Chapter 1 offers a radical reinterpretation of the gender of Michael Psellos, one of Romanía’s most well-known scholars as well as one of few figures from the Middle Byzantine period to have received extensive gender analysis. The chapter starts with biographical information about his education and personal life. It continues with the role that learning played in his self-definition and his depiction of others, especially in his many encomia. It argues that, in his writings, education and learning could act as ‘masculine capital’, which, when accumulated, could be used to allow for less masculine behaviours in other areas of life, both propping up and subverting hegemonic ideals of physical strength. Finally, it considers the implications of this for Psellos’ work, from his descriptions of hunting and warfare to his emotional life.

Chapter 2 focuses on Ioannes Tzetzes’ letters and his Chiliades to explore the role that animals could play in the construction of the scholar’s gender. It begins with a discussion of Tzetzes’ preference for mules and the role they played in networks of patronage. It continues to show how Tzetzes challenged hegemonic masculinity by expressing solidarity with animals: not only did he not hunt or kill them, but he also often refused to eat them. In his collection of ancient stories, Tzetzes described animals as capable of friendship, affection, loyalty and grief, and praised their understanding of the world as in some ways superior to that of humans. In his letters, he used his affective connections with animals to justify his open expression of emotions and did not hesitate to grieve for humans, animals and plants. Tzetzes’ writings, through their blurring of human/non-human boundaries, invite us to think differently about animals, past and present, spurring us to develop greater empathy with our natural environment.

The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

Chapter 2 explores the circulation of masculinity through the lens of friendship and sensory rhetoric.Coordinating the language of Christian fellowship and classical friendship, the Cappadocians involved correspondents in an aesthetic based on a union of souls.Using imagery of the body to express affinity of soul, the Cappadocians engaged correspondents in an agōn predicated on mutual faith and/or shared manhood.These letters of affection mimicked the language of contest with the Cappadocians choreographing encounters based on reciprocal seeing, speaking/hearing, and touching. In portraying union of souls through corporeal imagination, the Cappadocians reordered the bodily senses as masculine.These friendships were reinforced through the care taken in the penmanship of the letters and careful selection of messengers, elements that reflected the performative nature of correspondence. And through framing correspondence as a form of gift-giving, the Cappadocians further underscored friendship and Christian fellowship as elements of masculinity rooted in the traditions of classical Greece.

The chapter discusses a papyrus letter in the Basel papyrus collection that is our earliest autograph of a self-proclaimed Christian. The earliest evidence of Christians in the Egyptian countryside points to a well-traveled and well-read local landed elite. The Basel letter shows that Christians at that time were not hindered from taking public offices in their hometowns. In fact, they were called upon to do so, along with their pagan fellow citizens of means; their financial situation was decisive, not their faith. The Basel letter further illuminates the early spread of Christianity beyond urban centres and the strong links between urban and rural areas operating in a symbiotic relationship. It helps us elucidate the lives of early Christians in the Egyptian countryside during the first half of the third century, a period for which literary evidence is lacking.

Chapter 4 examines the Encomium of Michael Hagiotheodorites and a series of letters preserved in the same manuscript. Taking its point of departure from Umberto Eco’s distinction between the empirical and the model author, the analysis focuses on the story of a writer in trouble that can be reconstructed based on the encomium and the letters. The encomium offers an elaborate praise of the learning of the addressee, but there is also a more urgent message: the writer is in trouble and he needs the help of the powerful Michael to explain to the emperor that he has been slandered by his enemies. The three letters offer further clues as to the social and historical circumstances of this situation, representing a writer who saves himself from a difficult situation by mobilizing a network of friends. Regardless of Manasses’ own experiences, that situation may well reflect the reality of a Komnenian writer on command.