This volume presents most of the papers delivered at the international conference organised by the research project ‘From Vivarium to Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana: Ancient Umbria between Research and Experimentation’, which took place in Perugia, Spello and the monastery of Fonte Avellana in September 2019. That conference and this volume represent a milestone on a long-term research path under the direction of Rita Lizzi Testa (henceforth L.T.). For many years, in fact, with tenacity and foresight, she has concentrated her own research and promoted that of many other scholars on the Collectio Avellana (CA), generating new perspectives and hypotheses on the nature of the text, its transmission and more generally the culture and the political and ecclesiastical history of Late Antiquity.

The CA is a very distinctive collection, including not only acts of councils and papal letters but also rescripts and imperial letters from the fourth to sixth centuries; it has had a greater impact than other collections for many reasons, some of which were already expressed by Otto Günther in the Prolegomena to the first modern edition, published in two parts in 1895 and 1898: Epistulae imperatorum pontificum aliorum … Avellana quae dicitur collectio. Two previously published volumes form part of this long-term research path on the CA: R. Lizzi Testa (ed.), La Collectio Avellana fra Tardoantico e Alto Medioevo (2018) and R. Lizzi Testa and G. Marconi (eds), The Collectio Avellana and Its Revivals (2019). The first was published as a monographic section in volume 1 (2018) of the journal Cristianesimo nella Storia: these eleven essays by international scholars tackle the question of the nature of the collection from different points of view, in order to frame the origin of the text, its transmission and its political reuse in eleventh-century Italy, attested by some marginalia present on the oldest two testimonies, the mss. Vat. Lat. 3787 and Vat. Lat. 4961, written in Polirone and Nonantola respectively between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth. The second volume consists of twenty-four chapters written by as many authors, including the English version of six essays already published in Italian or in French in the 2018 volume. It explores the content and sources of the letters and documents of the CA, the factors that generated and preserved these (i.e. the late antique system of chanceries and archives and its agents) and the impact of this collection on the religious and political struggle that characterised Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (the ‘Medieval Revivals’). From this work it became clear that the texts collected and ordered in a non-chronological series in the CA were found in various archives in Rome and Constantinople, and that the compiler, who does not seem to have been a cleric, intended them to be models for composing future documents. Some important aspects highlighted in this book of 2019 framed well the hypothesis already put forward elsewhere by L.T., that Cassiodorus himself was somehow implicated in this collection, or even, as suggested in the ‘Introduction’, xvii–xix, that Cassiodorus perhaps collected the greater part of the letters and documents in Rome or elsewhere in Italy between 526 and 533, then completed the Collectio during his stay in Constantinople and used it later to strengthen the Petrine See.

The latest step in this research project is the volume under review, which aims to explore the aspects of the whole cycle of written communication in Late Antiquity (production, delivery, storage and further transmission of letters and documents) and its agents in the light of some key problems connected to the CA. The twenty-three contributions (in Italian, English and Spanish) are divided into four thematic sections; in addition, there are an Introduction and a final chapter by L.T., in which she deals with the activity of copying, correcting and curating texts both of the copyists at Vivarium and of Cassiodorus himself.

The first section, ‘The Making of the Collectio Avellana from Cassiodorus to Pier Damiani’, begins with an essay by Pierfrancesco Porena, who focuses on the role of Cassiodorus in the formation of the CA and substantially confirms L.T.’s ‘audacious hypothesis’ on Cassiodorus as its compiler; assuming that Cassiodorus abandoned politics around 537–538, he suggests that the first selection of documents began in Rome between 545 and 547 to support Pope Vigilius in the ‘Three Chapters’ controversy in the East. Paola Paolucci deals with the subscriptiones present in the CA, and in particular with a subscription transmitted in the ms. Berolinensis Latinus 79 (B) at the end of the Gesta de absolutione Miseni, which are the minutes of a Roman synod held in 495 for the readmission of Bishop Misenus of Cumae (document 103 in Günther’s edition); she suggests it is the subscriptio of the copyist of an entire canonical collection produced during the Gelasian age and included later in the CA with interpolations. Tommaso Mari concentrates on the same text of the Gesta, and deepens its transmission and historical context. In her short but dense contribution, Serena Ammirati reflects on the possible ‘original physiognomy’ of the book and documentary models of the CA in the light of new acquisitions in the field of documentary papyrology and late antique codicology. The section ends with an essay by Giulia Marconi, who investigates the reuse of the CA in the eleventh century, demonstrating that there is no concrete evidence of direct use of the ms. Vat. Lat. 4961 by Pier Damiani.

