Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form

Description

This is the first general book on Greek and Latin letter-writing in Late Antiquity (300-600 CE). Allen and Neil examine early Christian Greek and Latin literary letters, their nature and function and the mechanics of their production and dissemination. They examine the exchange of Episcopal, monastic and imperial letters between men, and the gifts that accompanied them, and the rarer phenomenon of letter exchanges with imperial and aristocratic women. They also look at the transmission of letter-collections and what they can tell us about friendships and other social networks between the powerful elites who were the literary letter-writers of the fourth to sixth centuries. The volume gives a broad context to late-antique literary letter-writing in Greek and Latin in its various manifestations: political, ecclesiastical, practical and social. In the process, the differences between 'pagan' and Christian letter-writing are shown to be not as great as has previously been supposed.

Pauline Allen is an honorary researcher at the University of Pretoria and the Sydney College of Divinity. Previously she was Professor of Biblical and Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University and Foundation Director of its Centre for Early Christian Studies. Her publications include Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy (2013) and, with Bronwen Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410-590 CE) (2013) and Collecting Early Christian Letters (edited, Cambridge, 2015). Bronwen Neil is Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney and Director of its Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment. Her publications include, with Pauline Allen, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410-590 CE) (2013) and Collecting Early Christian Letters (edited, Cambridge, 2015) and, with Doru Costache and Kevin Wagner, Dreams and, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt (Cambridge, 2019).