A01=Margaret Mullett
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Anna Komnene
Author_Margaret Mullett
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byzantine
Byzantine elite letter collections
Byzantine epistolography
Byzantine Letter
Byzantine Literature
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Category=DSBB
Category=NHDJ
Category=NHF
Digenes Akrites
ecclesiastical correspondence
Eirene Doukaina
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eq_biography-true-stories
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George Palaiologos
Grand Domestic
Greek rhetorical tradition
Gregory Pakourianos
Holy Man
john
John Komnenos
John Mauropous
kallikles
komnene
komnenos
literature
medieval social networks
Michael Choniates
Michael Italikos
Michael Psellos
network analysis methodology
nicholas
Nicholas Kallikles
Nicholas Mystikos
Nikephoros Bryennios
niketas
Niketas Magistros
NIKETAS STETHATOS
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Peri Hermeneias
Rhetores Graeci
Slavic relations history
stethatos
Young Man
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Product details
- ISBN 9780860785491
- Weight: 997g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 1997
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Few works exist on Byzantine literature as literature and still fewer studies of individual texts. This reading of the letter-collection (c.1090-c.1110) of Theophylact of Ochrid employs a variety of approaches to characterise a work which is both a literary artefact in a long Greek tradition and the only trace of a complex network of friends, colleagues, patrons and clients within Byzantine Bulgaria and also within the empire as a whole. These letters are of great importance from the point of view of local economic or ecclesiastical history, relations with the Slavs, the arrival of the First Crusade, but have not hitherto been studied as an example of Byzantine letter writing. This was a genre taken seriously by Byzantines, offering us unique insight into the mentality of the Byzantine elite, but also into what the Byzantines regarded as literature. This book is important as an attempt to raise the status of the study of Byzantine literature, and of letters within that literature. It is a first attempt to place an epistolary text in a succession of literary and historical contexts; its aim, too, is to probe the reliability of any rhetorical text for straightforward biography especially at the time of the revival fiction in Byzantium. At the heart of the book is an analysis of the personal network of Theophylact, as presented in the collection, with further methodological discussion of network analysis in medieval texts.
Margaret Mullett, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