The second section, ‘A Teeming World of Secretaries and Archives, between the Senatorial Aristocracy and the Imperial Court’, consists of nine contributions, seven of which are devoted to notarii and exceptores. Ignazio Tantillo addresses the creation of the notarii at the imperial court during the fourth century, and investigates the historical context, substantially represented by the reorganisation of the central administration, and the factors in the rise of these officers: at first just the success of individuals, but the later success of the notarii as a body was due to their independence from the other officers and the particular choices of Constantius II. Milena Raimondi focuses on the social and political profile of the Palatine notarii under Valentinian, discussing the particular case of the notarii Leo, Syagrius and Neoterius. María Victoria Escribano Paño deals with the role of the senate in producing authentic copies of the Codex Theodosianus, presenting the hypothesis that the constitutionarii were exceptores of the Roman senate. Joachim Szidat, meanwhile, focuses on some figures of tribuni et notarii present on the council of Chalcedon as members of the public administration. Margarita Vallejo Girvés discusses the references to the written pacts between Justinian and the Visigoths preserved in the central imperial archive and those concerning the deposit of such documents also in Toledo and the existence of an imperial special official in Hispania, called a notarius. The contributions by Fabrizio Oppedisano and Dario Internullo both focus on Ravenna. Oppedisano discusses Var. 12.21 and interprets it as evidence for the specific situation of late antique Italy: it is in fact a letter for the appointment of a scriba Ravennas issued by Cassiodorus as praetorian prefect, thus acting outside his official powers. Dario Internullo, after providing a general picture of the exceptores, concentrates on the profiles, skills and writing practices of the Ravenna exceptores based on a direct examination of the documentary papyri of the fifth to eighth centuries originally preserved in the archive of the Archbishop of Ravenna. Regarding the other topic of the section, ‘archives’, Maria G. Castello addresses the question of the presence of central court archives on the basis of historiographical and legal sources, suggesting that their creation started only from the fifth century. Taking inspiration from a denunciation of Pope Gelasius collected in the CA, Umberto Roberto deals with the persistence of paganism in senatorial environments, which implies that the texts related to divination practices were still preserved in the archives of some senatorial families.

The third section, devoted to ‘Tachygraphers, Notaries, and the Formation of the Ecclesiastical Chancellery’, begins with the contribution of Michel-Yves Perrin, who reflects on the few mentions of stenographers in Greek and Latin hagiographic literature, and argues that this figure was inserted just to give credibility to the narration itself. Tessa Canella deals with the complex situation between the fifth and sixth centuries, characterised by religious controversies and by the production of a considerable number of forged documents and apocryphal works alongside authentic documents, and reflects on the role of the notarii ecclesiae in this context. Teresa Sardella shows how the Collectio of Dionysius can be instructive in understanding the genesis of other collections, through mentions of the many agents of documentation (notarii, exceptores, scribae, librarii), among whom the translatores occupied an important place. Sylvain Destephen deals with the synod held in 536 by Menas, Patriarch of Constantinople, and offers a thorough examination of the documentary structure and content of the synodal proceedings, transmitted within a collection compiled later by Palestinian monks, which reveals the clear influence of the protocols of the imperial chancery. The mentions of notarii in the registrum of epistles of Pope Gregory the Great are investigated by Elena Caliri, who points out for this type of officer the shift towards the acquisition of administrative functions. The first three canonical collections attested in Hispania, transmitted by the later pseudo-Iliberitan collection, are considered by Josep Vilella, who deals with the only one of them containing precepts which clearly depend on Rome.

With the fourth and final section we turn back to the CA, through an important but quite neglected aspect of epistolography in general and of written communication between the bishops of Rome and the leaders of the imperial and ecclesiastical hierarchy in particular: who delivered letters and documents and how. The section ‘Moving Documents in Late Antiquity: Messengers and Negotiators in the Collectio Avellana’ opens with a contribution by Juana Torres, who provides a detailed analysis of the mentions in the CA of all notaries, both ecclesiastic and imperial, and other officers involved in documentary production, in order to improve the scarce knowledge we have about the technical skills, institutional roles and functions of these officers in Late Antiquity. Alexander Evers deals with the transformation that occurred at a certain point in the office of the notarii, whose basic and original functions were writing down oral texts in shorthand, transcribing them into alphabetical script and reading them aloud; that transformation led the most talented of them to play a role as negotiators, ambassadors and men of influence. The section ends with a contribution by Noel Lenski, focusing on the letter-carriers attested in the CA: after collecting the prosopographical data related to these individuals, Lenski reflects on the social status of the carriers and the historical context of each delivery, in which the carriers could in addition play the role of negotiators, as well as addressing the concrete difficulties involved in carrying letters and related gifts, especially over long distances. A catalogue of the eighty-nine letter carriers named in the CA is provided in an Appendix.

The compiler of the CA finally has a name and an identity, one of the most important intellectuals and political figures of the sixth century. This makes the structure and purpose of the text understandable, and it is not, as we have seen, the only achievement. Now the time is ripe for a new critical edition of the Collectio.