Zuzana Frantovà, Ravenna: Sedes Imperii. Artistic Trajectories in the Late Antique Mediterranean. (Studia Artium Mediaevalium Brunensia 8.) Rome: Viella on behalf of Masaryk University, 2019. Paper. Pp. viii, 253. €55. ISBN: 978-8-8331-3048-4.

Speculum ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-184
Author(s):  
Sarah Bassett
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique

Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

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