὐτὰ ἔγραφεν. Οὕτω Λιβάνιος ἔγραψε τὰς ἐπιστολάς, οὕτω Συνέσιος ὁ φιλόσοφος, οὕτως ὁ Πηλουσιώτης Ἰσίδωρος, οὕτω πάντες, ὧν εἰσέτι ἐν κόσμῳ αἱ ἐπιστολαὶ διαμένουσιν. Οὕτως ἄρα περὶ τὸν λόγον ἐσπούδαζον, οὕτως ἦσαν φιλομαθεῖς, φιλόκαλοι καὶ φιλάλληλοι. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid, p. 17 aptly characterizes this phenomenon as “public intimacy”. See also Chapter 11, pp. 319–23 in this volume. See also Chapter 13 in this volume on the performance of letters in theatra. Maximos Planoudes, Letters, no. 119, ed. Leone, p. 205, l. 5–10. 480 Riehle the middle of his authorial collection gives clues about his method of publication: “Second collection of some of Tzetzes’ letters. For some ingenious person, who took with him the first one, lost the clean copy, while spoiling and jumbling up the draft.”54 This note suggests that Tzetzes’ “draft” (σχεδία = “casual, temporary (copy)”) of his collection consisted of loose sheets – hence the confusion by the person he ironically calls “ingenious” – of letter-copies – presumably the very copies he made before dispatching his letters – from which he would then, after arranging them in a certain way, produce a clean copy (ἀνακάθαρσις = “cleaning”). In another gloss Tzetzes mentions that this last step of transcription (μεταγράφειν) from draft to clean copy would normally be executed by professional scribes.55 Yet, authors regularly did not confine themselves to selecting and rearranging copies of their letters, but revised the very text of these letters, sometimes significantly as the case of Demetrios Kydones demonstrates. Before sending his letters, Kydones transcribed the text into loose quires, which are today preserved as codex Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 101. For the purpose of publication, he revised his transcriptions – adding or deleting single words or whole sentences, changing the wording, etc. – sometimes to a point where the new text bore little resemblance to the original letter. Kydones then passed his revised transcriptions on to a scribe – the scholar Manuel Kalekas, who is also known as a prolific letter-writer – adding marginal notes in which he instructs Kalekas on how to proceed in producing a clean copy of his collection. This copy, too, is preserved as manuscript Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbin. gr. 133.56 Kydones’ collection is certainly the most striking and best documented example of the entire Byzantine period. There is evidence, however, that other epistolographers proceeded in similar ways.57 54 55 56 57 John Tzetzes, Letters, ed. Leone, p. 99, l. 1–6: Δευτέρα συναγωγή τινων τοῦ Τζέτζου ἐπιστολῶν· τὴν γὰρ προτέραν, τήν τε σχεδίαν καὶ ἀνακάθαρσιν χρηστός τις ἀφελόμενος ἄνθρωπος, τὴν μὲν ἠφάνισε παντελῶς, τὴν δὲ παρέφθειρέ τε καὶ ἀλληνάλλως συνέθετο. Ibid., p. 159, l. 8–23. See, for example, also Gregory of Cyprus (ca.1241–1289/90), Letters, no. 155, ed. Eustratiades, p. 149, l. 6–8: “Having collected my letters from here and there, I have them transcribed by a calligrapher, as I wish to have them all together in one volume” (ἐπιστολὰς τὰς ἐμαυτοῦ ἄλλοθεν ἄλλην ὡς ἂν οἷός τε ὦ συλλέγων καλλιγραφεῖν δίδωμι, βουλόμενος αὐτὰς εἰς πυκτίον ἔχειν ἀθρόας). See Loenertz, Les recueils, pp. 1–18 with Hatlie, “Life and Artistry”, pp. 81–102. See also Chapter 5, pp. 168–70 in this volume. See, for example, Riehle, Funktionen der byzantinischen Epistolographie, pp. 47–85 and id., “Epistolography as Autobiography” on Nikephoros Choumnos (c.1260–1327); on Emperor Manuel II Paiologos (1350–1425) see the edition and translation of his Letters by Dennis, pp. xxi–xxii and Tinnefeld, “Zur Entstehung von Briefsammlungen”, pp. 368–69. Letters and New Philology 481 This process of compiling letters into collections is of course attested well before the Byzantine period in the Greco-Roman world. In Latin, this tradition begins with Cicero (106–43 BC) – who considered producing a collection of his revised letters towards the end of his life; the surviving collections were put together soon after his death by unknown compilers – while Pliny the Younger’s (c.61–c.113 AD) self-edited collection in 9 or 10 books became similarly authoritative for later generations of letter-writers and compilers.58 In Greek, the beginnings of this practice are more difficult to trace. Several letter-collections attributed to personalities of classical antiquity survive, but these are either entirely or in part inventions of writers of the Hellenistic or Imperial periods, although the authenticity of some of them continues to be a matter of debate.59 While few of these supposedly early collections genuinely belong to their purported authors, they prove that the idea of collecting letters of men, and to a lesser degree women, of high renown such as rulers, orators and philosophers was firmly established in the Greek realm before the appearance of undoubtedly authentic authorial collections in the fourth century AD. In fact, by the late antique period the letter-collection as a literary form seems so familiar that one could well accord it the status of a genre in its own right.60 As in my introductory attempt to sketch out a historical understanding of the genre “letter” (ἐπιστολή), let us begin with terminology.61 Although we do encounter words for collecting in epistolary contexts – for instance, συλλέγω (“to collect, gather”) and συνάγω (“to bring together, assemble”)62 and the correlative nouns συλλογή and συναγωγή63 – that are familiar from other types of collections such as gnomologia and poetic anthologies,64 their infrequency and lack of appearance in the headings of collections suggest that these words never became generic. The typical genre name for a letter-collection is simply the plural ἐπιστολαί (“letters”). There are, however, references to other terms in 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 For a recent overview of early Latin letter-collections see Salzman, “Latin Letter Collections before Late Antiquity”. For a recent overview of these collections see Jones, “Greek Letter Collections before Late Antiquity”. See Sogno/Storin/Watts, Late Antique Letter Collections for an immensely useful guide to Greek and Latin letter-collections of authors of the fourth-sixth centuries. See also the essays in Neil/Allen, Collecting Early Christian Letters. Cf. Gillett, “Communication in Late Antiquity”, p. 833 on Latin terminology in late antique epistolography. See, for example, above, p. 480, n. 55 the quotation from Gregory of Cyprus. See, for example, Tzetzes’ gloss quoted above, p. 480 at n. 54. See Odorico, “Cadre d’exposition / cadre de pensée”; Demoen, “La poésie de la συλλογή”, pp. 92–94. 482 Riehle a variety of comments on individual collections that allow interesting views into medieval Greek conceptions of letter-collections. A selection of letters of Emperor Theodore II Laskaris (1221/22–1258) in codex Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 59.35 is prefaced by a verse prologue by Theodore’s teacher and “minister” George Akropolites, who was apparently responsible for the preparation of this collection.65 As he praises the emperor’s literary skills and the beauty of his words, Akropolites refers to the letter-collection as “work composed of letters” (v. 28: ἐπιστολῶν πόνημα συντεταγμένον). The term he employs, πόνημα, literally means “something accomplished with toil” and is used in reference to any kind of literary composition. While the composite nature of this work is implied in the perfect passive participle συντεταγμένον (“put together”),66 the result is a unified “work” in one book67 meant to be read like other works of literature.68 Extensive letter-collections were regularly arranged into books (βιβλία), which probably corresponded to separate volumes.69 In a letter to Manuel Gabalas, the later metropolitan of Ephesos Matthew, Michael Gabras (c.1285/86–after 1350) states that he divided his letters addressed to friends into books “lest those who want to engage with them are forced to read through the whole corpus and presently get dizzy in their minds”,70 suggesting that he expected his audience to read a series of letters in their entirety.71 The evidence presented above, which could easily be expanded, points to the conclusion that letter-collections were generally considered to be coherent works of literature rather than haphazard assemblages of discrete documents. In the following, I will give a preliminary outline of different types of such letter-books, discuss possible rationales that hide behind such collections and reflect on what these observations mean for our understanding of Byzantine 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 George Akropolites, Prefatory Epigram, eds. Heisenberg/Wirth. See also vv. 12–14: “Like a multicolored view of flowers, the book encloses inside the colorful, all-radiant composition of written words” (Ὡς ποικιλόχρουν αὖθις ἀνθέων θέαν / τὸ ποικίλον σύνταγμα τῶν γεγραμμένων / πάνλαμπρον ἔνδον ἐγκαθειργνύει βίβλος). The metaphor of the meadow is a common topos in medieval collections of any kind (cf. the term anthology = “collection of flowers”); see, for example, Demoen, “La poésie de la συλλογή”, pp. 94–96. See the references to “this book (here)” (Ἡ βίβλος ἥδε / αὐτῆς τῆς βίβλου) in vv. 4 and 52. See especially the concluding verses 53–63, in which Akropolites addresses the reader in a manner typical of epigrams. For example, after his death, there was an edition of Theodore the Studite’s (759–826) voluminous correspondence in five books. See Theodore the Studite, Letters, ed. Fatouros, vol. 1, p. 43*, n. 2. Michael Gabras, Letters, no. 175, ed. Fatouros, vol. 2, p. 288, l. 3–6: ἅ μοι ταῦτα γράμματα τὰς πρὸς τοὺς φίλους ἔχει συνουσίας εἰς βιβλία οὑτωσὶ διελομένῳ τοῦ μὴ τοὺς ἐντυγχάνειν βουλομένους, ἀπὸ τοῦ ὅλου ἀναγκαζομένους ὁμιλεῖν, αὐτίκα ὑπομένειν ἐν τῇ γνώμῃ ἴλιγγον. See also below for further discussion of this letter. Letters and New Philology 483 epistolography and our scholarly engagement with it, and especially the practice of editing letter-collections.72 A clue to one possible reason for compiling a collection of one’s selected letters is found in Michael Gabras’ above-mentioned letter to Manuel Gabalas. After commenting on the division of his letters into books, Gabras states with reference to the letter-collection he delivers to his addressee that From reading this book you will learn that I severely struggled in my life and that almost nothing panned out as I wished, so that by going through such a considerable number of letters written over a long time span you will find that I, the author, did not have good fortune in life. However, the greatest and severest of all evils that struck me you will not learn from this book, as the account of these events will be contained in the second book, which will be regarded as the first with respect to the force of calamity [displayed in it].73 This exceptionally explicit and detailed comment on the rationale behind compiling letters into a collection makes clear that this late Byzantine author designed his letter-books as “narratives”74 of his life; in other words, they 72 73 74 Cf. the methodological questions in Ysebaert, “Medieval Letters and Letter Collections”, pp. 55–56 and id., “Letter Collections”, p. 1900 (expanding Constable, Letters and Letter-collections, pp. 57–58). Cf. also the typology of late antique letter-collections proposed by Allen, “Rationales for Episcopal Letter-collections”. For the formation and transmission of Byzantine