ABSTRACT
This essay is concerned with verse letters in twelfth-century Byzantium. The first part addresses the challenges that these texts pose in terms of their transmission in Byzantine book culture and their resemblance to much of the encomiastic poetry written during this period, which was not necessarily sent in the form of letters. The second part begins with a general discussion of the epistolary features and the thematic variety of these texts and then focuses on three verse letters by Theodore Prodromos, all of which are addressed to contemporary peers and powerful individuals (Ioannikios the monk, Stephanos Meles, and Theodore Styppeiotes). In discussing the negotiations between verse, letter-writing practice, and rhetoric, it is argued that these poems helped the author to overcome his physical absence from the intellectual and courtly life of Constantinople because of his fragile health condition at a later stage of his career.
