Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "[Late Antique Letter Collections] provides scholars with a valuable resource with which to engage in further research and to consider the influence of edited collections in the reading of individual letters. . . .The editors are to be commended for collaborating with over two dozen contributors to produce an impressive and wide-ranging collection of essays which together provide a comprehensive study of the major collections of Latin and Greek letters from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.-- "The Journal of Theological Studies"