letter collections see the general remarks and cases studies in Hatlie, “Life and Artistry”; Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid, pp. 41–43; Tinnefeld, “Zur Entstehung von Briefsammlungen”; Papatriantaphyllou-Theodoride, “Γύρω από το θέμα της παράδοσης”; Grünbart, “Byzantinische Briefflorilegien”; id., “L’epistolografia”, pp. 352– 58; Papaioannou, “Fragile Literature” (for a revised version of the second part of this article see id., Michael Psellos, pp. 250–67); Riehle, “Epistolography as Autobiography”; Kotzabassi, “Zur Überlieferung von Briefcorpora”. For late antique collections see Sogno/ Storin/Watts, Late Antique Letter Collections; Neil/Allen, Collecting Early Christian Letters. For the medieval West see, in addition to Ysebaert’s studies referenced above, Constable, “Letter-collections in the Middle Ages” and Chapter 3 in this volume. Michael Gabras, Letters, no. 175, ed. Fatouros, vol. 2, pp. 288–89, lines 24–31: σὺ δὲ τἀν αὐτῇ [sc. τῇ βίβλῳ] ταῦτα ἐπιὼν ἄλλως μὲν κάμνοντα εἰς βίον με μαθήσῃ καὶ σχεδὸν τοῖς πᾶσιν εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ κατὰ γνώμην χρώμενον, ὁπότε διὰ τοσοῦδε ἥκων ἀριθμοῦ γραμμάτων χρόνῳ οὐκ ὀλίγῳ τῶν αὐτῶν ἐξειργασμένων τὸν συνθέντα με οὐδὲν μᾶλλον τύχῃ εἰς τὸν βίον ἀγαθῇ χρησάμενον εὑρήσεις. τὰ δὲ μέγιστα καὶ κυριώτατα κακῶν δήπου τῶν καταβαλλόντων οὐκ ἔσται γνῶναί σοι ἐν τῇ αὐτῇ, τὸν ταύτῃ κατάλογον μελλούσης ἔχειν τῆς δευτέρας βίβλου καὶ πρωτίστης τῆς αὐτῆς κριθησομένης τῇ τῆς συμφορᾶς δυνάμει. The noun Gabras employs in this context, κατάλογος (“catalogue, list (e.g., of names)”), should likely be understood as pointing to the episodical character of an epistolary collection in contrast to continuous narration (διήγησις, ἀφήγησις). 484 Riehle constituted his autobiography.75 This biographical potential of epistolography is rooted in ancient and medieval epistolary theory, which attributed to the letter the property to exhibit the character (ethos) of its writer76 and thereby situated letter-writing in the rhetorical tradition of ethopoiia (“character-making”, “speech-in-character”).77 A sequence of letters could thus be read as series of character portraits.78 For Byzantium, an autobiographical background has been posited for the self-edited collections of John Mauropous (c.1000–1075)79 and Nikephoros Choumnos (c.1260–1327),80 but there are undoubtedly more. Since letters are, however, not only representations of their writers, but representations of exchanges between senders and recipients, collections can also be read as narratives of relationships.81 This probably explains why numerous letter-collections in the manuscripts are arranged by addressee, while others are correspondences in the strict sense, i.e., letters followed by responses. (Today many readers of letter-collections may not be aware of this, because modern editors regularly rearrange the historical collections into an assumed chronological sequence.82) Some collections follow this principle entirely,83 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 Ancient and medieval autobiography comes in many different forms and genres (for Byzantium see Angold, “The Autobiographical Impulse”; Hinterberger, Autobiographische Traditionen) and does not have to follow a linear chronological pattern. See Gibson, “On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections”, pp. 74–76, who draws parallels between Latin letter-collections and non-diachronic ancient biography. On reading Byzantine lettercollections as autobiographies see also Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid, pp. 283–88. See the Introduction, p. 9, n. 38 in this volume. See Chapter 12, p. 340 at n. 30 in this volume. This is one likely rationale behind the numerous “fictional” letter-collections of ancient personalities – some of which have been interpreted as epistolary novels – which flourished in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods and were widely received in Byzantium. See Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, pp. 193–252 (esp. 196–203); Malosse, “Éthopée et fiction épistolaire”. John Mauropous, Letters, ed. and trans. Karpozilos, pp. 28–32. Riehle, “Epistolography as Autobiography”. See, for example, McLynn, “Gregory Nazianzen’s Basil”, pp. 186–91 and 193, arguing that Gregory of Nazianzos intended to present the educated public of Caesarea with a certain image of his friendship with Basil of Caesarea and to prove his superiority in theological matters through his manipulated edition of their correspondence. See below, p. 491 at n. 115–16. For example, the collections of Gregory of Nazianzos are in the various manuscript families all largely arranged by addressee (see the overview in Storin, “The Letter Collection of Gregory of Nazianzus”, pp. 87–92), while McLynn (“Gregory Nazianzen’s Basil”, pp. 184– 86) has argued convincingly that Gregory’s original edition of his letter-exchange with Basil consisted of letters by Basil each followed by Gregory’s responses. A later example for the latter type of correspondence is Theodore of Kyzikos’ exchange with Emperor Constantine VII (Letters, B, nos. 1–18, ed. M. Tziatzi-Papagianni, pp. 83–108); an example for the former type (arrangement in groups by recipient) is Theodore II Laskaris’ Letters and New Philology 485 while others accommodate sequences of letters addressed to or exchanged with the same person within a macrostructure that is defined by a different method of organization.84 While some surviving letter-collections are authorial, i.e., compiled and edited by the author of the individual letters contained in them, others are clearly the work of later generations of compilers. An early, well-documented example is the epistolary oeuvre of the ascetic Isidore of Pelousion (c.355–435/40).85 The constitution of his voluminous corpus of 2000 letters was already attested by Severos of Antioch (c.465–538). Letters originally dispatched to specific addressees were revised – for instance, deprived of standard epistolary elements at the beginning and end, or cut into smaller pieces – and assembled, probably by monks of the author’s circle, looking for and finding dogmatic and spiritual advice from an important authority in Isidore’s letters. Besides this monastic redaction, multiple minor collections circulated and were used as theological source during the Christological debates of the sixth century. In addition, Isidore’s plain but classicizing Greek could serve as an ideal model for the epistolary style which, according to ancient and medieval rhetorical theory, should be slightly elevated but clear, oscillating between written and oral speech. This approach to Isidore’s letter-collection is echoed in later Byzantine comments that list Isidore among the canonical letter writers along with Synesios, Libanios, Gregory of Nazianzos, Basil the Great, and Michael Psellos.86 For most late antique epistolographers, however, we have very little or no information at all on the early history of their transmission. The first great period of codification of ancient literature in Byzantium is the tenth/eleventh century, when the oeuvres of both classical and late antique authors were published in “complete editions” in one or more volumes, while at the same 84 85 86 aforementioned collection in codex Plut. 59.35; see the πίναξ (“table of contents”) on fol. 41r–v: <http://mss.bmlonline.it/s.aspx?Id=AWOItsgyI1A4r7GxMMQB&c=Epistolae% 20diversorum#/oro/91>. For example, Nikephoros Choumnos’ main collections generally follow the principle of thematic clusters and chains (see Riehle, “Epistolography as Autobiography”, pp. 9–11), while occasionally also bundling letters addressed to the same person (such as Emperor Andronikos II: Letters, nos. 10–29, ed. Boissonade, pp. 14–35) and including responses from his correspondents (Letters, nos. 37–39, 43–44, 133–134, ibid., pp. 45–50, 52–60, 155–59). See Isidore of Pelousion, Letters, ed. and trans. Evieux, vol. 1, pp. 96–110 with Larsen, “The Letter Collection of Isidore of Pelusium”, pp. 296–97 and Toca, “The Greek Manuscript Reception”. See the Introduction, p. 10 at n. 47 in this volume (Photios) and above, p. 478 at n. 50 (Joseph Bryennios). 486 Riehle time also producing multi-author collections in miscellaneous manuscripts.87 Epistolography is an integral part of the newly-formed canon: the earliest manuscripts of the collected letters of Gregory of Nazianzos, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Libanios, Julian, Synesios and Isidore of Pelousion, for example, all belong to this period.88 Moreover, there survive several epistolary miscellanies of the tenth and eleventh centuries that combine select letters of late antique authorities with those of contemporaries or near-contemporaries. Examples include the following codices: (1) Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Ambros. B 4 sup. of the tenth century, which transmits the letter-writing manuals of Pseudo-Proklos and Pseudo-Demetrios, ethopoietical and pseudo-historical collections (Aelianus, Philostratos, Theophylaktos Simokattes; Diogenes, Krates, Phalaris, etc.), as well as letters from late antiquity and Byzantium (Basil, Libanios, Firmus of Caesarea, Aineias and Prokopios of Gaza, Patriarch Photios);89 (2) Athos, Megiste Lavra, Laur. Ω 126 of the eleventh century, combining letters of Basil, Gregory of Nazianzos and Libanios with those of more recent authors such as Photios, Symeon Magistros, Theodore of Kyzikos and Constantine VII;90 and (3) Patmos, Monastery of St. John, Patm. 706 of the eleventh century, which likewise contains selected letters of both late antique and tenth-century writers (Isidore of Pelousion, Theodoretos of Kyrrhos, Gregory of Nyssa; Symeon Magistros, Leo of Synada, Nikephoros Ouranos, Theodore Daphnopates, among others).91 The incentives for such collecting and publishing activity are manifold and can only, if at all, be recovered through meticulous study of contents, compilation methods and traces of reading practice such as marginal notes as well as palaeographical and codicological analysis which may give clues to the provenance of a given manuscript. Biographical information on great figures of the past may have played a role in this context as well, but other rationales were likely more important. It is certainly no accident that the appearance of large 87 88 89 90 91 Pérez Martín, “Byzantine Books”, pp. 41–42. For middle Byzantine miscellanies in particular see Ronconi, I manoscritti greci miscellanei. E.g., Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. gr. 506 (tenth century): Basil and Gregory of Nazianzos; <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b107214756/f6.image>; Par. Coisl. 