Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop

by Mullett,Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780860785491
• ISBN10: 0860785491
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-10-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

A note on using this book	ix	(1)
List of illustrations	x	(1)
Abbreviations	xi	(3)
Preface	xiv	(2)
Map of Theophylact's Letter-Network	xvi	(1)
Map of Theophylact's Bulgaria	xvii
1 Text and Context	1	(10)
2 Genre and Milieu	11	(68)
Issues of genre	11	(32)
1 Epistolarity	11	(12)
2 Evaluation	23	(8)
3 Reception	31	(12)
Theophylact's milieux	43	(36)
4 Eleventh-century Constantinople	43	(10)
5 Byzantine Bulgaria	53	(16)
6 Alexian Literature	69	(10)
3 Collection and Network (I) Portrait of a collection	79	(84)
1 Dating and Ordering	79	(19)
2 Preoccupations and Concerns	98	(35)
3 Rhetoric	133	(30)
4 Collection and Network (II) Portrait of a network	163	(60)
1 Detecting Theophylact's Network	163	(15)
2 Theophylact's First Order Zone	178	(23)
3 The Uses of Network	201	(22)
5 Author and Man	223	(56)
Theophylact the author	223	(38)
1 Theophylact as Auctor	223	(7)
2 Letters in the Oeuvre	230	(17)
3 Other People's Letters	247	(14)
Theophylact the man	261	(18)
4 The Constantinopolitan	261	(5)
5 The Bulgarian	266	(8)
6 The Exile	274	(5)
6 Context and Text	279	(104)
The Collection	291	(56)
The Network	347	(36)
Tables	383	(26)
I Concordance of Numbers	385	(2)
II Lost Letters	387	(3)
III Letters referred to	390	(1)
IV Silence referred to	391	(1)
V Communication Problems	391	(1)
VI Documents requested	392	(2)
VII Letters received	394	(4)
VIII Bearers of the Letters	398	(3)
IX Gifts in the Letters	401	(2)
X Journeys in the Letters	403	(6)
Bibliography	409	(16)
Index	425