Ancient Letter Collections Project

We’re delighted to announce that the AHRC is to fund a four-year project at Manchester on Ancient Letter Collections (£500k), co-ordinated by Prof. Roy Gibson (PI) and Dr Andrew Morrison (CI). The project will begin in December 2016.

The Project:

The letter collections of Greco-Roman antiquity dwarf in total size all of ancient drama or ancient epic put together. Yet, unlike epic or drama, they have little visibility as a distinctive area of study. This is due in large part to the fact that no one definitively knows – because no one has thought to ask – how many letter collections actually survive from antiquity. This project will establish for the first time how many such collections survive. More significantly, through diachronic critical review of each collection to survive from the fourth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D., the project sets itself the task of establishing the study of ancient letter collections as a discrete and unified field. Included in that survey are numerous foundational texts of ancient literature and thought, from the letter collections of Plato through those of Cicero and the Christian New Testament to Saint Augustine’s collections in later antiquity. From this survey it will emerge that – like ancient drama or epic – there is significant generic unity across time, above all in terms of formal features, despite differences in content and focus between individual texts.

Alongside the creation of a field of study, it is an important part of this project to establish how ancient letter collections were ordered and read. A good number of surviving ancient letter collections – perhaps the majority – are available only in standard modern editions which have abandoned the distinctive ordering that is found in the ancient manuscripts of these collections. For example, Cicero’s Letters to Friends show a particular ordering by addressee or theme in all ancient manuscripts; but modern editors have re-ordered these letters entirely by chronology, thus obliterating the format in which the letters were read for first 1,500 years of their history. By seeking to establish how each letter collection to survive from antiquity was originally arranged in its manuscript form, we aim to recover, and promote the importance of, distinctively ancient reading practices in relation to letter collections.

The project will result in two substantial books: i) a critical review of each of the c. 70 surviving Greco-Roman letter collections before 500 A.D., and ii) an accompanying synoptic interpretative monograph.
The major component of the critical review is a series of cross-referenced discursive essays. Each essay will include the following information for each surviving letter collection:
a) basic information on authors, dates and other works;
b) total number of letters in the collection and total number of addressees (in the largest surviving version of the collection);
c) a detailed descriptive essay on the main patterns of arrangement visible in the available manuscripts, including key information on the earliest evidence available for an existing collection (and whether the arrangements visible in the manuscripts go back to antiquity or even the author’s hand).
d) an essay-survey of modern editions and short critical bibliography of significant items.
The synoptic interpretative monograph – building on the foundations of the critical review – will look at the field as a whole and ask questions about wider patterns of organization and associated reading practices.

The project will also include lots of impact and outreach activities, one of which will be regular posts on this blog once the project gets under way in December 2016.