368 (eleventh century): John Chrysostom; <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b10038050d/f253.item>; Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 85 (eleventh century): Libanios; <https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.85>; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 55.6 (eleventh century): Synesios; <http://mss.bmlonline.it/s .aspx?Id=AWOItGseI1A4r7GxML55&c=Synesii%20Epistolae#/oro/7>. See Martini/Bassi, Catalogus codicum graecorum, pp. 92–94. See Darrouzès, Épistoliers byzantins, pp. 20–26. See ibid., pp. 9–20; De Poli, “Il codice Patmiacus 706”. Further examples can be found in Papaioannou, “Fragile Literature”, pp. 293–94. Letters and New Philology 487 epistolary collections of mostly ancient authors coincides with the “golden age” of epistolary writing under the Macedonian emperors. Especially in the eleventh century Byzantine literary culture is increasingly “rhetoricized”,92 and ancient models figured prominently in this trend. Collections of letters, of both the complete-oeuvre and the multi-author types, could be employed as stylistic and rhetorical models93 and specifically as samples for composing one’s own correspondence. Evidence for this approach can be found in a variety of metaepistolary comments as well as in cases of intertextuality in Byzantine letters of the middle and late periods.94 Letter-collections could serve other, i.e., non-stylistic, in the broadest sense, didactic functions as well. Letters of the Church Fathers could be used as points of reference for theological debates. To give just one out of countless examples: codex Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vind. theol. gr. 168, dating from around 1350, is a miscellaneous theological manuscript.95 Its second part, which also contains a selection of Basil’s letters (fols. 270r–343r), comprises mostly texts dealing with the Holy Spirit. Some of these texts are by past theological authorities such as John of Damascus and Photios, others more recent, which pertain to the controversy between the eastern and western churches over the procession of the Holy Spirit, such as the correspondence between Pope Gregory IX and Patriarch Germanos II, and anonymous anti-Latin treatises. The selection of texts suggests that this manuscript was compiled in order to provide dogmatic material in support of the Byzantine stance on this issue. The marginal notes on Basil’s letter confirm this hypothesis. Although some glosses highlight aspects of literary composition,96 the vast majority of them are concerned with theology, and more particularly with the procession of the Spirit97 or dogmatic matters pertinent to this issue such as the relation between 92 93 94 95 96 97 Papaioannou, Michael Psellos, pp. 48, 56–63. A late Byzantine author of the early fourteenth century, who also prepared an edition of Libanios’ letters, even used his own correspondence to teach his students Greek grammar, as evidenced by the epimerismoi (a form of word-by-word grammatical commentary) he appended to his collection: George Lakapenos, Letters and Epimerisms, ed. Lindstam. The number of surviving manuscripts points to the popularity of this collection as a teaching tool. See the Introduction, pp. 10–11 at n. 46–51 in this volume. For a description of the manuscript see Hunger/Kresten, Katalog der griechischen Handschriften, pp. 275–79. E.g., f. 275r (on Basil of Caesarea, Letters, no. 14, ed. and trans. Courtonne, vol. 1, pp. 43–44): “note the most lovely and marvelous description of the place” (σημείωσαι ἔκφρασιν τόπου πάνυ ὡραίαν καὶ θαυμαστήν). E.g., f. 278v (on Basil of Caesarea, Letters, no. 38, ed. and trans. Courtonne, vol. 1, pp. 84– 85): “scholion: note the most convincing and clear statement concerning the procession 488 Riehle essence (οὐσία) and substance (ὑπόστασις).98 Finally, a marginal note on the authenticity of a letter addressed to emperor Theodosios I, which is considered spurious by modern scholars as well, is of some interest in this context.99 This remark reads: “scholion: this letter, both with regard to the thoughts and to the diction, does not seem to belong to the great Basil”.100 Notably, in the margins of this letter there are no glosses to be found, although these abound in the rest of the collection, suggesting that the reader-scribe ignored this letter because it did not carry the authority of being written by the Church Father. Other collections were from the outset designed as unified works of religious instruction and share genre markers with other types of theological writing.101 For example, the genre of ἐρωταποκρίσεις (“questions-and-answers”) is occasionally framed as correspondence.102 Such a work survives from the sixth century under the names of the hermits Barsanouphios and John of Gaza (“the Prophet”).103 The entire corpus comprises roughly 850 letters that follow the typical pattern of a heading introducing the question asked, followed by the letter-answer of Barsanouphios or John, and are designated in one part of the tradition as “letters and answers” (ἐπιστολαὶ καὶ ἀποκρίσεις). Although it seems that the material was drawn from letter exchanges, and perhaps also oral communications, that had actually taken place, the original collection was compiled and edited, probably by a near-contemporary, as one coherent text and furnished with a prologue addressed to “the readers of this book” (τοὺς ἐντυγχάνοντας ταύτῃ τῇ βίβλῳ).104 Similarly, Photios’ (c.820–after 893) Amphilochia assemble 329 responses to exegetical queries by their addressee, the metropolitan of Kyzikos, Amphilochios.105 These were, at least in part, compiled from the written correspondence between Photios and Amphilochios, as is indicated by the considerable overlap between the Amphilochia and Photios’ 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 of the Holy Spirit against the Latins” (σχόλιον: σημείωσαι περὶ τῆς ἐκπορεύσεως τοῦ ἁγίου πνεύματος κατὰ Λατίνων, ἀναγκαιότατον πάνυ καὶ σαφέστατον). E.g., f. 313r (on Basil of Caesarea, Letters, no. 214, ed. and trans. Courtonne, vol. 2, p. 205): περὶ οὐσίας καὶ ὑποστάσεως. Basil of Caesarea, Letters, no. 365, ed. and trans. Courtonne, vol. 3, pp. 226–27. F. 331r: σχόλιον: ἡ ἐπιστολὴ αὕτη, οὔτε ἀπὸ τῶν νοημάτων, οὔτε ἀπὸ τῆς φράσεως ἔοικεν εἶναι τοῦ μεγάλου Βασιλείου. See also Chapter 8, esp. pp. 234–39 in this volume. On the genre in general see the essays in Volgers/Zamagni, Erotapokriseis and the survey by Efthymiadis, “Questions and Answers”. See Hevelone-Harper, “The Letter Collection of Barsanuphius and John”. Barsanouphios and John of