Manuscripts compiled of letters: anonymous teacher (10th C.), michael psellos (11th C.), maximos margunios (16th C.)

Introduction. The article considers a fairly common practice of compiling the codices of the original letters and other charters in Byzantium. Until now, this phenomenon in the history of the Greek book was completely unobserved. Methods. The methodological basis of the investigation is a combination of epistolography, text critics, prosopography, palaeography, and codicology. Analysis. The article investigates the codicology and the composition of a unique collection of the 16th century compiled by the well-known intellectual and publisher David Hoeschel of the letters of the Greek scholar Maximos Margunios. This extant example of the “book of letters” provides a completely new approach to the study of the famous collection of letters of the so-called Anonymous Teacher of the first half of the 10th century from the London manuscript British Library. Add. 36749. The study of this manuscript shows that this is either the original autograph of the Anonymous author himself, or its copy made by one of his students. The study of the manuscript and its historical context, in particular, make it possible to identify confidently one of the addressees of letters by the name of Ephraim with the famous scribe the monk Ephraim. In turn, all these observations make it possible to better understand one of the passages of the letter of courtier scholar Michael Psellos to his friend caesar Ioannes Doukas, in which Psellos writes that Ioannes makes a book out of his letters. Results. As a result, we have three examples of compiling a codex of letters as such: the earliest - the first half of the 10th century, a short narrative passage of the second half of the 11th century, and the ‘ethnographic’ example of the late 16th century. Thanks to the really existing post-Byzantine manuscript, we can better understand the history of the manuscript of the first half of the 10th century, and more accurately interpret the narrative of the 11th century.