Letters from Gaza in Late Antiquity

Letters from Gaza in late antiquity are exceptionally rich: large collections of monastic letters from Barsanuphius and John, as well as the sizeable corpus of the sophist Procopius and the smaller collection of Aeneas of Gaza (see Watts, Westberg, and Hevelone-Harper in Sogno, Storin, and Watts 2017). The collections are closely connected to different educational institutions in late-antique Gaza: the rhetorical schools and the monasteries. Strategies for self-presentation and occlusion, and the performance of different images of author and addressee cast light on the nature of the communities in which they were produced and for which they were collected. The letters engage in complex strategies of self-presentation that is a function of the named author and the compilers of the collections. These strategies both reveal and hide their authors and their imagined, iterative settings, partly through testing the boundaries of different genres and partly through relationships between letters within the collection. This paper traces factors of self-presentation, generic fluidity, and collection-building and ask how they may be used in writing a history of Gaza in this period.