Gaza, Letters, eds. Neyt/de Angelis-Noah, trans. Regnault, vol. 1.1, pp. 158–61. See Kiapidou, “Chapters, Epistolary Essays and Epistles”, pp. 57–58; Efthymiadis, “Questions and Answers”, pp. 53–55. Letters and New Philology 489 collection of letters.106 As in the case of Barsanouphios’ and John of Gaza’s collection, the Amphilochia are prefaced by a programmatic dedication, in which Photios comments on his compilation method, stating that “not few of [your questions] have been solved by us ourselves elsewhere”,107 and refers to the result as σύνταγμα (“composition, work, book”). Question-and-answers could also be of non-theological content. For instance, the main juridical writings of Demetrios Chomatenos, archbishop of Ohrid from 1216 to 1236, were collected – perhaps by the author himself – under the title Various Works (Πονήματα διάφορα). This collection comprising 152 numbered entries includes letters – their genre is revealed by a variety of epistolary markers – in which the author responded to questions from individuals on canon law. The compiler carefully arranged these letters along with texts belonging to other, judicial genres by applying formal, subject-matter and chronological criteria.108 Closely related to this genre of ἐρωταποκρίσεις are the so-called κεφάλαια (“chapters”) which provide instruction in a series of “essays”. In the case of Michael Glykas’ (later twelfth century) On Difficult Passages of the Holy Scripture (Εἰς τὰς ἀπορίας τῆς θείας γραφῆς) these were for the most part based on actual letters, which were compiled and edited to form a coherent work, as the occasional cross-reference in the text to another “chapter” demonstrates.109 Although this brief outline of some types of letter-collections cannot do justice to the manifold and complex realities of epistolary manuscripts, I hope it 106 107 108 109 See Photios, Letters, eds. Westerink/Laourdas, vol. 1, pp. ΙX–X; Amphilochia, ed. Westerink, vol. 4, XVΙ–XXII: 80 of the letters found in Photios’ epistolary collection the author also included in the Amphilochia. For a brief introduction to Photios’ letters see Kazhdan, A History of Byzantine Literature (850–1000), pp. 25–30. Photios, Amphilochia, ed. Westerink, vol. 4, p. 1, l. 5: καὶ ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς οὐκ ὀλίγα τούτων [sc. τῶν σῶν ἀπορημάτων] ἀλλαχόθι ἐπιλέλυται. This is corroborated by Westerink’s observation that in addition to his letters, Photios used other works of his (including the Bibliotheca) as a source for the Amphilochia: see the reference above in n. 106. Another passage further below in the prologue suggests that some of the essays draw on oral exchanges, ibid., l. 13– 16: “These very questions have been posed here and there before, and you were present and heard how our tongue removed the difficulty of some of them – for as it was possible to store what you heard in your memory, why do you demand a second time labors from us?” (τὸ δὲ σποράδην αὐτὰ προβεβλῆσθαι τὰ ἐρωτήματα καὶ τὸ ἀκοῦσαι παρόντα τῆς ἡμετέρας γλώττης ἐνίων αὐτῶν ἀφαιρουμένης τὸ ἄπορον – τί γάρ, ἐνὸν τὰ ἠκουσμένα μνήμῃ φυλάξαι, σὺ δὲ δευτέρους ἡμᾶς ἀπαιτεῖς πόνους;). See Demetrios Chomatenos, Various Works, ed. Prinzing, pp. 62*–307*, esp. 270*–71* (on letters in the collection) and 284*–307* (on the arrangement of the collection); Kiapidou, “Chapters, Epistolary Essays and Epistles”, pp. 56–57. See Kiapidou, “Chapters, Epistolary Essays and Epistles” (p. 55 for examples of crossreferences); ead., “On the Epistolography of Michael Glykas”; Efthymiadis, “Questions and Answers”, pp. 59–60. 490 Riehle has achieved two related goals: (1) to present letter-collections as deliberately designed and coherent works of, e.g., autobiographical or didactic literature which could allow us to grant them the status of a genre to be distinguished from the individuals letters they contain;110 and (2) to showcase the inherent fluidity of Byzantine letters once they entered the world of books. Due to their multifunctionality and concise form – a constituent genre marker which in practice is, however, regularly violated –111 letters could easily be appropriated, transformed and combined with other texts, either by their original authors or by later compilers, to serve new purposes within a collection. Given this form of transmission, any attempt to restore a letter’s supposed original form will almost inevitably be doomed to failure. This observation has important ramifications for our interpretive approach to Byzantine letters. Scholars today are usually interested in the original context of letters and treat them, for example, as biographical sources of their authors and addressees, as expressions of their thoughts and teachings, as documents of long-distance communication, as indicators of social networks, etc. Since the surviving letters are, however, potentially manipulated to an extent that is difficult to gauge and in a process impossible to reverse, readings of that kind will always be treading on slippery ground. What I would like to suggest is that we abandon, at least for now, such “documentary” readings of individual letters in favor of interpretations of letter-collections as they survive in the manuscripts. Recent work on ancient Greek epistolography can serve as a model in that respect. While past discussions of the collections attributed to eminent personalities of classical Greece were almost obsessively dominated by attempts to determine their authenticity, scholars have more recently started to approach these collections as unified works of, e.g., narrative literature.112 Current research on late antique 110 111 112 See Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp. 171–72 on transformation of genre through “aggregation”: “A different process is