In Constantinople during the 13th and 14th centuries, after the Latin conquest, the presence of the Western Church and its monastic orders was prominent. Among them, the Dominican Order held a distinguished position, aiming, among other, to persuade not only the emperor but also other prominent figures of the imperial court of the “legitimacy” of…
This paper examines three letters (nos. 157, 158, and 159) by the 14th-century Byzantine author and intellectual George Oinaiotes, a figure whose extensive epistolary corpus remains largely unpublished. These three texts, all centered on the theme of travel, offer a rare and revealing glimpse into Oinaiotes’s literary and intellectual world. Letter 157, resembling travel notes…
Although it has already been over 5 years since Papaioannou’s critical edition of the letters of Michael Psellos, one of the most prominent intellectuals of 11th-century Constantinople, came out and made all of the surviving letters available for scholars, this important corpus has yet to receive a focused analysis. One of the key challenges in…
A critical edition of the epistolary collection of Georgios Oinaiotes is one of the most important desiderata in the field of Late Byzantine Epistolography, with more than 90 percent of his 176 extant letters still unedited. The epistolary corpus of the author is preserved in three manuscripts: Laurentianus S. Marco 356, Monacensis gr. 198, and…
The textual record of late Byzantium bears witness to the unprecedented degree of participation of women in the production of literature through their roles as patronesses, scribes and authors in their own right. Of this latter camp, the epistolary output of Eirene-Eulogia Choumnaina Palaiologina – transmitted without the heavy-handed editing process to which other more…