The Letters of Psellos: Cultural Networks and Historical Realities ed. by Michael Jeffreys and Marc D. Lauxtermann (review)
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Michael Psellos, who lived in the eleventh century, is commonly claimed to have been the greatest intellectual that Byzantium produced. He was a polymath of the first order, and his Chronographia provides an extraordinarily modern, personal, and racy take on the reigns of a succession of emperors, from the preceding century to his own time. His overall output was immense, and very varied, including more than five hundred surviving letters, which are the subject of this volume, and which are finally receiving a properly critical edition. They are packed with personal comment, learned observation, information about contemporaries (many of them are indeed letters of reference), and much more. Like many other Byzantine literary figures, Psellos was a teacher, and his views and those of some of his pupils got him into difficulties; he became a monk and retreated for a time to a monastery. But his letters are an astonishingly rich source for literary and intellectual networks in eleventh-century Constantinople. Psellos's elaborate and rhetorical way of writing also makes them notoriously difficult to understand. Scholars often disagree sharply about the meaning of an individual letter: Is it to be taken literally? Or is it an elaborate linguistic play? How easy was it for the [End Page 171] recipient to grasp its meaning? Lauxtermann and Jeffreys provide a kind of user's guide: five chapters dealing with different aspects of Psellos and his oeuvre, followed by summaries (not translations) of all the individual letters. Even then, there is plenty to argue about.
Eleventh-century Byzantine literature and society are currently attracting a great deal of excellent new publication, and a further volume approaches the contribution of Psellos's writings to contemporary ideas of literature and art. The present volume would be tough going for the general reader, but then so was Psellos himself. Jeffreys and Lauxtermann are among the best possible guides, and we must be very grateful for whatever help we can get.
Dame Averil Cameron is professor of late antique and Byzantine history at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy. She was warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2010 and is currently president of the Council for British Research in the Levant and chair of the Oxford Center for Byzantine Research. She is the author of Procopius and the Sixth Century; Byzantine Matters; The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–700; Dialoguing in Late Antiquity; Arguing It Out; and (as coeditor) Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300–1500; Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam; and volumes 13 and 14 of the Cambridge Ancient History.
