Theophylact Of Ochrid: Reading The Letters Of A Byzantine Archbishop (birmingham Byzantine And Ottoman Studies)

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. Cover 1 Half Title 4 Title Page 5 Copyright Page 7 Contents 10 A note on using this book 12 List of illustrations 13 Abbreviations 14 Preface 17 Map of Theophylact's Letter-Network 19 Map of Theophylact's Bulgaria 20 1 Text and Context 22 2 Genre and Milieu 32 Issues of genre 32 1 Epistolarity 32 2 Evaluation 44 3 Reception 52 Theophylact's milieux 64 4 Eleventh-century Constantinople 64 5 Byzantine Bulgaria 74 6 Alexian Literature 90 3 Collection and Network (I) 100 Portrait of a collection 100 1 Dating and Ordering 100 2 Preoccupations and Concerns 119 3 Rhetoric 154 4 Collection and Network (II) 184 Portrait of a network 184 1 Detecting Theophylact's Network 184 2 Theophylact's First Order Zone 199 3 The Uses of Network 222 5 Author and Man 244 Theophylact the author 244 1 Theophylact as Auctor 244 2 Letters in the Oeuvre 251 3 Other People's Letters 268 Theophylact the man 282 4 The Constantinopolitan 282 5 The Bulgarian 287 6 The Exile 295 6 Context and Text 300 The Collection 312 The Network 368 Tables 404 I Concordance of Numbers 406 II Lost Letters 408 III Letters referred to 411 IV Silence referred to 412 V Communication Problems 412 VI Documents requested 413 VII Letters received 415 VIII Bearers of the Letters 419 IX Gifts in the Letters 422 X Journeys in the Letters 424 Bibliography 430 Index 446 Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop Margaret Mullett. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [409]-424) And Index.