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The two volumes offer the first critical edition of the entire letter-collection of Michael Psellos; a total of 563 texts, including spuria, rewritings, and excerpts. Psellos (11th c., Constantinople) is a well-known figure among students of Byzantine culture and arguably the most prolific and influential middle Byzantine learned author. His letter-collection, preserved in 53 Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts, grants us glimpses into the lives of well-known but also everyday Byzantines, sheding light upon Constantinopolitan networks of friendship and power and, more importantly, upon habits of rhetorical craftsmanship, literary imagination, and typologies of self.

This is the first edition of ten Funeral Orations of Michael Psellos based on all the manuscripts preserving those works and accompanied by a full apparatus fontium and the necessary critical apparatus. Some of those texts had been published by the Greek scholar Konstantinos Sathas at the end of the XIX c. Those editions hardly correspond to the contemporary standards. The same applies to several more recent editions, prepared by P. Gautier, which also leave much to be desired. The most important texts of our collection are the funeral orations for the patriarchs Michael Keroullarios, Konstantinos Leichoudes and John Xiphilinos, a personal friend of Michael Psellos. All the texts offer valuable details concerning Psellos's early life; at the same time they constitute an important testimony to the survival of the Late Antique Rhetoric in XI c. Byzantium. They constitute a necessary supplement to Psellos's more famous work, his Chronography, verifying and shedding a new light on the events narrated there.