aggregation, whereby several complete short works are grouped in an ordered collection … Such an aggregate is generically distinct both from its component parts and from unordered collections”. See also Marti, “L’epistolario come genere” who, for Renaissance epistolography, distinguishes between “epistolario” (selfedited, authorial collection) and “raccolta di lettere” (modern collection/scholarly edition comprising letters of a given author). Terminology remains an unresolved issue for ancient and medieval letter-collections as well; see Riehle, “Review of Neil/Allen, Collecting Early Christian Letters”; id., “Epistolography as Autobiography”, p. 4, n. 12. See the Introduction, pp. 9–11 at n. 40, 44, 52–54 in this volume. See, for example, Morrison, “Narrative and Epistolarity” whose reading of the collection of Plato’s 13 letters deliberately ignores the question of whether any of them are genuine. Letters and New Philology 491 letter-collections is moving in similar directions.113 This means, by extension, that we need to shift our focus to the historical collections of the manuscripts, their individual contexts and composition. Once we have a better understanding of these epistolary manuscripts in terms of their formation and function, it may be possible, at least in some cases, to get a better sense of the original form and function of the individual letters contained in these collections. If the basic tenets of the above remarks are accepted, we will also have to reconsider our methods of editing Byzantine letters.114 Modern editions usually treat letters as solid documents which can be restored to their original form by applying “Lachmann’s method”. In cases of epistolary oeuvres that survive in multiple manuscripts with textual overlap, the letters of the individual collections are most commonly fused together, re-arranged in a way that seems best to the editor – often chronologically,115 which is problematic per se given that most letters elude even approximate dating116 – and provided with an apparatus listing the readings of the most important manuscripts, with importance being determined by its place in the genealogy of transmission, as well as the editor’s emendations. In this way, the collections of the manuscripts are annihilated, textual variants are buried in an apparatus at the bottom of the page and traces of reading practice such as interlinear or marginal notes are dismissed. As a result, changing uses of the individual letter-texts for different purposes – including authorial projects of shifting self-representation through edited collections – are inevitably blurred or entirely obscured. If we want to allow readers of our critical editions to get a sense of the historical collections that are the building blocks of the edited text, then we have to do a better job presenting the realities of the manuscripts in these editions. Displaying textual variants in the narrow sense – i.e., variant readings for 113 114 115 116 See Sogno/Watts, “Epistolography”; Sogno/Storin/Watts, Late Antique Letter Collections; Gillett, “Communication in Late Antiquity”, pp. 833–40. See also Hatlie, “Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography”, p. 247: “while most major Byzantine letter collections have been published, in many instances questions remain about the origins and, therefore, profile of these collections. The issue is not merely how many letters are included or lost and why, but also whether letter writers or the editors of their works shaped a collection for this purpose or that, effectively distorting our image of its literary or historical value.” See Gibson, “On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections” and id., “Letters into Autobiography” on ancient and late antique Latin collections; for late antique Greek collections see Sogno/Storin/Watts, Late Antique Letter Collections, pp. 55–56 (Julian), 69–70 (Basil), 87–89 (Gregory of Nazianzos), 193 (John Chrysostom). See, for example, Van Hoof, “The Letter Collection of Libanius”, pp. 123–24; Kotzabassi, “Zur Überlieferung von Briefcorpora”, pp. 232–34; ead., “Reconsidering the Letters of Constantine Acropolites”. 492 Riehle single words, phrases or whole passages in the text of an individual letter – is in the case of Byzantine letters a relatively easy task, as these variants are almost always of a microstructural nature. Especially in the case of authorial variants, however, we should consider integrating the readings into the running text – for example, with the help of an Einblendungsappparat117 – rather than mingling them with the editor’s interventions in the critical apparatus.118 Only in exceptional cases, such as some of the more radically revised letters of Demetrios Kydones,119 will it become necessary to resort to a synoptic presentation of the complex process of authorial reworking. While this kind of textual variance within single letters may at times pose methodological and practical challenges to the editor, collections – owing to their status as aggregates of distinct texts – present issues of their own that are much harder to solve.120 In particular, the number and arrangement of individual letters in the manuscripts can vary greatly. What are we to do with this kind of fluidity? Is every collection, or group of collections that present no or few differences as collections, a text in its own right that deserves to be published separately? And even if we give a positive answer to this question, do we revert to a kind of “Bédierism” that obfuscates the relationship with other collections that share text with the collection we edit? Such a solution would evidently be unsatisfactory, as it would allow only for a specific kind of reading, that of the given collection as an organic