The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

A summary of the information revealed by Collin’s letters with specific examples

A brief summary of Collins’s activities as as Victorian author in multiple modes

This chapter examine some ways in which Greek novels flaunt and make play with their textuality, particularly Antonius Diogenes’ The incredible things beyond Thule and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. It argues that Antonius Diogenes presents recurrent tensions between the textual and the oral and highlights the importance of γράμματα, ‘letters’, to communication within his narrative, mirroring its writing down on wooden tablets that readers encounter in its frame. It also proposes meta-literary functions both for the name of the Arcadian envoy to Tyre, Κύμβας, ‘Cymbas’, since one of the meanings Hesychius gives the noun κύμβη is πήρα, ‘bag’ ( i.e. the receptacle in which the wizard Paapis carried his magic books) and for the twisting and turning of Mant(in)eas in P.Oxy. 4761. Longus apparently follows Antonius Diogenes in (unusually) specifying the number of his work’s books, but γράμματα, ‘letters’, have no role within his narrative (despite being taught to the young couple): that narrative is an entirely oral response by an unnamed exegete to a γραφή in the sense ‘painting’, and though within it tales are told, nothing is ever written or inscribed, not even in Dionysophanes’ paradeisos or in his civic elite world.

Political intelligence was vital to the Company’s subsidiary alliance system; to enforce it, Residents needed to be able to identify when its conditions were being breached. Yet, the Residents’ papers indicate that the problem was not so much collecting intelligence as determining how to use it. Fraud, or the possibility of fraud, was an important consideration; Residents devised elaborate strategies for identifying forgeries as well as for managing the composition and transmission of letters at court. News passed by word of mouth proved even more ungovernable. Residents were prone to distrust rumour, viewing it as either idle gossip or as insidious disinformation propagated by enemies. Still, they sometimes had no choice but to engage with rumour, particularly when allegations of Company brutality circulated in the streets. Mistrust might have been a common feature at royal capitals, but it also permeated the Residents’ relationship with his superiors in the Company. Residents sometimes misrepresented their activities as a means of shoring up their authority, but they also relied on keeping lines of communication open; frequently, it was Calcutta that remained frustratingly silent. In sum, though gathering and disseminating intelligence was one of the Residencies’ primary functions, fulfilling this responsibility was never simple.

The first chapter considers Seneca’s views on the life of studious leisure (otium) in relation to the therapeutic purpose that he claims for all his philosophical writings. In his essay On Leisure, Seneca explores several standard defenses of the contemplative life (Aristotle’s βίος θεωρητικός), indicating clearly that such theoretical pursuits as astronomy and metaphysics are worthwhile pursuits in their own right. Yet there are tensions in his position, for he also suggests that the expenditure of time that philosophy requires is justified primarily by the moral benefits it conveys to oneself and, through the medium of writing, to future generations. In the Letters on Ethics, the latter claim is put forward as the very reason for the book’s existence, a generic imperative to which the entire content should refer. Consequently, those purely theoretical investigations that (nonetheless) appear in the Letters are present on sufferance and must be excused by a series of deliberately transparent rhetorical devices.

Lionel Johnson is more famous now for his life (and death) than his work – for his alcoholism and insomnia, conversion to Catholicism, erroneous claims to Irish heritage, and death by severe brain haemorrhage at the age of thirty-five. As a founding member of the Rhymers’ Club and contributor to the notorious Yellow Book, he is frequently referred to as a major figure of British Decadence, but his work is rarely considered in any detail. This chapter looks at Johnson’s criticism, poetry, and letters as expressive of a religious humanism heavily influenced by Pater’s sensuously continent aestheticism. No one was more excited by the world than Johnson, by the crowds of London as much as by the wonders of nature, and the continence he described was hardly a cloistered retreat. But sex was at the heart of what he saw as wrong in the modern world: its lack of respect for tradition; its bad manners; the haste that led people to look to their own uncultivated selves for a guide to right and wrong. Like Pater, Johnson portrayed continence as a sociable practice, leading to better relationships with people, objects, and the past.

In the chapter I argue that we should set aside the Quellenforschung arguments of Lefèvre and Brunt and Atkins and others and look at what Cicero is up to in book 3, where he aims to fill in a gap left by Panaetius and not followed up by Posidonius. My analysis focuses in particular on Cicero’s redeployment of the Ring of Gyges thought experiment to undercut the Epicurean reliance on Kuria Doxa (KD) 5 to bolster their ‘moral’ hedonism; and the critical role, or so I argue, of the correspondence with Cassius (which cites KD 5 in Fam 15.19) in the development of Cicero’s argument (with additional reference to Fin. 1-2, where KD 5 also takes a critical role). In addition to making the case for the importance of the correspondence as ‘work in progress’, I argue that Cicero’s engagement with Posidonius, Panaetius et al. represents a mature, confident Cicero philosophus, ready to make a targeted contribution to Stoic ethics, with none of the dissimulatio doctrinae of the works of the 50s.

This chapter works through the evidence that in the world envisioned by the Flavigny formula collection and its companions, lay people used documents and letters like those that the formula collections contain to do things that did not involve churches and monasteries, and explore how the formulas say that they used them. This evidence is considerable, and extends well beyond laypeople simply appearing as actors in transactions that were recorded in writing. It includes transactions assuming in principle that the actors involved would keep the records for future reference: laypeople presenting documents as evidence in disputes; provisions for laypeople to update their documents by erasing parts of them and then writing in new words; documents that refer to other documents; references to lay archives, particular some that had been destroyed and whose contents needed to be replaced. Socially document use ranges from members of the elites, to unfree acquiring documents giving them freedom or presenting documents as proof that they had been free to begin with, to lower-status people showing up in front of someone with higher status with a letter of recommendation, to merchants carrying copies of royal privileges with them.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

This chapter illuminates a key characteristic of lay society in the Carolingian period: it was built on personal relationships, such as those between lords and their followers, vassals, or unfree, between patrons and clients, between friends – in short, between those who could offer help and those who needed it. The importance of these relationships is revealed above all in formulas for letters, in which clients asked patrons for help or asked them to intercede with other powerful people to help them solve problems, or in which people with power wrote to an equal or superior on behalf of a supplicant. These letters reach very far down the social scale. Some deal with unfree who have gotten into difficulties and have asked a patron for help. Quite a few tell of unfree who have gotten in trouble with their own lord and run to another powerful person – such as the Carolingian courtier and lay abbot Einhard – to beg his intercession. They show us a society in which power appears to have flowed through these personal relationships as or perhaps more strongly than it did through lines that we might describe as connecting governing and governed, or ruling and ruled.