The letter collections that the high-ranking court official Nikephoros Choumnos (c.1260–1327) compiled on the basis of his correspondence with the emperor, fellow intellectuals, clergymen and relatives, are an important testimony to the social and intellectual history of late Byzantium. They show how during this period of cultural revival and political crisis writers used letters not only as a medium for communication and networking within a small educated elite based primarily in Constantinople but also as a vehicle for self-representation through the publication of carefully curated manuscript collections.
The present book aims to make these different, yet closely intertwined layers of the 180 surviving letters of Nikephoros Choumnos accessible through a new critical edition with facing German translation. One of its main objectives is to present the individual collections the author commissioned as autonomous works of literary autobiography and to foreground textual fluidity on both the macrostructural level of the collections and the microstructural level of each letter. In addition to a short biography of the author, the introduction provides fundamental analyses of various aspects of the collections and of the individual letters preserved in them (transmission, formation and composition of the collections, prosopography, summaries with commentary, linguistic and literary elements), offers a detailed discussion of the orthography of the authorial manuscripts and explains the principles and methods applied in the edition and translation.