unit, while precluding, for instance, an authorcentered approach. Needless to say it would simply be unfeasible to provide separate print editions of every manuscript collection that contains letters of the Church Fathers or Michael Psellos, for example. Given the multitude of different forms of transmission outlined above, it is virtually impossible to formulate a best practice for editing Byzantine lettercollection at this point. Digital editions could provide solutions to many of the issues addressed in this essay. However, there remain problems inherent 117 118 119 120 See above, p. 472 at n. 25. Cf. Leone’s edition of Nikephoros Gregoras’ Letters, which reproduces small-scale authorial variants in the text – vertically or with brackets indicating addition or subtraction – and in the case of two fundamentally different redactions of the same letter prints both versions separately; see vol. 1, p. 191. See above, p. 480 at n. 56. In his edition of Kydones’ Letters, Loenertz highlights instances of revision in the running text with brackets and gives the variant readings that belong to earlier text stages in the apparatus. While this works well for micro-changes, it is quite cumbersome to reconstruct from his lemmatized apparatus the repeated macrostructural revisions that occur in the text of some letters (e.g., Letters, no. 391, ed. Loenertz, vol. 2, pp. 342–44, especially at l. 8–9) and to understand nexuses between individual revisions. Cf. Constable, Letters and Letter-collections, p. 65. Letters and New Philology 493 in the digital humanities,121 which are even more glaring in relatively small disciplines like Byzantine Studies as these often lack the funding needed for such endeavors. Not every editor is in the fortunate position to have access to the financial and logistical resources that will allow her or him to produce digital editions, which require IT support, long-term server storage space and, where facsimiles are included, the acquisition of costly reproduction licenses. The question of whether the outcome justifies the time, effort and expenses flowing into such editions is a legitimate one than can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. This caveat may sound sobering and discouraging. However, it would certainly be desirable to have a few exemplary digital hypertext and best-text editions of individual collections even if it may not be viable to apply these methods to the entire corpus of Byzantine epistolary literature. We have only started to understand the importance of the medium – or genre – of collection in epistolography and other kinds of writing. Now is the time to experiment with different interpretive and editorial models, and the “New Philology” can serve as a point of reference for such a paradigm shift. Bibliography Primary Sources Apophthegmata et gnomae secundum alphabetum, eds. D. Searby/M. Bylund/ P. Osterdahl, Apophthegmata et gnomae secundum alphabetum, 2013: <http://www .ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/library/gnomologia/>. Barsanouphios and John of Gaza, Letters, eds. F. Neyt/P. de Angelis-Noah, trans. L. Regnault, Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza. Correspondance, 5 vols. (Sources chrétiennes, 426, 427, 450, 451, 468), Paris 1997–2002. Basil of Caesarea, Letters, ed. and trans. Y. Courtonne, Saint Basile. Lettres, 3 vols., Paris 1957–66. Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams, Ghent 2015: <http://www.dbbe.ugent.be/>. Demetrios Chomatenos, Various Works, ed. G. Prinzing, Demetrii Chomateni Ponemata diaphora (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, 38), Berlin 2002. Demetrios Kydones, Letters, ed. R.-J. Loenertz, Démétrius Cydonès. Correspondance, 2 vols. (Studi e Testi, 186, 208), Vatican City 1956–60. 121 For digital editions in particular see, for example, Menzer, “Review of Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant”, who identifies access, information overload and maintenance as three major issues, and Macé et al., “Textual Criticism and Text Editing”, pp. 346–47. 494 Riehle George Akropolites, Prefatory Epigram, eds. A. Heisenberg/P. Wirth, Georgii Acropolitae opera, vol. 2, Leipzig 1993, pp. 7–9. George Lakapenos, Letters and Epimerisms, ed. S. Lindstam, Georgii Lacapeni et Andronici Zaridae epistulae XXXII cum epimerismis Lacapeni, Gothenburg 1924. Gregory of Cyprus, Letters, ed. S. Eustratiades, Γρηγορίου Κυπρίου οἰκουμενικοῦ Πατριάρχου ἐπιστολαὶ καὶ μῦθοι, Alexandria 1910. Isidore of Pelousion, Letters, ed. and trans. P. Evieux, Isidore de Péluse: Lettres, 3 vols. (Sources chrétiennes, 422, 454, 586), Paris 1997–2017. John Mauropous, Letters, ed. and trans. A. Karpozilos, The Letters of Ioannes Mauropous, Metropolitan of Euchaita (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, 34), Thessaloniki 1990. John Tzetzes, Letters, ed. P.A. Leone, Ioannis Tzetzae epistulae, Leipzig 1972. Joseph Bryennios, Letters, ed. N.B. Tomadakes, Ὁ Ἰωσὴφ Βρυέννιος καὶ ἡ Κρήτη κατὰ τὸ 1400. Μελέτη φιλολογικὴ καὶ ἱστορική, Athens 1947, pp. 124–32. Kekaumenos, Advice and Anecdotes, ed. and trans. Ch. Roueché, Kekaumenos, Consilia et Narrationes, 2013: <http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/library/kekaumenos -consilia-et-narrationes/>. Krasopateras, ed. H. Eideneier, Krasopateras. Kritische Ausgabe der Versionen des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts (Neograeca Medii Aevi, 3), Cologne 1988. Libistros and Rodamne (Redaction α), ed. P. Agapitos, Ἀφήγησις Λιβύστρου καὶ Ῥοδάμνης (Βυζαντινὴ καὶ νεοελληνικὴ βιβλιοθήκη, 9), Athens 2006. Manuel II Palaiologos, Letters, ed. and trans. G.T. Dennis, The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, 8), Washington, D.C. 1977. 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