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A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography introduces and contextualizes the culture of Byzantine letter-writing from various socio-historical, material and literary angles. While this culture was long regarded as an ivory-tower pastime of intellectual elites, the eighteen essays in this volume, authored by leading experts in the field, show that epistolography had a vital presence in many areas of Byzantine society, literature and art. The chapters offer discussions of different types of letters and intersections with non-epistolary genres, their social functions as media of communication and performance, their representations in visual and narrative genres, and their uses in modern scholarship. The volume thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of letter-writing in the Byzantine Empire and beyond. Contributors are: Thomas Johann Bauer, Alexander Beihammer, Floris Bernard, Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis, Carolina Cupane, Niels Gaul, Cecily J. Hilsdale, Sofia Kotzabassi, Florin Leonte, Divna Manolova, Stratis Papaioannou, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Alexander Riehle, Jack Tannous, Lena Wahlgren-Smith.

Der jüngere Plinius erweist sich nicht nur in seinen berühmten Briefen über den Vesuv-Ausbruch, verschiedene Gespensteranekdoten oder spielende Delphine als Meister der Erzählkunst. Auch zahlreiche weitere Einzelbriefe sowie Briefpaare und Briefzyklen sind als kunstvolle Erzählungen gestaltet. Die vorliegende Studie bietet erstmals eine systematische Analyse der narrativen Techniken des jüngeren Plinius und den damit verbundenen Strategien der Lektüresteuerung. Neben der Frage, wie antike Autoren und Leser das narrative Potenzial von Briefen einschätzten wird auch untersucht, inwieweit sich die Ansätze der modernen Narratologie auf eine antike Briefsammlung anwenden lassen. Im Zentrum der Analyse stehen insbesondere Briefe und Briefzyklen über Plinius als Anwalt bzw. erfolgreicher Redner, als prinzipientreuer Senator sowie schließlich als Freizeitdichter. Auch die Erzählstrategien des Epistolographen in Briefen über Mirabilien und Naturphänomene werden untersucht.

The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion.  As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation. In Postal Culture , Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture.

Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

Arabic letters on papyrus challenge the modern reader. There are few to no diacritical dots to distinguish homographs, no systematic spacing between single words, and in the majority of cases a low degree of graphical structuring. However, contemporary readers usually read and understood these documents easily – probably because the recipient of a letter knew what to expect. The letters are formulaic, and their information packaging follows an algorithm typical for their time and content. Here formulaic letter writing means not only the reuse of the same formulae or topoi but expressing thoughts in a predictable linguistic way and order, both as a matter of readability and as one of adequacy and politeness. The main concern of this work is to discover these unwritten rules and norms behind Arabic letter writing on papyrus.

Les études recueillies dans ce volume constituent la synthèse des échanges, dans un esprit de dialogue humaniste, que certains parmi les plus éminents spécialistes de Pétrarque et de Boccace ont eus au Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR) de Tours en juin 2019. Le point de départ a été de vouloir faire le point sur les caractères et les rapports épistolaires entre les deux écrivains dont il nous reste un nombre inégal de missives, d’une tonalité fort hétérogène. Luca Marcozzi, Gabriella Albanese, Paolo Pontari, Marco Petoletti, Paolo Rigo et Marco Ariani se sont penchés sur ces aspects. À partir des deux auteurs, l’attention s’est naturellement déplacée vers leurs réseaux culturels, politiques mais aussi familiaux qui ont été explorés par Ilaria Tufano, Loredana Chines, Paolo Viti, Enrico Fenzi, Marco Cursi, Laura Regnicoli, Elsa Filosa, Igor Candido, Marco Veglia et Monica Berté.La perspective résolument transversale, philologique, paléographique, littéraire et historique qui traverse ces études permet ainsi d’avoir une vision plus composite des relations entre les deux sodales par rapport au traditionnel aperçu Pétrarque magister/Boccace discipulus, et en même temps plus complète de leurs correspondants.

This book is dedicated entirely to the interpretation of Paul's Letter to Philemon. The letter is approached from a wide variety of perspectives, thus yielding several new insights into its interpretation. In a first essay the tendencies in the research on the letter since 1980 are outlined. This is followed by essays devoted to the epistolary analysis and to a rhetorical-psychological interpretation of the letter; as well as an essay devoted to the rhetorical function of stylistic form in the letter. After this there are two essays devoted to situating the letter in its ancient context: one views the letter against the background of ancient legal and documentary sources and another one against the background of slavery in early Christianity. The next two essays focus on theological aspects, namely on the letter as ethical counterpart of Paul's doctrine of justification and on the role that love plays in the letter. Three essays focus on ideological issues: the contextual interpretation of the letter in the US, a post-colonial reading of the letter and the letter's legacy of hierarchy and obedience. The volume concludes with four essays on the way in which the letter was interpreted by the some of the Church Fathers: Origen, Jerome, Chrystostom, Augustine and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

Nous avons ici l'équivalent d'un journal à plusieurs voix, source irremplaçable pour l'historien de !a vie quotidienne comme pour l'historien de l'humanisme. Seventeenth-Century News (XLI, !-2) et son companion Neo-Latin News (XXXI, 1-2) sont exceptionnellement riches en matière morienne. 1) Utopia and the Ideal Society de J.C. Davis, est, selon James Stephen, « very good on content and very bad on form. » Mais le message des grandes oeuvres - surtout l'Utopie de More et la New Atlantis de Bacon - lui échappe parce qu'il ne tient aucun compte de l'ironie, de la fable, et n'y voit que des prosaïques traités de philosophie politique : « every chapter in this book is marred by the author's reluctance to be vexed by fiction » (p. I). p. 200 : lire MASSA UT et non MASSA ULT. * Dans le cahier ? ° 73 de CLIO (!983), pp. 22-30, Franz Bierlaire prolonge ses essais de 1 978 et 1979 sur le De civilitate morum puerilium d'Erasme, ce « maître d'hier pour demain », en esquissant le passage progressif « de la civilité au savoir-vivre ».