The Author Is Not Dead

This project studies how the image of the author is not only mediated but also shaped in complex ways by the manuscript transmission peculiar to late antique epistolary corpora. Current studies on epistolographic authorship are largely based on the complete corpora as found in printed editions. Yet, full corpus manuscripts are extremely rare for most late antique epistolographers. This means that the many extant manuscript witnesses in circulation are partial and often convey a distorted and reshaped image of the authors, which is the result of the work or various compilers. As such, this is an investigation into the material aspect of the transmission of knowledge, from the perspective of the manuscript reception of epistolary corpora of late antiquity. The overarching question addressed is how the manuscript transmission of an epistolary corpus impacts the very image of the epistolary author. For this, my working hypothesis is that the work of medieval compilers (who selected and copied smaller selections of letters for various purposes), rather than leading to isolated and arbitrary results, produced instead a series of partial collections that each project a separate authorial profile. To verify this hypothesis, I focus on two larger epistolary corpora of late antiquity, selected for the different problems they pose with regard to the relationship between their authors and the earliest compilers of the corpus: the epistolary corpus attributed to Nilus of Ancyra of the fifth century (around 1000 letters, fraught with problems of authenticity), and that of Barsanuphius and John of Gaza of the sixth century (around 850 letters for which, by contrast, we know the identity of the earliest compilers).